macOS Mojave: The MacStories Review

I went to San Jose this June not expecting much from macOS. After all, it’s a mature OS that already did what I need. My expectations were reinforced by rumors and leaks that Apple would introduce a Dark Mode and the fact that High Sierra introduced several significant foundational changes to macOS. I concluded that Mojave would focus primarily on a design refresh.

I was wrong. Dark Mode is the most visible and one of the most significant changes to macOS, but Mojave is much more than a UI refresh. Dark Mode and Mojave’s other system updates include productivity enhancements that have made meaningful improvements to the way I work on my Mac.

It took some time to acclimate to Dark Mode, but now I prefer it. As much as I like Dark Mode though, the most important changes to macOS have been those that surface existing functionality in new places making them more useful than in the past.

Mojave adds a collection of Desktop, Finder, and screenshot tools that are notable for the way they meet users where and how they work. It’s a functional approach to computing that has had a bigger impact on my day-to-day workflow than other recent updates to macOS, even where the Mojave updates provide new ways to do things I could already do before.

Supported By

￼Ulysses

Ulysses, the ultimate writing app for Mac, iPad, and iPhone.

There’s a lot to cover in Mojave, so I’m going to dive right in and dispense with explaining how to set it up. Apple has a whole page devoted to the topic that you can explore if you’d like. Instead, let’s start by considering how Mojave’s Dark Mode.

Dark Mode and Accent Colors

Dark Mode

High-resolution Gallery previews make it possible to spot yourself in a crowd.

Dark Mode, which can be enabled from the General section of System Preferences, is the natural place to start because it’s the feature that will be in front of you all day long as soon as it’s enabled.

Enabling Dark Mode.

Dark interfaces have been available in Apple’s pro apps like Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro for years. One advantage of dark UIs is that they emphasize the content rather than the app, which is useful when editing video or photos. Dark UIs also eliminate the harsh glare of a white screen in your eyes if you spend long hours in front of a screen.

Some of the benefits of dark UIs may be merely psychological too, but after two years in front of a dark theme in Ulysses, I’m convinced that it’s been easier on my eyes. I also prefer dark themes aesthetically.

Since installing Mojave and spending a lot of time exclusively in Dark Mode, I can report that it takes time to get used to, but it’s grown on me. At first, I felt like I had a harder time identifying overlapping windows because it was harder to see their drop shadows. Over time that feeling has faded, and I plan to stick with Dark Mode going forward.

At first, I found it harder to distinguish between windows in Dark Mode.

Before enabling Dark Mode, any time I would switch away from Ulysses’ dark theme to something with a bright white background, the abrupt change was jarring. That problem is improved with Mojave, but it’s not likely to be eliminated anytime soon I’m afraid. That’s because when you turn on Dark Mode, the appearance of third-party apps only changes if their developers have implemented Dark Mode. It’s not automatic.

This means you’re likely to have apps that don’t support Dark Mode on your Mac right away. The good news is that developers seem to recognize that if they don’t implement Dark Mode, they are going to stick out like a sore thumb. As a result, many have already made the transition as you can see in the gallery of third-party apps with Dark Modes that I’ve collected below.

Dark Mode won’t be for everyone, but I expect many people will prefer it, and for them, finding apps that support Dark Mode will become a priority. I also suspect that the number of people who run their Macs in Dark Mode full-time will be large enough that third-party developers who don’t implement it run a substantial risk of causing users to look for alternatives to their apps.

The reason Dark Mode isn’t automatically applied to all apps is that it’s not as simple as making the window chrome dark gray. There is a lot going on to make Dark Mode work. If you look closely, the grays change depending on the colors behind them. Apple is using the color of images on your Desktop and behind what you see to subtly tint the window chrome, so the grays harmonize with the rest of the environment. Even the drop shadows beneath the windows, the icons in toolbars, and the Dock’s trash can change between Light and Dark Modes to provide a cohesive experience for users.

Because it’s not a trivial implementation detail, it may be a while before your favorite apps support Dark Mode. Even then, however, not everything will be dark. Apple explained to developers at WWDC that some apps, like like photo browsers and video editors benefit from always being dark, but there are exceptions. Apple believes that other apps still benefit from the contrast of a white background and dark text, which is an option in Mail for example. In Mail, you can switch the message compose window to white, but I prefer that to be dark too and have not yet run across a situation where I want an app to run with a light-colored background.

Apple Mail lets users turn on Dark Mode for message windows.

Although Apple suggested that it can be appropriate to make content areas like Mail’s message composition window light, I don’t like it in the few apps I’ve seen take that approach. I hope that, like Apple, they too provide the ability to switch to a dark content area.

I also appreciate apps like Acorn that provide a setting to allow users to switch between system-selected Light or Dark Mode, always-on Light Mode, or always-on Dark Mode or support themes, which allows for the same sort of customization. I haven’t seen many apps that take Acorn’s approach, but I like the choice it gives users to customize their Mac environment.

