Bournemouth — Sep 18th 2018
14 members, including the welcome return of former convenor Alan Cox, met at “All Fired Up” to hear Tony run through the new features of the latest versions of macOS and iOS.
macOS 10.14, aka Mojave, will be available from 24th September. It is a free upgrade for all machines that can run it, including iMacs from late 2012. It will be the last macOS supporting 32bit applications, so Tony urged us to check whether we are still running any by using Activity Monitor. Some old features such as Back to My Mac have been removed, probably in the interests of security.
Tony then ran through some of the new features of Mojave, including the Gallery view introduced into the Finder. The Finder also has some quick action buttons enabling simple operations, such as rotating an image, to be carried out without launching an application. The overall look of the desktop can be customised with new features such as Dark Mode, time-varying desktop images and the use of Stacks.
Camera Continuity makes it easy to take an image on an iPhone camera (if the phone is running iOS 12) for direct insertion into a document on the Mac. There are also some new development tools which should in future make it easier for developers to port iOS apps onto macOS
There are new Screenshot tools and various security and privacy enhancements. The new AFPS filing system, introduced with High Sierra, now supports fusion drives.
Turning to iOS 12, this is already available and any device running iOS 11 can run it and should see useful speed improvements.
New gestures are available on iPads, similar to those on the iPhone X (10), and there are new facilities for managing screen time. Do Not Disturb is more flexible and, on devices with depth sensing cameras, Portrait photos can be processed to simulate reduced depth of field, A new ‘Measure’ app is included (which Tony later demonstrated) and Siri shortcuts have been introduced, together with an App you can download to make your own shortcuts. Nobody present had tried this yet - a subject for a later presentation, perhaps?
After a coffee break, the usual Q&A session was held, with questions on two-factor authentication, tailoring cookie settings and deleting or filing e-mails. There was just time for a short demo of some of the new iOS 12 features before we arrived at the 9pm closing time.
Links to Apple’s pages on the new OSs:
www.apple.com/uk/macos/mojave/
www.apple.com/uk/ios/ios-12/
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