Now that El Capitan OS X 10.11 is out, here are some excellent resources available to help you in researching what is new, learning how to take advantage of the software and work through any issues you might encounter.

Professional Reviews:

• El Capitan: TidBITS Answers Your Questions
• El Capitan: The MacStories Review by Alex Guyot
• El Capitan: The Ars Technica Review by Andrew Cunningham & Lee Hutchinson
• Complete OS X El Capitan review by Rene Ritchie

Apple resources:

• Apple’s OS X page
• Apple’s Support Page for El Capitan – my personal productivity favorite is SplitView where I can focus on two apps and nothing else for a while.

Notable blogs and deep-dives into specific aspects of El Capitan:

• Safari and The huge value of pinning a tab by Dave Mark
• OS X articles on Krypted.com by Charles Edge (many great nuggets here)
• System Integrity Protection (a.k.a. rootless) deep dive by Rich Trouton
• Unraveling the mystery system font San Francisco by Craig Hockenberry

As someone who dabbles in both photography and graphic design, I spend a lot of time in graphics-oriented apps. There are several leading apps in this category, but which is the right one for you? Is Photoshop better than GIMP? Is Pixelmator better than Photoshop?

The Contenders

GIMP 2.6

The free one. GIMP is free, open source, and cross platform. It has a reasonably good feature set, but doesn’t perform particularly admirably and has a user experience that is decidedly un-Mac-like. GIMP is free.

Photoshop CS5

The big one. Photoshop has been around for a long time, and is the industry standard. Photoshop is the archetypical ‘professional’ app: tons of features (some questionable), a usable-but-not-great UI, and a ridiculous price. Photoshop CS5 is $700, Photoshop CS5 Extended is $1000. Amazon has small discounts. Students and teachers get big discounts.

Pixelmator 2

The shiny new one. Pixelmator is relatively new, incredibly inexpensive, and has quickly gotten a good reputation. Pixelmator is beautiful and a pleasure to use, performs very pleasingly, and has a respectable feature set. Pixelmator is $30 on the Mac App Store.

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