Acorn gives users the option to follow the system-set appearance or force Light or Dark Mode regardless of system settings.

Safari is another app where you’ll see a lot of white. Although the window chrome is gray, the web content is whatever color the publisher decides to make it. Navigating to sites like The New York Times, with its predominantly white background, feel like having a flashlight shined in your eyes after you’ve been using Dark Mode for a while.

Apps that haven’t been updated for Dark Mode are conspicuous.

Applied system-wide, Dark Mode was hard to adjust to initially. Now though, I don’t want to go back. That’s been especially true since early September, one of the busiest times of the year at MacStories when my hours in front of a screen got longer. It won’t be for everyone, but if you decide to try Dark Mode, give it a while to sink in before calling it quits.

Accent Colors

Also new in Mojave are Accent colors. Set to blue by default, these are the colors used by macOS to indicate that a radio button or other controls have been selected. In addition to blue, there are options for purple, pink, red, orange, yellow, green, and graphite, which was also previously available with blue as an ‘Appearance.’ Each shade looks a little different depending on whether you’re in Light or Dark Mode.

Pages with green Highlights and purple Accents.

When you select a new Accent color, it automatically switches to the corresponding Highlight color too. That’s the color used for things like selected text, and despite its changing automatically to match the Accent color, it can be set independently after the fact, which strikes me as something that ‘past Apple’ wouldn’t have done. Still, the company has done a good job of picking colors that in combination don’t clash horribly with one another, even if some combinations won’t be to everyone’s taste. On balance, I like the addition. I’ll probably stick with the familiar blue default, but I appreciate the option to fine-tune the look of my environment.

The Desktop

The Dock

Airmail, 1Password, and Deliveries are recently used apps separated from the rest of the Dock by a short divider.

The Dock received the same Dark Mode treatment as the rest of the OS, though you can no longer only set the Dock and menu bar to a dark appearance in Light Mode. The Dock also inherited a handy feature from iOS: in the Dock section of System Preferences, there is now an option to show your most recently opened apps at the far right end of the Dock, or the bottom if your Dock is pinned to the side. Recent apps are separated by a divider that’s not quite as tall as the one used to separate Downloads and the Trash from your apps. Unlike iOS, the recent apps section of the Dock is not limited to just three items.

Wallpapers and Hot Corners

Mojave includes an assortment of new wallpapers.

Mojave adds two dynamic wallpapers that change during the day and can be found in the Desktop and Screen Saver section of System Preferences. One called Mojave shows a dune in the Mojave desert as the lighting changes throughout the day, transitioning through 16 different images. The second dynamic wallpaper is called Solar Gradients, which is a more abstract wallpaper that connotes the time of day through color gradients.

Alternatively, you can choose from a selection of nine other static wallpapers. Two are static versions of the daytime and nighttime Mojave dynamic wallpaper, and the remaining seven include a variety of desert scenes captured at different times of day, providing a nice spectrum of colors and brightnesses that work well in Light or Dark Mode.

The Desktop and Screen Saver section of System Preferences is also where you can set hot corners to perform system actions when you move your pointer into a corner of the screen. With Mojave, Apple has added the option to lock the screen, which for people who work in an open environment with sensitive information will be a nice alternative way to lock down your system before stepping away from your Mac.

Stacks

Stacks bring order to the chaos of a messy Desktop.

In a nod to the fact that many people park files and folders on their Desktop in a cluttered, chaotic mess, Apple has created Stacks. Stacks can be accessed by right-clicking the macOS Desktop and enabling the ‘Use Stacks’ option. As soon as you do, whatever jumble of files and folders you have scattered across your Desktop animate to the right-hand side of the Desktop, ordering themselves into neat piles. Folders aren’t stacked, but are neatly lined up too.

Organizing files with Stacks.

Stacks can be organized by kind, date last opened, date added, date modified, date created, and tags. You can scrub through items in a stack with a two-finger horizontal swipe on a trackpad. The file thumbnails can be a little small for this to be effective when files look similar, but it works surprisingly well for images and video files.

Clicking on a stack expands it in place between your other stacks so you can see the icon of each file it contains. If you’ve got a large stack, expanding it can extend rows of files far across your screen. At the end of the expanded rows will be any stacks below the one you expanded, which can be confusing until you understand what’s happening. Once expanded, you can use Quick Look to preview a file or do anything else you could previously do with a file on the Desktop. Click on the downward facing arrow icon above the first file in the expanded stack, and your stack will be collapsed again.

Expanding a Stack to view its contents.

I like that Apple has recognized the ways many people work on their Macs and have provided a tool to tidy up the Desktop a bit. I often park files for projects that are in process on the Desktop. It’s rarely more than a dozen or so files that I clean up at the start of the next week, but sometimes it gets more out of hand. In either situation, I’ve benefitted from stacking files (usually by kind), which has made it easier to find what I need quickly. The feature works best with a limited collection of files and folders, but even if you have dozens of files on your Desktop, Stacks is a quick and painless way to bring some order and organization to them.

