Hello everyone, and welcome to the class. This is David A. Cox with techtalkamerica.com.
Today I'm going to be showing you all the newest features you're going to find in the
latest operating system for the Mac, know as OSX El Capitan. To help you digest this
information, for those of you who wish to do so, I've created a simple 2-page clean
PDF you can download.
It's my notes, what I have on my desk next to me when I teach this class live. If you'd
like to download that, I'm making it available to you for free. You'll find a link to that
in the description of this video. If you wish to review this video later, maybe to go over
parts you missed, you'll notice in the notes I'm including the time code for the various
chapters, that way you can skip ahead to the parts you care about.
Let's start with going over the new features you'll find in Apple Mail. You'll have the
same multitouch gestures you have on your iPhone or iPad. For example, this message,
let's say I want to preserve it and mark it as unread. I can swipe with two fingers on
my trackpad, from left to right, and I'll get this box that says, mark as unread.
When I click on that, like you can on the iPhone and iPad, that blue dot comes to mark
it as an unread message. Also, if I swipe the opposite way, from right to left, with
two fingers, I get a trash button. If you do a more dramatic movement, you can wipe
out that message. i'm not gonna do that because I'm gonna use this message.
The other feature I want to show you, I love this one. For those of you who use a calendar,
you're gonna like this one. Now there's better integration between then calendar program
and the mail program. For example, in this message it says, do you want to meet tomorrow
for lunch. It detects this language and looks at dates.
It says, one event found in this email. By clicking add here at the top-right corner
I can add this event into my calendar. Lunch with Johnny, and hit add to counter. Simple.
The next feature I wanna show you is one I thought was a bug in the last operating system.
They never corrected it, they made it a new feature in this one.
For those of you who like using the Apple Mail program in full screen mode like I do,
one of the things that may have frustrated you is the fact that you can't minimize a
message. Until now. If I'm composing a message and I need to fetch information from a different
email, an address, maybe some text, or a photo. I can now click outside of this message and
it minimizes to the bottom of the screen.
The other way you can do that is hitting the yellow dot here. Let's say I need to go to
this message, and grab this graphic. I can click and drag it and drop it here into this
message. It's preserved, just like that. You can do the same thing with text. I can highlight
it with my cursor, click and drag it down. As soon as you drag it down, it'll pull it
to that new message, and there it is. Just like that.
Another great feature for those of you with ADD, if you start writing a message and realize
you have another message to start writing, you now have tabbed emails. I can create multiple
new messages at the same time. The easiest way to do this is hit command N, that'll create
a new message.
You can see, over here I have my old email, over here I have my new email. The next thing
I wanna show you are a few simple changes to the photos app, starting with recent contacts.
Let's say I've corresponded with someone, and now I want to send them a photo. The Mac
remembers that history. Let's say I have this selfie I took at the Cape Cod National Seashore.
I wanna share it with someone I just talked to. I can go to the share button, and in addition
to the normal options you'd have up here, it'll look for recent contacts you've corresponded
with. You can click on that person's name or email address and send them an email with
the attached photo. The other feature I wanna show you here is handy for a not-so-obvious
reason.
If you're like me, I take screenshots on my phone, iPad, and Apple Watch all the time.
It just happens, especially if I'm doing a hard reset on any of those devices. It's easy
to accidentally do that. If you look here on the left hand side, there's now a category
for screenshots. If you have accidentally cluttered your photo library with a ton of
accidental screenshots, you can now click on them, secondary click, and hit delete,
something I thought you might want to know.
The next feature is something I can show you, I can't demo it because this operating system
just came out yesterday. When you're in the normal edit mode for a photo, we've got our
options on the right hand side. You'll notice there's now support for third party extensions.
As of right now, we could not find any of them. I think it's because it's too new.
This will open up doors down the road. When they do, we'll do an updated class on our
favorite extensions for photos. As of right now, there's no options. The next feature
we're gonna talk about is Spotlight, which got a few new changes. If you didn't know,
you can access Spotlight one of two ways.
You can go to the spyglass you see here at the top right hand side of your screen. Or,
if you're like me and a fan of hotkeys, you can do command spacebar which will activate
it. The first change to Spotlight is you can now move it around. You're not locked to the
middle of the screen, so if you'd prefer to keep it at the top-right corner, you can drag
and drop it, and it'll stay there.
You can now search within Spotlight, the same way you'd communicate with a person. Let's
say I'm trying to locate a document I wrote within the last week. I can literally type
in, documents I wrote last week, and there it is. Here's a .pdf we created, my notes
for this particular class, and more. A couple other things you can do, let's say I'm trying
to locate an email.
I can do the same thing, email from Johnny, and you see it there. You can do weather,
and if you type in the word, weather, it's gonna be wherever you physically are. You
can also say weather in different locations. Let's say I wanna see what the weather's like
in Houston, Texas. There you go, it pulls that information. If I can put a feature request
out there with Apple, I wish movies had this kind of information, can't really do that
right now.
