Apple has kicked off its Worldwide Developer Conference in San Francisco, where company executives are unveiling the next version of OS X for Macs and more.

Craig Federighi, Apple's senior vice president of Software Engineering, is now on stage, and he is talking about OS X El Capitan. It's the successor to OS X Yosemite, the eleventh major release of OS X that was announced and released to developers at last year's conference. Federighi not only revealed the new software's much rumoured name, but also demoed some key features.

What are some key features in El Capitan?

Apple had two areas of focus when working on El Capitan: experience and performance. (Federighi said experience involved aspects like Spotlight, built-in apps, and window management, while performance presumably means the software's speediness and reliability.)

Safari

Federighi first opened Safari in order to show off its new changes.

He demoed how you can now pin sites by dragging tabs to the left, and when you click a link from a pinned site, it now opens a new tab. You can also mute or find audio playing in a tab by clicking a speaker icon in the address bar.

Spotlight

Moving onto Spotlight, Federighi demoed how you can now resize the Spotlight panel and move it around. The search feature also supports natural-language search throughout OS X. You can search for "mail I ignored from Phil" or "documents I worked on in June" to see fetch all related results.

Window management

Apple has added a feature that is just like Snap in Windows. It lets you auto-arrange windows by dragging them to the side.

Metal

Apple brought Metal - which launched last year for iOS - to OS X. Adobe got an 8x improvement in rendering effects in AfterEffects, according to Apple, and because of that noticeable bump, Adobe plans to adopt Metal in all its OS X apps going forward.

READ: Airborne is first Metal-ready game for iOS 8

Epic Games took the stage in order to demo Metal on the Mac as well. The firm revealed how it build Fortnite in the Unreal Editor. It said the game, which will start this autumn as a beta, is faster because of Metal.

When will El Capitan be available?

El Capitan is available to OS X developers, starting today. The public beta will be available July.

The software won't release for consumers until autumn. It'll be a free update.