The Finder

Cover Flow was first implemented by Apple in iTunes in 2006 but found its way into the Finder in 2007. The interface element was originally meant to imitate flipping through record albums, but the Finder extended the metaphor to folders and files. As tastes changed, Cover Flow was dropped from iOS devices and iTunes but remained in the Finder, which has always struck me as the least natural fit for its card flipping interaction. In any event, we can all pour one out for Cover Flow today, because with Mojave, it has now been eliminated from all of Apple’s products.

Gallery View

Not great for navigating folder structures, but the Gallery View is perfect for browsing photos and video.

The spiritual successor to Cover Flow is Gallery View, which displays a row of small thumbnails along the bottom of the Finder window with a preview of the selected file above it. If you have a folder of images to review and manage, Gallery view is useful, but it’s not a good option for folder navigation. I find moving through folder hierarchies harder with the Gallery view because depending on your window size, there aren’t many icons in the row at the bottom of the window at one time. Also, to see what the name of a folder is, you have to hover your pointer over it or click on it and view the name in the Preview pane unless you turn on ‘Show filename’ in the Finder view options. That makes the Gallery view a much better option for visual content where you don’t need to move up and down a complex folder structure.

Finder Preview Pane

Show Preview Options opens a separate window of all the metadata that can be displayed for a file.

The Preview pane got much more useful with Mojave too. Until recently, I rarely kept the Finder’s Preview pane open. If that sounds like you, I’d suggest giving it another try. Use the shortcut ⌘⇧P to open the pane if it’s not showing in your current Finder view.

The same information available in the High Sierra Preview pane is in Mojave too, but there are options to include so much more. From the Finder’s View menu you can select the new Show Preview Options menu item. That will open a separate window with a list of every bit of metadata that can be shown in the Preview pane for the currently-selected file type. Just tick off the checkboxes for the data you care about and you’ll see the information appear in the Preview pane.

The ability to customize the Preview pane on a per-filetype basis makes it much more useful. Although everyone has hundreds of different kinds of files on their Mac, most people probably only work with a handful on a regular basis. If you work with the same types of files over and over, you probably need certain data about them time and again, which is what makes the new Preview options so powerful. One drawback though is that for some types of files, like video files, the metadata window can get very long, so viewing it isn’t a great experience on a smaller laptop screen.

Quick Actions

The other new feature of the Preview pane is Quick Actions, which are located at the bottom of the pane. Quick Actions are a new type of system extension for manipulating files from the Finder’s Preview pane or the Touch Bar. Mojave has Quick Actions to Rotate, Markup, Create PDF, and Trim, all of which work great with images. Trim and Rotate also work with certain video files as does Trim with MP4 audio. Third-party apps can add their own Quick Actions, which are available behind a ‘More…’ button next to any built-in Quick Actions. You can create Quick Actions yourself in Automator too.

Quick Actions are a new type of system extension.

None of the third-party Mojave-compatible apps or betas that I’ve tried include their own Quick Actions yet. The lack of support for Quick Actions among third-party developers is a little surprising. It’s also disappointing because I’ve found that I like Quick Actions a lot.

Whether you’ll take to them too will depend on how you use the Finder. I tend to navigate folders and files from my Magic Trackpad and not with the keyboard. As a result, having a shortcut to a commonly performed file actions close by has been extremely handy. It’s better than a Service too because the icons next to Quick Actions make them easier to identify.

Even if third parties are slow to adopt Quick Actions, I’ve begun to extend them myself with Automator. One of the file actions I perform over and over every day is uploading screenshots to the MacStories CDN. The process is actually a few steps. First, images are sent to Kraken.io to be compressed, then they are uploaded to Rackspace, and a URL is returned. We have a web app that can manage the process, but it’s a little slow and cumbersome.

Custom Quick Actions can be built in Automator.

Quick Actions are a new output of Automator. With the help of one of my kids who was sitting around on the couch all summer, we built an Automator Quick Action that runs a Python script which handles the process end-to-end. When it’s finished, the Quick Action copies the URL to the Clipboard and sends a notification that it’s finished, showing how much the image’s size was reduced by Kraken. Because I’m already browsing in the Finder for images to upload, it’s trivially easy to pick my custom Quick Action and a few seconds later have a URL I can paste into a Markdown document.

Custom Quick Actions are found behind the More… button in the Preview Pane.

My hope with Quick Actions is that they are the first step in a ground-up re-imagining of automation on the Mac where Quick Actions become the equivalent of shortcuts on iOS and Automator is replaced by something closer to the Shortcuts app on iOS. Automator has served Mac users well for years, but it doesn’t take long using Automator before you need to resort to scripting inside Automator workflows to get things done. Shortcuts supports scripting too, but I’ve found I can create far more complex automations on iOS without resorting to scripts, which makes it accessible to more people.

Finder Miscellany

Folders can be displayed at the top of the Desktop.