A couple other things you can do, sport scores, so I can type in a sports team and see the
most recent sports score, and upcoming schedules. Finally, even though it's not entirely on
topic, I want to give a shout out to a different class we created. Some of you asked me, what's
my favorite app of all time. I'm a business guy, not a gamer, so I don't have any favorite
games. I think the most useful add-on app for the Mac, if you wanna check it out I'll
include a link in the description of this video.
I love this app, it goes hand-in-hand with Spotlight, called Alfred. Specifically because
you have access to the clipboard history. If you're constantly having to copy and paste
different things, and need access to past things you've copied, make sure you check
out that class. I'll include a link to that in the description of this video.
What we're gonna do is take a brief commercial break, this is how we're able to keep these
classes free for all of you. When we come back, we'll resume where we left off and go
over a bunch of other new features you're gonna find in the new operating system for
the Mac, OSX El Capitan. We'll be right back.
David: The next feature I'm going to be showing you is split screen mode, which is in no way
a feature Apple allegedly stole from Microsoft. This feature, when they first announced it,
I thought to myself why would I need an app to run in 50% of the screen. I think of that
as ruining the experience. Then I started playing with it, and I realized there are
certain apps that I tend to use together.
For example, a lot of the time I use my calendar with my email. I like to schedule things based
on my calendar, so a lot of times I'm going back and forth between those apps. That is,
for me, where split screen mode is perfect. There are two different ways you can enable
split screen mode. I'm gonna show you both of them, but the thing I'm gonna do first
is make sure everyone's on the same page when it comes to their settings.
If you will indulge me, I'm gonna go into system preferences, and recommend all of you
follow along. Within system preferences, the second line down, we have trackpad. For those
of you who don't have a trackpad, if you're on an iMac you're gonna do the same thing
here but in mouse. For the rest of you, go here into trackpad settings. We have these
three options at the top. Make sure you're under more gestures, and the middle option
here is mission control.
Make sure you have this checked, and the animation that's playing to the right will show you
how this works. You swipe up with three fingers, and it reveals all the apps that you have.
It separates their windows, so it's easier to sort things. Make sure you have that enabled.
Let me show you the two different ways to activate this feature. What I'm first gonna
do is what I refer to as the manual method.
I'm gonna open my calendar and my email, so they're on the same window. The first method
is I'm gonna put one app into half screen mode, and tell it which app to run on the
other half. Normally if i wanted my email to be in full screen mode I'd click the green
dot. When you want it to run with only half the screen, you click and hold on the green
dot. When you do so, it's gonna give you a blue background.
If I drag this to the right, you can see I place the mail on the right hand side. If
I move it to the left and let go, it's running in 50% of the screen. This is important, you
have to have the other app open at the time. You can't go into Launchpad and launch it
right now. It has to already be running. Now, if I had multiple apps open I could click
on whichever one. In this case I have calendar, so I'll click and voila.
I have my calendar on the right hand side, and my email on the left. Sometimes you don't
need these to be so 50-50, sometimes you need more space here, and not as much here. What
you can do is, this little black bar you can grab it, and click and drag to either side,
and it will readjust the size of the windows. It's not completely custom, it's gonna snap
to certain conditions, like this is the smallest I can make the calendar.
It still works pretty well for me, and in my case this is the perfect solution. Having
your email and your calendar next to each other. Some of you might feel the same way
about notepad or iMessages. The other way you can trigger this is through Mission Control.
Give me a moment while I set this up. We're back to where we started, we have email here,
calendar here.
What we can do, instead, is go into Mission Control mode. Three fingers at the bottom
of your trackpad, and swipe up. Now I can take either one of these apps, click and drag
it to the top right corner of the screen. What I've done is put mail into full screen
mode. It's the same thing as hitting the green dot. Now what I'm gonna do is take the calendar,
drag and drop it up here.
That's the other method you can use to enable split screen mode. The next few features I'm
gonna show you have to do with Safari. Those of you who are not fans of Safari, you may
want to skip this part. Otherwise, let me show you what we've got, one of the features
we have. We have three apps open at the top of the screen, the New York Times, Tech Talk
America, and Amazon.com. If I want to go to these websites often, I could create a bookmark.
But there's a new way to save it called a pinned tab. The way you do this is take the
tab that's open and drag it to the left. You'll see in the case of the New York Times, it
shrinks into the icon for the New York Times. I can do the same thing for Tech Talk America,
and that's on the left. I'm not going to do that with Amazon, to prove a point. The reason
why you may want pinned tabs, is when I quit out of Safari and go back into it, you'll
notice the pinned tabs are still there.
The one that was open is back to whatever my homepage is. While we're talking about
saving websites, I want to bring your attention to something. We create these free classes
for everyone, all over the world, to enjoy. We appreciate it if you show a little support
to what we do and we have three easy steps to follow, so when you purchase on Amazon
you can support what we do.
You can find the directions here, techtalkamerica.com, and click on the support us. It's totally
free, the absolute easiest way to show a little love to the guys who like to bring you knowledge
in how to use your various gadgets. We appreciate that. The next two features we have here in
Safari. Do you have a problem where you have a Youtube video open? Let me launch one.
