Split View multitasking

El Capitan makes full-screen mode more effective to assist your productivity

Split View enhances full-screen apps by enabling you to display two apps side by side. Full-screen mode has always made sense on devices with small screens, like iPads and the MacBook Air, but its usefulness was less convincing on an iMac or other large display. Split View is designed to make it more practical on them as well, and it makes it much easier to work with two apps on any screen size.

Like full-screen mode for a single app, Split View hides the Dock and the menu bar, so you make use of all available space and remove many distractions. Rather than using a gesture to move back and forth between two fullscreen apps, Split View improves productivity; you might put a text editor on the left and Safari on the right when researching a subject. There are multple ways to enable Split View.

17> Click and hold the green button at the topleft of any window that can be switched to full- screen mode. You’ll notice half of the screen displays a blue overlay (which depends on which side of the screen the pointer is on). Move the pointer to the side on which you want that app to appear, then let go. Other windows that are capable of switching to full screen then appear in Mission Control fashion on the other side of the screen. Click one of them to set it as the other half of that Split View workspace.

18> If you already have one app in fullscreen mode, simply open Mission Control and drag a window from the centre over the Spaces bar at the top of the screen; when it expands to show previews of your spaces, drop the window onto an app that’s already in full-screen mode to combine the two in Split View mode. See the page opposite for additional details of how Mission Control works in El Capitan.

19> To take one app out of Split View, move the pointer to the top of the screen to reveal the menu bar and both apps’ title bars, then click the green button at the top-left of the title bar of the app you want to make a window again. The other app remains in full-screen mode.

You can adjust the space dedicated to each app by placing the pointer over the dividing line between them, so the cursor changes to show either a single-headed or a double-headed arrow. Drag this left and right to adjust the space allocation 20> OS X automatically assigns what it thinks is a sensible split of the screen based on the apps you’ve combined. Whether you’ve adjusted the split yourself or you dislike OS X’s assumption, double-clicking the divider snaps to an even 50% split.

Irrespective of the apps you combine and the width of your display, Split View can display no more than two apps together.

The one sour note for Split View is that it requires apps to support full-screen mode. Older versions of Adobe apps and Microsoft software doesn’t support it.