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early adopters of 10.11 El Capitan; anyone more than me? (And batteries.)


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I'm going for the Unified Apple Developer Membership, at the moment the purpose is just to get 10.11 El Capitan as an early adopter - mostly for general performance reasons - Accordance is not going to run slow no matter what I would do or wouldn't do but the computer is a bit old (oldest still supported advanced one), basically all parts have been changed in it so it will still last long even though I bought it recently used. I wrote on my twitter and facebook that I bought parts and on my facebook timeline I specified a little bit about my Mac. (This evening I need to decide what batteries to order so that I would be prepare for long car and train distances, as a passenger that is. Any ideas, best strategies? I have all kinds of laptops.)
Apple states on their homepage as introductory information that OS X 10.11 El Capitan gives significant performance boosts compared to 10.10 Yosemite. So I draw the conclusion that there is no more need to go back to 10.9 Mavericks which was the previous OS with good performance on old hardware.
Only drawback with my old Mac is small graphics memory.
A modern and well performing OS (10.11) that speeds up the computer should theoretically save battery as the system requirements are basically exactly the same as for the previous one (10.10).

 

I can't see much reasons to subscribe to the membership more than the one year that costs $99. I might take some programming class in the Spring semester 2016, I have time to decide on that and see how other (mostly language) things progress.

 

Related: on an entirely different forum I asked a programming question but didn't get a reply yet: http://www.christianforums.com/threads/any-christian-programmers-web-devs-out-there.7808381/#post-68109202

I'll let You all continue this thread continue as a general excitement about the new OS!

EDIT after three minutes: typo, small additions.

Edited by Unix
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El Cap is running better than Yosemite or Mavericks did on my early 2011 13" MBP. Thanks to iCloud, Dropbox, and symbolic links I can flip back and forth between 10.11 and 10.10 partitions without losing documents or Accordance notes. Even though it is just developer beta 1, it is surprisingly snappy and stable. I have integrated video and graphics are smoother. All of the tiny improvements and polish makes it more enjoyable than Yosemite. One of the features I appreciate is the ability to hide the Dock and Menu Bar. The added real estate is very nice for when I'm not working in full screen. It would be awesome if Accordance would end up supporting Split View so I can have Accordance stacked nicely beside my text editor.

 

I've not run into any issues with Accordance so I am happy about that. I don't run without being plugged in very often but when I have the battery does drain faster. I expect that since new code is not optimized, more debug info is being dumped to logs, analytics are being sent to Apple, there are bugs crawling around that battery life won't improve until closer to final betas and release candidates.

 

I quickly looked at your post on that other forum. If you are looking to learn a new language for making apps, I would suggest Swift. Apple is trying to move everyone from Obj-C over to it. They have tons of documentation and development resources you can get your hands on without the need for getting a membership. Since they are releasing a public beta of El Capitan in July, it might be worth waiting for it to arrive instead of plunking down $99 for early access. I've done that in the past with the intention of learning Swift and publishing an app, but it did not come to fruition. You can use other languages for Apps but the amount of documentation and resources for Swift almost make it a no brainer. The only downside is it relies heavily on concepts from C, which I am not familiar with. I've spent lots of time in PHP, JavaScript, HTML, and Perl, and when I starting looking at Swift I found I had to go look at some C fundamentals before proceeding. I think Apple now has a primer on C to quickly get into swift. You might not need it, but it is there for help. Since Swift has been out for a while there are probably lots of blog and forum posts that deal with common issues that you might run into. That's just my 2 cents.

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Doesn't a program just have to support full-screen view, which Accordance does, to support the split view?

 

It would be awesome if Accordance would end up supporting Split View so I can have Accordance stacked nicely beside my text editor.

 

 

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Actually no. There seems to be more to it. I tried it with my standard Accordance workspace and it did not work. Neither a long click on the full screen button not attempting to stack in Mission Control. I'll play with a less complex workspace, but I doubt it will be any different. Maybe just compiling with the 10.11 SDK might make it just work.

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OK. I did find an article that explains a bit about the support. Ars Technica first look at El Capitan. I'm sure the Accordance developers are looking at these things and hopefully will have support when the OS is out.

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  • 2 months later...

Thought I'd push this back to the top, given that El Cap is coming out at the end of the month, and I also would love to see Split View support enabled in Accordance!

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I just installed the El Capitan Gold Master on my 2015 13" MacBook Air. It seems to be running faster than any of the previous El Capitan Betas, and much faster than Yosemite. It reminds me of Snow Leopard in that respect. I don't know how well it will run on older hardware though. 

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  • 3 weeks later...

Really like the split screen feature on El Capitan. And really looking forward to using Accordance that way...

(That would actually go for iOS too...)

 

Thanks for the great work you guys (Accordance developers) are doing!

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