And you have another website that opens in the background and also has audio. I'm gonna
launch a video, and keep the audio down. If you look at the top of the screen, we have
two audio buttons. We have a master kill switch in the web url bar. We also have a speaker
icon here. If we had multiple tabs open, and audio playing all over the place, it can be
distracting.
If I click here, it's gonna kill the audio to whatever's playing on that tab. Whereas
if I click up here, I can kill the audio from all tabs that are open. The final feature
I wanted to show you in Safari is, let's say you have an article you want to save. One
of the things you can do now, is if you go to the share button, there is now support
for notes and reminders. Full disclosure, I'm not a fan of either of those for saving
websites, I think Evernote is a better solution.
To each their own. The next feature I'm gonna talk about is notes, which got a lot of the
new features you'll find in IOS 9, though not all of them. One of the features is you
can now have folders of notes. You can see the folder structure here. I have folders
for class notes, recipes, shopping notes. Within each folder you have individual notes.
I want to prove a point, regarding why I don't like using notes in combination with Safari.
Let's say you want to create a notebook of recipes. This is why Evernote is a better
solution. Let's say I want to save this recipe. You'll notice that if you do the share function
from Safari, and go to notes, you'll notice there's no way to tell it what folder this
is supposed to go in. It's gonna create a new note, and it's gonna be up to you to manually
drag and drop it into that list.
If you do a lot of this stuff, it can be a pain in the butt. Evernote has that built
in. Sorry, I didn't mean to go on a rant. A few other features we have. I'll restore
that so I can show you other features. Within notes, we can use checkboxes for something
like a shopping list. We'll say milk, cookies, and taffy. You now have the checkbox options.
Where this could be handy, is if you create a shared shopping list. Then again, there
is an app that does that, that I may have just mentioned.
We have formatting options now, here within notes. Personally, never cared about this
feature. It's a notepad, not word or pages. You have title, heading, body, all that good
stuff. You can also do bullet points and a numbered list if you're too lazy to hit one,
period, space. Few other features, if you start to bring in attachments like photos,
which you can now do. That's the photo browser button.
Again, I don't know why you would bring photos into notes, but you can. What you can do is
go to this icon and sort all of your notes based on what kind of content it has. You
can see all photos and videos, sketches, maps, websites, audio, and documents. Some interesting
features. I don't know how many of you will use these features, I think there's better
software out there that does the same thing.
We're down to the final few items. What I'm gonna do is group a bunch of these together.
They're all different, but minor changes. The first thing is great for those of you
who have in iPhone. Now the calendar program communicates with Apple Maps. Let's say I
have a doctor's appointment that's an hour and a half away, and there's a traffic accident
in between there. What will happen is my phone will alert me that, due to traffic conditions,
I should leave earlier in order to get there on time.
Definitely a cool feature for those of you who have an iPhone and use the calendar application.
The next feature, you'll notice, apologies in advance, this looks so pathetic. This utility
got a it of a makeover. It's not this utility that's pathetic, it's my computer. Dear Tim
Cook, I need a new computer, I'm out of space. Next feature is one I should have mentioned
earlier when we were talking about Safari.
You'll notice that Youtube videos now have a built-in airplay button. You can throw this
video on Apple TV without having to go through the normal process. You can keep it this size,
but on your television it would be full screen. I'm looking forward to the new Apple TV. Andy
Grammar, you owe me for a free promo. Next feature is one I was a little disappointed
on.
Usually when they come out with a new operating system, they tend to give us some amazing
photography to go with it, for different desktop backgrounds. Not the case this time. There
are two. That's one, that's the other. You have officially two options. Let's go back
to my self promo. Next feature I have to go back to system preferences for.
You'll find here under general, there's an option up here, the third item down, automatically
hide and show the menu bar. That's the white bar at the top of my screen. Personally, I
need constant access to that bar, I did not find it to be beneficial, I found it to be
an annoyance. For those of you who might want that, you can check that feature out. One
feature I did like is under the app store.
You'll notice for free downloads at the bottom, you can make it so it'll save your password.
Also for in-app purchases, you can do require or require after 15 minutes. Next feature
is one I'd say is cool. For those of you who travel, pay attention to this one. Let's say
you have somewhere in your computer, maybe in notes or iMessages or the mail program,
a flight number. I guessed at this being a flight number, and I was shocked that it was
correct.
If I put my cursor over that, UA would be United Airlines, 1820. See how this arrow
appears next to it? I can click on that and it's gonna look it up and I can see it's a
flight that is flying. I can see its status, from Denver to [phonetic][20:45] GRR. Don't
you love GRR? I can see it's delayed 15 minutes. That works with any flight. A cool feature
that works across the board.
It may work in more than just those three apps, I haven't played a lot with it. That
does it for our class. A couple things before we go. If you haven't done so, please subscribe
to our Youtube channel. You can do so by clicking on that button that just appeared on your
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to that you'll find in the video description.
And thank you for tuning in. This is David A. Cox with Tech Talk America. Class dismissed.