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Apple Releases OS X 10.11 El Capitan With Improved Spotlight Search, Enhanced Performance, and Revamped Apps

Habakuk said:
F***! All my precious text shortcuts are GONE! Thanks, Apple, for spending me two hours of additional work.
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S@ hours wasted then :) Took me exactly 10 seconds to google it to find out where they are... presuming you have time machine up an running.
~/Library/Dictionaries/CoreDataUbiquitySupport/

In that folder are multiple folders containing different databases. These are not directly editable .txt files but rather .db files. Though you can copy and paste the folders and it will expand your own text shortcuts database.
 
sracer said:
Happy to help. There's only a few of us left who still rely on iWork '09 so we gotta help one another out. :)

All other color chooser tabs work fine. I agree regarding "where there's one bug.." that is why I'm encouraging caution.
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I'm not so sure about that "few of us" as I've turned what I would consider a "few" onto Macs just for Pages '09 "Page Layout" side functionality. It's hard to find a good alternative as easy to use with as much fundamental DTP power. iWork for Mac could have simply had an extra program- a MS Publisher variant (except something that works really well). I still wish Apple would do that.

But again, thanks for sharing any other bugs if you find any.
 
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Given the potential of Metal and supposed performance fixes compared to Yosemite, I decided to give this one a try. I backed everything up first in case I need to reinstall Mavericks and gave it a whirl.

First thing I noticed is that the fonts are either fixed or aren't the nightmare people claim they are. I don't have a "Retina" display here (1680x1050 is the native resolution of my 24" monitor I've been using) and the fonts are readable. I hate the "flat" window buttons, though. They truly are hideous compared to the "gem" old ones.

The second thing I noticed is that the system is incredibly slow the first hour or so while things are updating in the background and if Apple were smart, they'd give you a heads up about that when it first comes up to start as it might lead some to think it's awful and quit and restore the previous OS or something. Spotlight was 100% non-functional during this time. I'd type something in and 5 minutes later I still had no result. There's no busy indicator to tell me it's even TRYING to do something. Old OS X versions actually would say when you clicked on Spotlight that it was updating the database and give a time estimate. No such luck here. It plasters a giant window in the middle of the screen now (quite ugly too) and you type a word in and it sits there. A busy animation at the very least would be helpful. When I came back over an hour later, it was working OK, but still no busy indicator. I could have sworn, I read Spotlight will give weather information, but it doesn't seem to and it's not on the preference page list. Movie times, etc. DO come up, though.

The third thing I noticed is that my older VMWare (5.x) Fusion has a "NO" marker through it. It's 100% non-functional and says I'll need to update it. Look on the App Store Apple suggests....yeah not there because they want to charge you for every upgrade. From 5.x it's full price ($80) to "upgrade" to fix something that worked fine for my needs in Mavericks (i.e. to run XP for some old games; I don't need anything newer until they add DirectX 11 support, which even if they DO add in the next version will still cost me $50 more to "upgrade" even if I buy the current version. That's a lot to spend just to get better lighting in Pinball Arcade. I can't use Boot Camp because my internal drives are set to be RAID partitions for reasonable performance from spinning hard drives (another nice surprise when I attempted to install Windows 8.1 awhile back). Yahoo Messenger also broke, but given they haven't updated it for like 5 years, I'm not totally surprised there and it gets zero use so I don't care.

The fourth thing I noticed is that it broke Xtrafinder. This one is damn near unforgivable as Finder is an ancient POS without it. I'm not sure I'll ever get it working again seeing as RAID drives don't have the Recovery partition on them and thus I probably won't be able to turn rootless off (is the recovery partition needed to use "recovery mode" ?) to get around the basic problem that keeps it from working. Apple really should have a way to bypass this inside OSX without resorting to something it knows RAID users don't have. But then if Apple would just actually spend some time modernizing Finder instead of playing with crayon colors, I wouldn't have to user XtraFinder in the first place!

I'm not sure, but text typing in Firefox here feels just a hair "lagged" somehow (and Firefox just broke my favorite theme "Noia" so I'm pretty ticked there as well given the author recently decided to stop updating it since it took up too much of his time with Firefox constantly releasing updates, many of which break every single theme every single time to the utter ridiculous annoyance of every theme maker out there for it).

Beyond that, I'm hard pressed to notice anything "faster" in the GUI than Mavericks. Maybe it's night and day better than Yosemite, but I never bothered with Yosemite to compare. It doesn't feel faster than Mavericks so far on my 2012 Mac Mini and its GPU is Metal supported. The hint of lag in typing in Firefox is driving me nuts. I'm pretty sure I'm not imagining it at this point. Typing in Spotlight feels fine so maybe it's just Firefox. Maybe I'll give Safari another try and compare....
 
