A first look at Mojave

I swore I was going to wait for the third developer beta to upgrade my Mac to Mojave but I could not resist. After carefully making sure I had back-ups, I downloaded Mojave. I have just started to play with it but I do want to caution you that, unlike me, you should NOT be playing with live ammunition. It is buggy and not yet ready for serious production work. It will get there but things like all the buttons in our accounting system have no labels, all my 32bit applications like 2011 MS Office, 4D and several others all bring up warnings that they will soon not work.

I think you will find Mojave to be a big improvement in the Mac OS. There are many features that I am discovering that know I will be using regularly. Here’s just a sampling of the new features.

Dark Mode

After the installation Mojave defaulted to Dark Mode and while it was unique and different, it was not for me and I changed pretty quickly back to Light Mode. Dark Mode puts the focus on your work while toolbars, menus, and controls recede into the background. It’s integrated throughout macOS so it works with built-in apps—and third-party apps can adopt it too. The desktop picture even changes to match the time of day wherever you are. You can toggle between light and dark modes in the General System Preference.

Screenshots

You only have to remember one key command for your screenshots. Taking, annotating, sending, and saving screenshots is easier than ever. Just press Shift-Command-5 to bring up new onscreen controls, including video-recording tools.

Stacks

With Stacks, your Mac automatically arranges all the files scattered on your desktop into neat groups based on file type, date, or tag so you can get organized and easily find what you need. My desktop is usually a LOT messier than this example but I think you get the idea. You can toggle Stacks on or off at Finder->View->Use Stacks.

Finder Enhancements

You can now browse files at a glance with the large previews in Gallery View, view full file metadata, and perform Quick Actions like rotate or markup. This is very cool and I have just scratched the surface but the Finder window is much more powerful now. To markup pics for this article, I am able to do it now in Finder.

Quicklook is part of the new Finder, too. Clicking on the Quicklook eye icon will allow you to mark up and sign PDFs, rotate and crop images, and even trim audio and video files right in Quick Look—without launching an app.

Continuity Camera

This another really handy enhancement in Mojave. With Continuity Camera you can open your iOS device’s camera from your Mac, then immediately transfer the photo you took over to a document that you’re working on. For example, if you are working on a Pages document, and you need a photo of your dog, you can activate Continuity Camera, take the photo with your iPhone, then immediately see that photo pop up in the document on your Mac. Magic, right? Here’s how you do it for a photo, using a scanner is the same:

Open an editable document in an app like Pages or Keynote

Control-click, right-click, or two-finger-click on a space within the document where you want your phone to be located

Click Take Photo under the name of the iOS device you’ll use to take that photo

Take the pup’s photo using your iPhone or iPad

Tap Use Photo. Your photo will now appear in your document where you clicked.

Group FaceTime

With Group FaceTime, you can chat with up to 32 people simultaneously—more than ever before. New participants can be added at any time, and a call can include both audio and video callers. And users can join from any Apple device—iPhone, iPad, Mac, or Apple Watch. I haven’t given this a try yet but sounds pretty handy.

News, Home, Voice Memos and Stocks

iOS apps on the Mac! Oh no! I use all of these except Voice Memos daily on my iPhone or iPad. I especially like Apple News as it is a great way to catch up on what is important to me. Aside from the normal world and national news my news feed is full of Celtics and Cubs news.

We use our iPhones and iPads to turn on and off our lights, adjust our thermostat and lock the doors. It has always been a bit weird that you couldn’t do that from the Mac – well, now you can and it works great!

This is just the start of iOS apps that may find their way onto the Mac and I think that is a good thing.

We will cover more of the new features in Mac OS 10.14 Mojave as we discover them! The public beta is out now but as I said it is not for the squeamish – some things may not work the way you want them to, some things will not work at all and even though you might like being a pioneer you might also regret heading down that path before all the bugs are squashed.