OS X El Capitan

Yesterday I updated my Mac to OS X 10.11, El Capitan, and I’m impressed by its speed and apparent sturdiness. Things haven’t felt this good on my Mac since 10.8 (Mountain Lion).

Major glitch: an endlessly spinning beach ball while installing. I held down the power button, restarted, and all was well. Minor glitches: getting cDock to work and reinstalling the Safari extension Disconnect. I gave up on replacing Apple’s new system font (San Francisco) with Lucida Grande. Trying to make the change, at least for now, brings a host of complications, including squashed text in the Finder and in browser tabs. So I’m convincing myself that I’m happy with San Francisco, which itself is a clear (pun intended) improvement over Helvetica Neue.

I’m a little saddened to see that the sempervirens bug, a problem I first noticed in OS X 10.10, is still present, having persisted through 10.10.1, 10.10.2, 10.10.3, 10.10.4, and 10.10.5. Sempervirens isn’t present on every Mac, but a tech-support person reproduced the bug when I called about it in 2014, and a higher-level person filed a report. And the bug is still here. I guess I didn’t call it semper for nothing.

Itr’s always smart to check that crucial apps and hardware will work with a system update. I waited until I knew that aText was working in 10.11. Elaine has to wait until the music-writing app Finale works in 10.11. That’s supposed to happen “by the end of November 2015.” Sigh.