Dorchester — Oct 9th 2018

Tony gave 20 of us a full rundown on the new operating systems macOS 10.14, Mojave, and IOS 12.

Mojave was released to the public 24th September and whilst Tony listed Apple’s list of compatible Macs but confirmed that any Mac running High Sierra can run Mojave. Tony warned that Mojave would be the last OS to run 32 bit apps and showed how to use Activity Monitor to check which ones (Tony has subsequently confirmed using System Information > Applications > sort on 64-Bit is easier)

Mojave introduces the option of dark appearance which can be selected in Preferences > General and works with the Finder, all Apple Apps with others following suit. Tony showed the Photos App where the dark appearance really focusses attention on the photo. Finder now shows much more of the metadata of a file and will allow some actions such as create pdf, rotate and markup to be executed from within the finder, only the relevant options for the file type being displayed. Ribbon view has been replaced by the more comprehensive Gallery View. You can now sort desktop files into stacks and two of Apple’s desktop pictures change in light with the time of day.

Continuity includes a new Camera facility enabling programmes such as Keynote and Pages to call for a new photo from an IOS 12 device. Tony demonstrated this by creating a KeyNote slide, Control Clicking on it triggered a dropdown menu including, import from iPhone or iPad > take photo. He selected his iPhone which immediately woke up in camera mode ready to take the photo. He took the photo of us the audience, on the iPhone selected ‘use photo’ and there we were a photo in KeyNote.

There is a new screenshot app offering more choice than the familiar keystrokes which still work. With Mojave, Apple new file system APFS now supports Fusion drive.

Apple have incorporated a sample of IOS Apps into Mac OS e.g. News.app and have created new development tools to make it easier for developers to port IOS apps into macOS.

Moving on to iOS 12, Tony confirmed that this will run on any device running iOS 11 and is claimed to include speed improvements for older devices. The most noticeable changes seem to be with the iPad on which the Control Centre is now activated by dragging down from the top right of the screen. Gestures developed for iPhone X have also morphed to the iPad; dragging up from the bottom of the screen a short way raises the dock, dragging further displays all open apps and further again closes the app in use.

There are new apps including Measure and Short Cuts for Siri available from the App store: Apple have included a number, see Settings > Siri & Search. Do not disturb has been improved to give various options as to when be applied. Tony is very impressed and showed us the new portrait photo facility included with twin camera phones. This enables the depth of field of a photo to be adjusted retrospectively increasing the out of focus of the background to blacking it completely.

After the break we reverted to Mick’s multipart talk on email. Looking at Etiquette Mick explained the difference between To, Cc (Carbon Copy) and Bcc (Blind Carbon Copy) stressing that email addresses in both To and Cc can be seem by all recipients which is bad form if they are not all well known to each other and in regular email contact. Email addresses added to Bcc are not seen by any other recipient who will just see Undisclosed Recipients. Use Bcc for circulating info to a number of recipients. With Apple (Unlike Windows?) there is no need to include a name in the To or Cc fields.

Looking at Trouble shooting, Mick gave a step by step check list. Check that the internet is working by checking out a site on a browser. Then go to the WebMail version of the email account that is giving the problem. If you cannot log in to that, you can conclude that there is a password problem. (Whilst there check out no overfull mail boxes.) If webmail is working, then the problem must be in the Mail app, so check all the settings - worth keeping a screen shot for future reference. On the Mac, Mail > Preferences > Server Settings, there are tick boxes “automatically manage connection settings” for both incoming and outgoing settings; in his experience this is often the problem so he advises leave unticked.

Comments

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Tony Still said…

A small correction: unfortunately there are a few older Macs that can’t run Mojave. The cut-off is generally about late-2012 as the oldest machines to support Mojave, earlier ones don’t have sufficiently powerful graphics processors. Apple's list is here.
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