As with any OS update, there are hundreds of little changes scattered throughout Mojave. Some are inconsequential, but others, while small, are nonetheless handy and worth noting.

In another nod to the reality that many people use their Desktop as their primary Finder folder even if they don’t think of it like that, Apple has added an option for folders to appear at the top of your Desktop when sorting by name. The ability to do that in a Finder window isn’t new, but previously, that was impossible when organizing your Desktop. I don’t expect to get much use of this myself, but combined with Stacks, it’s a much better system for organizing files and folders on the Desktop than was available before.

Screenshots and Screen Recording

As you can tell from reading this review, I take a lot of screenshots. The Mac has always had a rich set of keyboard shortcuts for taking screenshots of your whole screen, a portion of the screen, or a window, saving either to the Desktop or Clipboard. With Mojave, Apple has expanded the tools available and made the experience more like what you find on iOS.

When you take a screenshot, a thumbnail appears briefly in the lower right-hand corner of the screen.

The first thing you’ll notice when you take a screenshot in Mojave is that a little thumbnail appears in the lower right-hand corner of your screen, similar to what happens on iOS. Click on the thumbnail and a preview opens, giving you an opportunity to make simple edits to the screenshot, which I cover below. After a few seconds, if you don’t do anything with the thumbnail, it slides off the screen to the right and is saved wherever you’ve designated screenshots to go, which by default is the Desktop.

Apple has also added a new screenshot shortcut: ⌘⇧5. Press that combination of keys and a small, translucent toolbar appears at the bottom of your screen with buttons to create the same screenshot types described above as well as some new options.

⌘⇧5 displays a screenshot HUD at the bottom of the Desktop.

The new toolbar can also grab screen recordings. There’s a button for a full-screen recording and a user-selected portion of the screen. There’s also a timer option to delay the start of a screen recording 5 or 10 seconds, which gives you time to click record then set up your windows for the recording.

The timer can be set with the new Options button on the toolbar, which also offers additional save locations for your screenshots and recordings. Screenshots can be saved to Desktop, Documents, Clipboard, Mail, Messages, Preview, or Other Location, which opens a Finder window. Screen recordings have a similar set of saving options with the addition of QuickTime Player, but not Preview or the Clipboard. There are also options for the toolbar to remember your most recent selection, show or hide the floating thumbnail in the corner of your screen, and to show or hide the pointer in screenshots and recordings. If you’re making a screen recording, you’ll also see a list of any available microphones.

Quick Look

Quick Look has been revised too, dovetailing nicely with Mojave’s new screenshot and screen recording features. Previously if you performed a Quick Look of a file, you had only two options: a button to open the file in the default app for that file type and a Share button for sending it to another app. Those two buttons are included in Mojave too, but Apple has also added tools to allow you to make basic edits to a document without ever opening another app.

The markup controls available in Quick Look on Mojave are very close to the tools found in Preview.

For images, the new tools available via Quick Look closely mirror what’s available under the Markup button in Preview. You can draw on images, create shapes, magnify or highlight portions of the image, add text, crop, rotate, and add a signature too. As someone who uses Preview all the time only to add my signature to contracts or make minor edits before sending a PDF or image to someone, this new feature is going to be a significant time saver and leave me with one less app to close later.

For video and .M4A audio files, the options are simpler, but useful. Mojave adds buttons to rotate a video and trim it. Used in conjunction with the new screen recording feature, the trim tool is particularly powerful for video. Instead of opening the file in QuickTime, you can trim it in Quick Look then click the share button to send it to another app. That’s exactly what I did with the videos in this review. After recording the videos with the new Mojave screen recording feature, I trimmed any extra footage off the ends, saved them, and later uploaded the files to our CDN. The trim feature is less useful for audio files since it only seems to support M4A files and not WAV, MP3, or other file types.

Continuity Camera

Continuity Camera is the type of feature from Apple that I love. As much as people like to argue about whether the Mac or iOS is a better productivity platform, the reality is that sometimes, one is better than the other, but other times, they’re best together. Continuity Camera is one of the best demonstrations I’ve seen in a while of macOS leveraging the mobility of iOS to make the two together greater than the sum of their parts.

Continuity Camera lets you insert images in apps and the Finder with an iOS device.

With Continuity Camera, you can insert a photo or scan anywhere on your Mac that can accept an image using your iPhone or iPad’s camera. For example, you can right-click in TextEdit, Ulysses, Pages, and many other apps, pick Take Photo or Scan Document and your iPhone comes to life ready to go. You can even use Continuity Camera inside the Finder where the right-click menu item is called ‘Import from iPhone.’

If you’re taking a photo, you can use either the rear or front-facing cameras. After tapping the shutter, you’re asked to confirm whether to use the photo or retake it. Exiting to the home screen cancels the operation.

Scans work the same way they do on iOS with the same flash, color, and shutter controls that you find on iOS if you scan a document into Apple’s Notes app. The key difference is that with Continuity Camera, you can drop a scan into any app that will accept an image, while the same scan capture interface is limited to Notes on iOS.

