OS X 10.11.4 will bring Live Photos to the Mac

By Justin Pot Published February 22, 2016

The next OS X El Capitan update, 10.11.4, will bring Live Photos to Messenger and a tool for migrating your Evernote backlog over to Apple’s own Notes app. The release is available now as a developer beta, for testing purposes, and is expected to be released to the public in March.

The updates are mostly bug fixes and performance improvements. According to 9 to 5 Mac, particular focus has been placed on improving Photos and iBooks for Mac as well as on solving an annoying Safari bug that affected Twitter URLs. Security patches and bug fixes have been the focus for recent OS X updates: 10.11.3 offered no new features to speak of.

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This time there’s more than bug fixes. Fans of Live Photos will be happy to see them appear on the Mac in at least one form. Live Photos is a feature introduced with the iPhone 6S. These “photos” include 1.5 seconds of video footage before and after the still frame, which can only be seen on iPhones running iOS 9. Tap the icon at top-left and you can see the footage, but not if you’re on a Mac. That is, until now: Mac users running 10.11.4 will be able to watch the footage when Live Photos are shared in Messages.

And if you’re an unhappy Evernote user, Apple is now offering you an easy way to migrate over to their iCloud-syncing Notes app instead. Notes is far from a feature-to-feature alternative to Evernote, but users wanting something simpler might enjoy the option, and being able to move existing data into the application might make the transition easier for some. It will be interesting to see how Notes grows with future OS X and iOS releases.

The final release of OS X 10.11.4 will reportedly also coincide with a new version of iTunes. There’s a lot to fix there, certainly, and we’re looking forward to learning more. We’ll keep you posted.

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Justin's always had a passion for trying out new software, asking questions, and explaining things – tech journalism is the…

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