El Capitan was officially announced at the 2015 WWDC. Along with basic information, such as that the newest version of OS X would once again be available for free, and that there will be a public beta available starting in July, Apple also touched on a few of El Capitan’s new features. But they didn’t have time to mention all of the new features.

So, here's a list of 5 new features I'm looking forward to that may not have gotten a lot of play at the WWDC keynote address.

Photos for OS X

The talk around the WWDC is that Apple has opened up Photos to developers to write third-party extensions. This should allow Photos to support a wide range of new capabilities, including third-party editors.

Think of it this way: If you really prefer to edit images in Photoshop or Pixelmator, but you like the image management capabilities in Photos, you may soon be able to have your cake and eat it, too. All that would be needed is for the developers of your favorite image editing app to write a Photos extension that would launch their editor with your selected image.

Of course, these third-party Photos extensions won’t be showing up for a while, but when they do, Photos may become my go-to imaging system.

Notes Attachment Browser

Notes already allowed you to attach images to your various notes. But flipping through notes one by one to find an image wasn't the greatest way to spend your time. OS X El Capitan will add an attachment browser that will let you easily find notes based on what was attached to them.

Mail Gets Smarter

Ever received an invite to an event in Apple Mail? During the summer, someone is always suggesting a barbeque or get-together for the weekend. With El Capitan, Mail can now automatically offer to create an event in Calendar based on the information in the message.

While this was an easy task to perform in previous versions of Mail, the new version will offer to perform the task for you. I think this will be a great help, since more than once I've failed to notice that there was an invitation buried in the message.

Mail Gets Tabs

Tired of moving between multiple open mail messages? I'll often be in the middle of writing an email, and go off to look up something in Safari, which then covers up my message. When I return to Mail, the main Mail window pops right up, but the message window I was working on is still hidden behind other windows. In El Capitan, Mail will have tabs, just like Safari and the Finder. All of those message windows can now be corralled in a tab bar, giving you easy access to messages you're actively working on.

Spotlight on the Move

When OS X Yosemite made its debut, it included a much-needed update to Spotlight. Unfortunately, Apple decided that when you invoke Spotlight, it should appear front and center, smack dab in the middle of your display.

Now I don’t know about you, but the middle of my display is usually where I'm working, and when I want to search for something in Spotlight, I don't necessarily want it to cover up my work. With El Capitan, Spotlight can now be resized, as well as moved to where you want it.

I don’t know yet if it will stay where you put it, or if a new invocation of Spotlight will plop it back in the middle of the screen, but at least it's an improvement.

Don’t forget that we'll have installation guides for OS X El Capitan available once the beta version is released. If you would like to sign up for the public beta, you can do so at: Apple Beta Software Program.

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