As someone who moves between a Mac, iPhone, and iPad all day long, I love Continuity Camera. If I’m already in Messages on my Mac and want to share a quick photo of something or scan a receipt to a folder in the Finder, my iPhone is a great solution because it’s fast and sitting there next to me ready to help.

I wish though that Apple would adopt this sort of tight integration elsewhere. I’ve long argued that Handoff should work with iTunes on the Mac so I can continue listening to something at my desk that I started on my iPhone. Hopefully, Continuity Camera is a sign of more Mac and iOS integrations to come.

What’s Gone or Going?

As with any OS update, Apple has removed features throughout the system too including the Safari Extension Gallery, which will be eliminated at the end of 2018, Back to My Mac, social network integration in the share sheet and other parts of macOS, Jabber and other chat services in Messages, and support for OpenGL and OpenCL, which have been used to develop many games, has been deprecated.

The Apps

Mac App Store

The all-new Mac App Store.

Mojave marks the introduction of an all-new Mac App Store. Modeled in part after Apple’s successful redesign of the iOS App Store, the new Mac App Store includes some interesting features unique to it.

The first thing that struck me about the new Mac App Store is that it looks a lot like the apps Apple ported from iOS to the Mac even though there is no iOS counterpart to the Mac App Store. As the only other new app introduced this year, perhaps that indicates a shift in the design language of Mac apps that’s intended to make apps ported to the Mac look more at home there.

Like its iOS sibling, the new Mac App Store’s focus is on editorial content. The Store takes a lower-density approach like the iOS App Store, with a slightly different layout that suits its resizable window. The Store is divided into different sections than the iOS App Store too – Discover, Create, Work, Play, Develop, Categories, and Updates – which Apple says better reflect the Mac app world. Also notable, is that macOS system updates, which were housed in the Mac App Store since 2012, have been moved to System Preferences.

The Mac App Store has its work cut out for it. The Store never took off the way its iOS counterpart did. The volume of notable apps released on the Mac App Store is less than it used to be and over time, many important apps left the Store. Nor did the Mac App Store ever get the same attention the iOS App Store did, a problem that only got worse with the introduction of the redesigned iOS App Store, which seemed to monopolize Apple’s attention. Add to that the fact that the Mac App Store has a history of being buggy, and it has a lot of hurdles to overcome to grow even remotely close to the importance of the iOS App Store.

It’s hard to judge how the new Mac App Store will perform before it launches. I like the new design, and an editorial focus should give users a reason to visit, but I wonder how often content on the Mac App Store can be refreshed. The lower app volume will make it difficult to update editorial content daily. I expect we’ll see something less than that; perhaps two or three times per week.

Apple is also working to bring powerful productivity apps back to the Mac App Store and others to it for the first time, including Panic’s Transmit, BBEdit from Bare Bones Software, Adobe’s Lightroom CC, and Microsoft’s Office 365. Those apps should help attract developers who have continued to sell directly to customers, but the option to sell outside the store necessarily means that the Mac App Store won’t ever be the one-stop shop the iOS App Store is.

The Mac App Store also needs to be less buggy too. During most of the beta period, the Mac App Store has generally been fine, but my use of it has also been fairly light. However, recently Apple updated its Store terms of service, to which it insists you agree before updating apps. That’s fine except that when I tried to update an app under an Apple ID other than the one I was logged into, the Mac App Store presented a blank modal window that blocked updating with no explanation of what was going on.

I’ve dealt with bugs related to using multiple Apple IDs for long enough that I was able to diagnose the issue relatively quickly, but that was based on experience, not the blank screen presented by the Mac App Store. I may be an edge case, but the episode does make me wonder whether the same effort that I expect will go into editorial content has gone into the app itself.

Apple has a long way to go to fix the Mac App Store. I hope it’s able to do so. It may not make sense for all developers, but the Mac App Store is a great turn-key solution for new developers who are getting started and a good way to encourage users to explore new apps.

iTunes

The new Friends Mix.

The biggest change you’ll see to iTunes is the Friends playlist that Apple began testing as part of the Mojave and iOS betas in August. Apple Music subscribers will find the Friends playlist, which is updated on Mondays, in the For You section of iTunes. The playlist collects what it describes as ‘the best of what your friends are listening to.’ My sense from the playlists I’ve seen since August is that the collection is tuned heavily to the areas where your tastes overlap with your friends, though that’s not entirely the case. Roughly one-third of my recent Friends playlists have been from artists that I don’t recognize.

As with iOS 12’s Music app, you can search Apple Music song lyrics on iTunes. The new feature seems to have been added to Apple Music on iTunes the same day iOS 12 was released.

Searching for a song based on lyrics.

The remainder of iTunes remains the same, though it looks particularly good in Dark Mode, which makes album art stand out much better than in Light Mode. I’m disappointed we didn’t see a standalone Apple Music app this year, but in light of the status of the migration of iOS apps to the Mac, I suspect it will be a while yet before that is a possibility, if a port of the current iOS app is what Apple has planned.

