El Capitan

4 Oct 2015 08:05:06

Drew McFarlane

Just wondering if anyone has taken the plunge and downloaded El Capitan?

After Veryfing & Repairing "Disk Permissions" I downloaded it onto a mid 2010 MacBook Air on Friday afternoon and had a play with it yesterday. Downloading and installing, maximum two hours, was a complete success without any complications, and so far I am more than happy with it.

I have a long way to go yet, but I believe a vast improvement on Yosemite.

Re: El Capitan

9 Oct 2015 08:51:02

John Surtees

Seems to work fine on our latest Mac Mini and our oldish MacBook Pro. However I have read that there is a bug that was reported on the Nisus site.

http://nisus.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=22&t=6166

Re: El Capitan

9 Oct 2015 10:13:18

Euan Williams

Hi Drew and John, yes, I too really like El Capitan in general, it's a bit snappier and frequently pops up with nice touches which I’m fairly sure weren’t in Yosemite. But there are a few well-known and serious and well-advertised issues for Microsoft Office 16, and Outlook, so far unresolved.

As always, make a ‘clean install’ on a different partition on your drive so that reverting isn’t a problem. That you have also made a full clone and/or Time Machine backup goes without saying.

A particularly odd bug is causing grief in Preview when annotating or printing .pdfs the annotations get stretched and rotated, and when printing the page may be rotated portrait/landscape with part of the print area being ‘lost’ outside the page margins. (Tip of the hat to David M.)

As this occurs with both Preview 8.0 (Yosemite edition) and 8.1 El Capitan edition presumably this is a problem within the 10.11.0 System, possibly Open GL but that’s pure uninformed guesswork :)

Work-around? Annotations inserted within Acrobat Reader (11.0.10) behave this way too. I haven’t explored other options yet.

El Capitan signals its dissatisfaction with some older software by silently “blinking” the screen, but there seems to be no indication as to what has upset it. Neither Preview 8.0 nor 8.1 “blink”, nor do InDesign CS 5.0, Illustrator CS 5.0 — but Photoshop CS 5.0, and Acrobat Reader 11.0.10 (so far) do.

Quark has asked users not to work with their current version (QXPress 2015) in El Capitan and hope to update it by the end of October.

As would be expected, discussions are popping up across the web, some learned and calm, some noisily outraged. Googling “El Capitan [insert your interest] issue” should reach many of these.

After extensive beta testing how these big issues get through is always a mystery (deadlines?), so let’s hope that 10.11.1 (now on Beta 3) sorts most of them out.

Meantime I use my existing Yosemite on a different partition but only where there is a problem — insufferably smug statement, but try it.

Re: El Capitan

9 Oct 2015 10:15:33

Drew McFarlane

I have now downloaded it on two machines, a MacBook Air & MacBook Pro.

On the Pro I had to reinstall three e-mail accounts, I was receiving e-mails but I couldn't send them. Each time I sent an e-mail I had a message informing me that the server couldn't be contacted.

After manually re-instaling two G Mail accounts and a POP account everything is back to normal.

Re: El Capitan

9 Oct 2015 12:12:11

David Moon

Did the SMTP setting just sort themselves out? On my PlusNet account El Cap changed all the settings and I had to reset by rechecking the setting when running Yosemite.

Re: El Capitan

9 Oct 2015 14:32:45

Euan Williams

Further investigation with David Moon this morning has shown that by copying the (emailed to us from Windows) pdf into Pages like a photo, and then exporting the document as a pdf from Pages (with or without annotation so that any PC can read the file) we were able to open the document in Preview again where it behaved normally. This may be acceptable for general purposes.

However our aim was to keep the “sent to us” pdf as an editable pdf to annotate and forward via Mail.
We tried opening and saving the same document in PDFPro with success.
We tried the same with Adobe Illustrator with success.
We tried “Save Attachment” within Mail with success.

Then we tried opening the “sent to us pdf” direct from the email into Adobe Reader and saving it as an AR pdf, which was also successful when loaded into a Mail message. When we annotated the AR pdf in Preview this functioned normally.

This suggests that there is something disagreeable in the El Capitan system workings in relation to the particular pdf format of Preview 8.0 and 8.1 which appears to write PDFs that are, in the sense discussed here, corrupted.

Re: El Capitan

9 Oct 2015 23:34:31

Tony Still

Re David's comment on SMTP (E-Mail outgoing sever) settings:
I learned the hard way in Yosemite to turn-off Mail's 'Automatically detect and maintain account settings" since it automatically detected and trashed my account settings. The only account I left it active for was my iCloud (me.com) account on the basis that it was Apple's own settings. So it was that account that got its SMTP settings trashed by El Capitan, consistency is a wonderful thing. Fix is to disable the aforementioned setting (under each account in the Advanced tab), then insert the setting manually from Apple's settings page.

However, El Capitan is, after two day's usage, a huge improvement on Yosemite. I have abandoned my Bluetooth and Airplay workarounds as both seem to be working again (fingers crossed!). It's also significantly faster in several areas (notably, app launching is much improved, though that may be specific cases since I've not tested it methodically).