Apple today took the wraps off macOS Mojave, the next major software upgrade for the Mac. While the upgrade isn’t necessarily ground-breaking, it does improve things in a lot of key areas that deserve some attention.
macOS Mojave brings plenty of welcome improvements to the Mac. The most notable update is the inclusion of a dark mode that darkens the interface of the Mac within apps like Mail, Photos, Pages, and more. A new API allows developers to integrate dark mode into their apps and have them automatically adjust their color schemes based on time of day. The same goes for the default wallpaper in Mojave.
The desktop is seeing a pretty major change in macOS 10.14 with the inclusion of Stacks. Now, instead of having a super-cluttered desktop filled with random files and folders, macOS will automatically group them together into stacks that live to the right of the desktop. You can click on any of them to see things like your spreadsheets, pictures, movies, projects, and more.
Finder also gets some new features including a new Gallery View to skim through files visually, new Quick Actions to access certain functions based on the file type (kind of like 3D Touch shortcuts on the iPhone), and Quick Look to see a full-size preview of a file without opening its corresponding app.
There’s also a suite of new apps that are making their way to macOS. News, Stocks, Voice Memos, and Home are all now available in Mojave, giving you the same experience with each as you would on iOS. This is due to Apple’s new technologies that lets developers create an app based on the same UI elements for both iOS and macOS. Bloomberg originally reported something like this was on the way but wasn’t entirely sure if the company was ready to show the feature off. And as it turns out, it is to an extent.
While these four apps were built using the new tools, developers won’t be able to access them until 2019. Apple will continue testing the capabilities internally until they’re right for app creators to start utilizing in their own projects. It’s a part of a multi-year project that Apple is giving a sneak preview in as a part of the new apps in the Mojave upgrade.
Additionally, macOS Mojave brings group FaceTime calls to the desktop with up to 32 participants, the Mac App Store has received a major redesign to better reflect what’s present on iOS, and more dramatic privacy and security improvements have been implemented to prevent tracking and other potential security risks from third parties.
macOS Mojave will be supported on Macs from mid-2012 and beyond alongside some Mac Pro models from 2010 and beyond. It’ll be released to the general public this fall following a beta process that will extend over this summer, available to both developers and registered public testers.
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