Dorchester — Oct 10th 2017

Mick listed the hardware configurations that can be upgraded to IOS 11. Mildly underwhelmed by the update, he confirmed it is much more significant on the iPad than iPhone and particularly so for those fortunate enough to have an iPad Pro and Apple pencil. A feature specific to the iPhone is Emergency SOS: press the power button five times, the phone locks and lets you “slide” to emergency services. Touch ID is disabled and requires your security code to re-enable. You can customise the emergency setting to have the phone call emergency services automatically.

Demonstrating on his iPad, Mick showed several of the new features: the more Mac-like customisable dock, the new customisable Control Centre (Settings > Control Centre > Customise Controls), multi-tasking, displaying two apps side by side, showing how to drag a photo from Photos into an email, and how the new keyboard (iPad only) shows alternative characters actuated by gently dragging the key downwards.

Safari for iOS, with similar improvements in macOS High Sierra, includes increased security “Intelligent Tracking Prevention”. Also shared with High Sierra, IOS 11 introduces two new default image and video formats: HEIF (High Efficiency Image File Format) and HEVC (High Efficiency Video Codec) reduce the file sizes with no loss of quality.

After Q&A and a break, David M discussed upgrading to High Sierra, commenting that most of the improvements are “under the hood” and anyone using Sierra would see only minor improvements in High Sierra. He listed the Macs that can run High Sierra. The most significant (and technical) change is that High Sierra uses the new Apple File System ‘APFS’, which replaces macOS Extended (journaled) — HFS+ and is shared with IOS 10.3, Watch OS 4 and Apple TV OS. High Sierra will still run on HFS+ but, on Modern Macs with SSDs the installer automatically changes the file system to APFS. APFS is not currently compatible with Fusion Drive computers. David explained how to reformat a disk drive manually. Super Duper does not yet support APFS but Carbon Copy Cloner does. David had reformatted a disk drive and made a full clone of his computer SSD using CCC and it worked perfectly. Note that once any drive has been formatted with APFS, it can only be read by a High Sierra installation. Remember to make a full clone, or at least a Time Machine backup before installing any major System upgrade.

Photos also gets a big improvement in High Sierra with more logical image filing. The improved ‘last import’ now shows imports going further back in time. The editing menu is much improved and handles Live Photos. High Sierra introduces tabs in most apps with a view option to see all tabs as separate windows. It allows users to collaborate on files in iCloud Drive. Siri has smoother voices and, with Spotlight, can now get flight tracking info. In Notes, notes can now be pinned to the top of the list, and tables can now be added.

Note: Mick and David referenced the comprehensive ArsTechnica.com iOS 11 and High SierraReviews.
For more detail, read them here:
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/09/ios-11-thoroughly-reviewed/
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/09/macos-10-13-high-sierra-the-ars-technica-review/

Comments

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David Moon said…

Tom Lane has received an email from Blurb confirming that Booksmart will not run on High Sierra.
Shirt Pocket have now issued an update to Super Duper which is compatible with High Sierra.
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