Safari

Favicons make it easier to identify sites among a sea of tabs.

Safari received many refinements that were released shortly before Mojave and parallel the changes made to the iOS version. Many of the changes revolve around passwords and security, but there are other notable adjustments too.

One small change that a lot of people are excited about is the addition of favicons to Safari tabs. I didn’t think much of this feature until I tried it. If you have a lot of tabs open, which truncates the name of the sites, favicon are a great way to distinguish them quickly.

Strong password AutoFill.

Safari makes it easier than ever to choose unique, strong passwords by auto-filling sign-up pages with suggested passwords. You don’t have to accept the password generated, but Safari makes it so easy that hopefully most people will go with the suggestion.

Your passwords are available from the Passwords tab of Safari’s preferences too. Here, you can enable AutoFill for usernames and passwords, browse and manage your passwords, and address any issues discovered by Safari’s new password audit tool. Safari flags reused passwords with a yellow warning label that lets you know on how many other sites you use the same password. Clicking the warning links to the related site so you can visit and change your password.

Safari also addresses cross-site user tracking. Apple has added what it calls Intelligent Tracking Protection to make it more difficult for sites to track you across the web. The company is also anonymizing your system configuration to help prevent sites from identifying you using a technique known as browser fingerprinting.

There are other smaller changes too. If you have pop-ups blocked, Safari now lets you know in the address bar if one has been blocked, which is useful if you’re stuck on a site not realizing that it’s insisting on using a popup for some important functionality. The gray theme of Safari Reader is also higher-contrast than before for a better reading experience.

FaceTime

Group FaceTime calls with support for up to 32 participants was originally announced at WWDC as coming with iOS 12 and macOS 10.14, but has been delayed until later this fall. There are, however, a couple of other tweaks that have been made to the FaceTime UI.

The control at the top of FaceTime, which used to separate video and audio calls, has been replaced by a control divided into all FaceTime calls and missed calls. Now Audio and Video buttons appear at the bottom of the left-hand sidebar after you’ve selected a contact to call, which strikes me as a more intuitive approach.

Siri

It’s sure nice to have Siri support HomeKit on the Mac.

One of the most problematic issues with Siri is the fact that it works differently depending on the device you’re using, and the types of queries it can handle varies. Siri on the Mac, which has been one of the most limited implementations of the voice assistant, gained two notable capabilities with Mojave.

The first is the ability to control HomeKit devices, which works just as it does on an iOS device or HomePod. The second capability enables querying your database of passwords. Ask Siri to show your Netflix password, for example, and it opens up the Passwords tab of Safari’s Preferences pane and asks you for your password to unlock the Keychain. Once entered, it displays the results of the search you requested from Siri. It’s good to see Siri gaining capabilities on the Mac, but I’d like to see ‘Hey Siri’ functionality added too, along with better parity with Siri on iOS.

Project Sneak Peek

In June at WWDC, Apple confirmed that it was working on a multi-year project to bring iOS apps to the Mac. Apple didn’t give the project or its underlying technologies a name. All Apple called it was a ’Sneak Peek,’ and so will I.

Sneak Peek is a way for Apple to help iOS developers bring their apps to macOS without having to rewrite their apps’ UIs in AppKit entirely. Only the broadest of explanations were given at WWDC, but the approach involves taking certain UIKit frameworks used to build iOS apps, bringing them to macOS’s AppKit, and adapting them to that environment, so they work with things like pointing devices and window resizing.

The developer tools to port iOS apps to macOS were promised by Apple sometime in 2019, but in the meantime, Apple is testing four of its apps in what it describes as ‘Phase I’ of the project. Those apps – News, Stocks, Home, and Voice Memos – were all iOS exclusives until Mojave. All four were good choices for Phase I of Apple’s experiment because each includes relatively few views and controls, and those they include translate well to macOS for the most part. While it’s far too early to judge Apple’s efforts to bring iOS apps to the Mac, it’s worth taking a look at each of the four apps both as new built-in macOS apps and as experiments in adapting iOS apps to the Mac.

Home

Home on iOS is dominated by square buttons with rounded corners for each HomeKit-enabled device. The same holds true for the macOS version. The first major difference is that the tab bar along the bottom of the iOS app is now a segmented control in the Mac app’s title bar.

The title bar also includes a plus button for adding a scene or automation, which is notable because, on iOS, that button adds a scene or an accessory. The other thing notable about the buttons at the top of Home’s window, which it shares with the other Sneak Peek apps, is that they sit in line with the window controls whereas a typical Mac app would have a clearly-separated toolbar below the title bar. Here, it’s as though the title bar and toolbar were merged.

There is no Edit button in the Mac app’s title bar. On iOS, that button makes the accessory buttons jiggle so they can be reordered. That’s not necessary on the Mac, where the buttons can be reordered by dragging and dropping. It’s worth noting too that any changes made in the Mac app sync almost immediately to its iOS counterpart.

