El Capitan update adds support for 150 new emoji

By Brad Bourque October 21, 2015

Apple OSX El Capitan Office — Image used with permission by copyright holder

Less than a month after the official release of OS X El Capitan, the first update is ready to roll out to consumer systems. While the update doesn’t add a ton of exciting new features, it does resolve some issues users have been having, and more importantly, packs in over 150 new emoji.

The newest update to El Capitan isn’t a particularly exciting one, instead bringing bug fixes and a few minor updates to the OS. Notably, the update is designed to help ameliorate some of the issues that users have been experiencing with Microsoft Office 2016. In fact, beta testers reported months ago that there were issues running the productivity suite, but these warnings went unheeded, and Office in consequence crashes frequently, even in the retail version of El Capitan.

But in more relevant news, OS X 10.11.1 finally adds the new emoji characters from Unicode 7 and 8. That’s right, El Capitan users will be able to invite their friends over for unicorn head tacos, or just encourage them to rock on (or flip off) with the press of a button.

There are some other miscellaneous bug fixes as well. The program that updates users to El Capitan was having reliability issues that should be patched up, and some audio plug-ins and VoiceOver problems have been taped up as well. In addition, the Mail application was occasionally forgetting the outgoing server information, a bug that should be dealt with in the newest version.

With all of the turmoil surrounding the Office 2016 and El Capitan compatibility issues, it’s good to see Apple responding quickly, especially to accommodate a competitor’s software. The patch is already available, so you can use the Software Update feature to download and install the newest version of El Capitan now.

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Brad Bourque is a native Portlander, devout nerd, and craft beer enthusiast. He studied creative writing at Willamette…

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