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Well, I upgraded and the computer is not only not snappier, it is slower than a stoned turtle in quicksand. All of my 8 cpu threads are between 85% and 100%, while I'm just reading email or browsing. Kernel_task is at 650% of cpu usage, according to iStat. I have restarted a few times. 16 gigs of RAM and my SSD is less than 65% full. As I type, the letters slowly pop up, lagging behind the typing for seconds. Blech!
 
MagnusVonMagnum said:
Beyond that, I'm hard pressed to notice anything "faster" in the GUI than Mavericks. Maybe it's night and day better than Yosemite, but I never bothered with Yosemite to compare. It doesn't feel faster than Mavericks so far on my 2012 Mac Mini and its GPU is Metal supported. The hint of lag in typing in Firefox is driving me nuts. I'm pretty sure I'm not imagining it at this point. Typing in Spotlight feels fine so maybe it's just Firefox. Maybe I'll give Safari another try and compare ...
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Yes, maybe you shouldn't judge Metal by the speed of Firefox's Gecko engine. One can't run cross-platform apps and expect to gain all the benefits inherented from OS X alone.
 
I'm having some issues when visiting some wordpress with with Safari
All the images in the wordpress site couldn't show..
Can any of you help me test out if this is also happening in your new El Capitan?
It was fine previously on Yosemite's Safari

http://getclicks.com.my
 
Gudi said:
Yes, maybe you shouldn't judge Metal by the speed of Firefox's Gecko engine. One can't run cross-platform apps and expect to gain all the benefits inherented from OS X alone.
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I'm not judging Metal. I'm saying it didn't lag in Mavericks.
 
ArmCortexA8 said:
Who in the world uses spotlight search. If you don't know where things are on your mac, give up.
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Maybe the only thing you do with your Mac is surf the web and get emails, but others actually do some more complex things.
ArmCortexA8 said:
Spotlight for workflow? It's not that had to locate documents and applications on a Mac without spotlight.
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Lots of things are not hard. It's not hard to add up a series of numbers, but a spreadsheet makes it easier.

It's not hard to find documents and applications, but Spotlight makes things easier. I guarantee that I could find things on my Mac faster using spotlight than you could without it.

It seems like you don't use Spotlight, you really should give Spotlight a go.
 
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jmiddel said:
Well, I upgraded and the computer is not only not snappier, it is slower than a stoned turtle in quicksand. All of my 8 cpu threads are between 85% and 100%, while I'm just reading email or browsing. Kernel_task is at 650% of cpu usage, according to iStat. I have restarted a few times. 16 gigs of RAM and my SSD is less than 65% full. As I type, the letters slowly pop up, lagging behind the typing for seconds. Blech!
Click to expand...

Give it time to complete all of the background tasks that it has to work through from the upgrade. It will get faster once it completes.
 
This update killed a couple of apps I was running. Screenflow no longer records system audio and Pavtube is no longer working. I know that its their fault and I need to pay I guess.:)
 
RogueWarrior65 said:
Wanna know why Spotlight in Yosemite sucks?
1) Can't resize the window which leads me to ask why Apple violates its own human-interface guidelines.
2) No way to open the enclosing folder in the Finder. Maybe, just maybe, I'm looking for a project instead of a file.
4) No way to open the document if it finds it in the app of my choice. No, as a matter of fact, I don't want to launch the document in whatever app the OS has decided is the right one.
5) No way to easily search for just the name of the document instead of the search string inside the document. So annoying. Even Finder window searches don't default to this.

Seriously, I don't want Spotlight to do anything but act as a search tool for my local storage.
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I could suggest easyfind (available at the App Store for free)

Super simple file and folder finder for local and network volumes.

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/easyfind/id411673888?mt=12
 
2 hours from start of download to completed installation on my 17” MacBook Pro (mid 2009). The first hour was a bit troublesome with sticky spotlight (re-indexing), iTunes and photos hanging while configuring libraries.

I thought i’d lost all my mail boxes but they were hidden? once unhidden all was good. Now, a couple of days later and i’m impressed, all seems better than Yosemite. Only downside is my Duet Firewire is no longer supported but for now at least, it’s working fine.
 
NOSFERATU said:
type "weather city, state" (no quotes) into spotlight
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Here I thought El Capitan was supposed to understand plain English queries now (plus it doesn't recognize my township even though all major weather services do; it shows North Carolina instead).