There is also a Home button with an icon of a house on it in the title bar of the Mac app for quickly switching rooms of your home. On iOS, the Home button is for setting up one or more homes, which you can’t do on the Mac. On iOS, the button for switching rooms uses a list icon and is only available from the Rooms tab, and unlike Home on the Mac you can also switch rooms be swiping between them in the Rooms tab.

HomeKit device settings are adjustable on the Mac. Unlike iOS where you long press on an accessory’s button to open its controls and settings, on the Mac you double-click the buttons or right-click and choose ‘Settings.’ It’s an interaction that’s a little awkward given that single-click interactions are the norm for buttons on macOS. However, buttons don’t have settings associated with them on the Mac either. The choice to use a single-click to turn accessories on and off is probably the best one under the circumstances, but it’s also an example where the differences between iOS and Mac apps start to show.

Date Pickers are an example of a control that doesn’t work as well on a Mac.

Another awkward area in Home for the Mac is Automation. If you set up a rule based on a date or time, you are shown an iOS-style spinning tumbler. That interaction works well on iOS, but it’s clunky on the Mac and I hope it’s replaced by something more like the Calendar app’s UI for picking dates and times. I’d also like to see Home add Automator actions to create automations beyond the Home app itself.

Despite some areas that need work, I’m glad to have Home on my Mac. While accessory buttons sometimes feel crowded on my iPhone, that’s not the case when I’m running the app on my Mac with a large display. The convenience of using Home on the Mac or iOS makes it an inherently more valuable app too. My most used apps are those that I can use whichever platform I’m on, which is something I hope Apple’s cross-platform efforts will make easier for third-party developers to adopt too.

News

News is an interesting contrast to Home. Instead of moving its iPhone tab bar to the Mac app’s title bar like Home does, News on the Mac resembles the iPad version of the app that moves the Today and news digests to the top two spots in the sidebar followed by an expansion of iOS’s Channels tab, which lets you see all the news sources you follow at once. Unlike the iPad though, the Mac version of news features a collapsible sidebar. You can change the sources you follow by clicking the Edit button, which displays very iOS-like delete buttons and reordering handles for managing the list.

Curiously, the Mac and iPad versions of News omit your local weather which is included on the iPhone version. News also declares its name in the title bar, something you don’t usually see in Mac apps except for things like System Preferences. Unlike Home and Stocks though, News does have a simple Preferences window, which brings it a little closer to what you’d expect from a Mac app.

Stocks

Stocks takes a similar design approach to News by closely resembling the iPad version of the app. The left-hand sidebar lists any stocks you follow, and the right-hand pane features business news stories.

Clicking on a stock opens related charts and news in the right-hand pane, and there’s a link to ‘Business News’ at the top of the left-hand sidebar to return to general business news, which is a little strange because there’s also a back button in the title bar that only works when you’re browsing general news stories.

At the bottom of the left-hand sidebar is a button similar to the iOS app for editing your stock list and adding new ones. It parallels the iOS app’s implementation, but I think a plus button in the title bar would be a better choice on the Mac. Stocks also dispenses with including the current date at the top of the app, which is an odd choice.

Voice Memos

Like News, Voice Memos is almost identical on the Mac and iPad. The only real difference is the absence of a delete button in the UI. Unique to Voice Memos though is that it syncs via iCloud but doesn’t have an entry in the iCloud syncing section of System Preferences. Instead, it’s tucked away behind the Options button for iCloud Drive, which strikes me as not being sufficiently discoverable when the other apps have their own entries in the iCloud syncing section of System Preferences.

Where Does Project Sneak Peek Go Next?

Apple’s efforts to bring iOS apps to the Mac are still in their infancy. Despite rough edges, I’m optimistic about where they are headed. One thing that I’m particularly interested to see added are more complex content creation apps. Other than Voice Memos’ simple UI for recording audio, none of the apps Apple has converted involve activities like writing, photo editing, drawing, or layout and design. By their nature, those sorts of apps are more complex and have more controls that need to be translated to Mac equivalents, but that will be necessary if the iOS apps brought to the Mac are anything more than a reimagining of Dashboard widgets.

32-Bit Support and System Security

Checking for 32-bit apps.

With Mojave, Apple continues to advance into a 64-bit future. macOS 10.14 will be the last version of the OS to support 32-bit apps. When the next major release of macOS is released, presumably in the fall of 2019, all apps will need to be 64-bit compatible. For now, the system warns users that an app’s developer needs to update a 32-bit app when it’s opened, but the app will still work. However in the next version of macOS, 32-bit apps will no longer run. I was pleasantly surprised to find very few apps 32-bit apps on my Mac when I checked.

You can check 64-bit compatibility by going to ‘About This Mac’ in the Apple menu of your Mac’s menu bar, then running a System Report. Go to the Applications section of the report and sort by 64-bit compatibility.