Other issues:

I've also discovered that NFS isn't working since the upgrade (my old Gen1 AppleTVs are set up with older versions of XBMC (Eden) to use NFS since Apple broke SMB some time ago). Oddly, SMB is now working with the older XBMC and NFS is missing. I'm still looking into it. Hmmm, odder yet is that File Sharing isn't even indicated to be turned on in the Preference Pane yet my old SMB setup is functioning off the XBMC AppleTV. Very very odd. I wouldn't mind switching back to SMB, but it would mean having to reload all the Meta data ALL OVER AGAIN in XBMC and that's a royal PITA. Since I don't know if I'm going to even keep El Capitan on here, it's a bit of a mess right now.

Edit: NFS stopped working because Apple won't let you modify the launch daemon to use the "-N" option with that SIP crap. In order to edit the file, you have to disable SIP...except you can't if you have a RAID boot volume since to disable it you have to boot into the recovery partition that doesn't exist on RAID boot setups. Apple created their own dead end here by supporting RAID but then putting an OS option into a recovery partition RAID doesn't support.... Good show Apple! Good Show! :mad:

Apple needs to offer a better way to turn of SIP....


VMWare Fusion 5.x definitely won't even load (so I can spend $80 to get it working again or go back to Mavericks). I only use it for WinXP and Win98 to play old games for the most part. I was hoping to wait for a version with DirectX 11 support before upgrading again since I bought Win 8.1 Pro (with the option of getting Win 10 if they ever ditch the spyware in the next year), but I can't install it via Boot Camp because I use RAID boot drives and even the latest VMWare and Parallels don't support DirectX 11 which I need for Pinball Arcade to get the dark lighting mode (only reason I bought Win 8.1).

XtraFinder is dead and once again since I have RAID boot volumes on the Mac Mini Server, I have no Recovery Partition in order to turn SIP off to get it working. Too bad Apple couldn't have a trusted software certificate or something for such programs because the default Finder just plain sucks by comparison.

Overall, I'm not too happy with the upgrade so far and to top my happiness off, the new Firefox broke the Noia theme and the author just retired it in August and there isn't a single good theme out there so now it looks like fugly Chrome and Safari again....Ugh.
 
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Merackon said:
Cannot tell if this is a serious point or not, I for one use Spotlight purely to speed up workflow, not because I don't know where my stuff is...
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Knowing the user saying that, I strongly suspect it's just trolling....
jmiddel said:
Well, I upgraded and the computer is not only not snappier, it is slower than a stoned turtle in quicksand. All of my 8 cpu threads are between 85% and 100%, while I'm just reading email or browsing. Kernel_task is at 650% of cpu usage, according to iStat. I have restarted a few times. 16 gigs of RAM and my SSD is less than 65% full. As I type, the letters slowly pop up, lagging behind the typing for seconds. Blech!
Click to expand...
Something definitely wrong in your installation, since I'm using it on an old 2009 Mini with better results
 
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ArmCortexA8 said:
Who in the world uses spotlight search. If you don't know where things are on your mac, give up.
Click to expand...
I do, it can locate a picture file by ID# that has been buried someplace that I have no idea where to find it. But if your feelings are that it is not helpful, then forget it even exists. I have done that for Band in a box. Even removed it, but I don't know if you can disable spotlight, maybe so. Use what works for you and let the rest fall by the way side of life, it for sure makes for less stress. Just my view.
 
This is interesting. I ran XBench (yeah I know it's ancient, outdated, etc., but it still runs tests) and these are the more interesting changes since my last test in Mavericks. Keep in mind this is on a Late 2012 Mac Mini with Quad i7, 8GB ram and two 1TB RAID0 drives.

Mavericks Uncached Write Hard Drive Test: 258MB/sec
El Capitan Uncached Write Hard Drive Test: 174Mb/sec (huge loss of speed; I see little RAID improvement in El Cap)

User Interface Test Mavericks: 428
User Interface Test El Capitan: 18.92 (WTF!?)

Quartz Test Mavericks: 424
Quartz Test El Capitan: 191 (I guess Metal doesn't work with old Quartz tests?)

CPU Test Mavericks: 279
CPU Test El Capitan: 249 (veclibFFT was biggest loss)

Other tests were reasonably similar numbers

"Overall Score Mountain Lion" = 278
"Overall Score Mavericks" = 265
"Overall Score El Capitan" = 78

Yikes.

Let alone the fact that some very expensive software broke (iZotope RX 2 and VMWare Fusion 5.x) (still checking other software)

And Mavericks scored lower than Mountain Lion that the Mac Mini came with....

Here I thought it was my imagination that text typing felt slightly lagged, etc. Those tests tell me it wasn't my imagination. I thought El Cap was supposed to be so damn fast. You could have fooled me. Am I missing a setting somewhere? Metal is supported on the HD4000. Why is my hard drive slower, etc.? Maybe some of the tests don't work correctly anymore, but THAT many after all these years? I dunno.

All I can say is that I'm glad I backed up Mavericks. It's looking more and more like it's going back on there.
 
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