Consent is needed for apps to use system hardware like your Mac’s microphone and camera.

Mojave’s security has also been enhanced. The OS prevents developers from using a longer list of system hardware and data without user consent, which includes hardware such as the camera and microphone, along with data such as:

Messages histories

Mail databases

Safari data

Time Machine backups

Location and

System cookies

Apps sold outside the Mac App Store will be more secure too. An app notarization program has been launched for apps that are signed with an Apple developer ID to help prevent malware from spreading. Currently, the program is voluntary, but it will be required in the future. The program will allow Apple to pull the plug on a single rogue app instead of everything related to a developer’s ID if there is a problem with just one app. As Apple’s Mac footprint has grown relative to the rest of the PC industry, it’s reassuring to see the company continue to deploy countermeasures against malicious software.

Conclusion

I went into testing Mojave curious about Dark Mode, but not expecting the update to change the way I work. Although Dark Mode took getting used to, it’s grown on me to the point where I’m not using Light Mode anymore at all. I still occasionally find it harder to distinguish between windows when my Desktop is cluttered than when I’m using Light Mode, but the tradeoffs have been worth it overall. Most importantly, I simply like the look of Dark Mode. Apple’s system apps – especially iTunes, Messages, Notes, and Xcode – look great in Dark Mode.

I also feel like using Dark Mode has been more comfortable for my eyes. Even if that’s just a placebo effect, it’s made it easier to work at my Mac when I’ve been busy, which I appreciate.

As much as I’ve enjoyed Dark Mode though, I’ve found that the real advantages to Mojave have been its collection of Finder, Desktop, and screenshot enhancements. The interesting part of many of these Mojave improvements is that the tasks they enable are possible one way or another in High Sierra. The difference is that Mojave surfaces them better.

For example, the image uploading automation I describe in the Quick Actions section works on High Sierra as a Service or via Alfred. I prefer it as a Quick Action though because I’m usually using my Magic Trackpad to navigate several screenshots at one time as I work. With Quick Actions close at hand in the Preview pane, it’s easier to start an upload, switch to my text editor, and paste in the URL that the Quick Action returns. I’ve never liked the Services menu because there’s no good way to tell one from another; it’s just a long text list. Quick Actions surface the tools I use where I need them.

The same is true of the Markup and other tools available from Quick Look. In the past, Preview always seemed to be open on my Mac. I’d open it to make a quick edit or two and then forget to close it. I also had to edit in Preview, save, go back to the file and upload it, or send it to another app. It may seem like a small thing, but being able to accomplish all those actions within the Finder saves a lot of time when you do them over and over. It also eliminates potential distractions as I switch between apps.

I also appreciate the Desktop organization tools Apple added to Mojave. I tend to accumulate several files on my Desktop as the week progresses and I’m working on a project that involves multiple files in various stages of completion. That mess is usually cleaned up by the following week, but being able to create Stacks by Kind or Date Modified is tidier and a much better way to sift through the files I’ve accumulated during the week.

There’s nothing among Mojave’s new features that has allowed me to accomplish things I couldn’t in High Sierra, but that’s not something you see very often in a mature operating system. Instead, Mojave takes what I do today and removes some of the friction from my existing workflows. How much Mojave improves how you work will depend on what you do, but I’ve been very happy with how its combination of features has made everyday tasks faster and easier to accomplish.

Beyond the productivity gains of Mojave, the thing that intrigues me most is the apps that Apple has ported to the Mac. I remain optimistic about what bringing iOS apps to the Mac might do to revitalize Mac apps in general, but the four examples Apple has shipped with Mojave show that there is still a long way to go.

The issue isn’t the apps’ functionality. They all work more or less the same as their iOS counterparts. The trouble is that none of them feel quite right on the Mac. This is precisely why I’m not a fan of cross-platform apps built using Electron or similar tools.

One of two things needs to change. Either iOS apps on the Mac need to become better integrated and work more like Mac apps, or what it means to be a Mac app needs to evolve. I suspect Apple is working to make those things meet in the middle. There are design and functionality inconsistencies among the ported apps that need to be cleaned up, but you don’t have to look any further than the design of the new Mac App Store to see what I suspect are Apple’s first steps toward evolving Mac apps. The Mac App Store lacks the traditional window chrome of most system apps and shares much more with the ported apps than existing Apple apps.

What remains unanswered though is what all of this means for more complex apps. Perhaps we’re heading toward a more pronounced divide between professional and consumer apps on the Mac – a divide defined not only by software but maybe even hardware, at least for some period as Apple’s in-house chip designs are adapted to handle the needs of professional desktop users. Apps like the four introduced with Mojave and the developer tools that Apple has promised for 2019 will be some of the most interesting things to watch as we head into the new year. Apple has taken the first step into a future, the contours of which are too fuzzy to predict from our current vantage point, but which obviously have been set in motion. One thing is for sure though, we seem to be heading into an interesting phase of macOS’s evolution that will be anything but boring.