Posts By: Gary Rosenzweig

A new feature in macOS Mojave is the ability to edit and manipulate files directly in the Finder using Quick Actions. You can rotate and mark up images, mark up PDFs, trim video and audio, and even convert images to PDF files. In the future you will be able to do more with third-party extensions. You can currently build your own Quick Actions in Automator too.

New to macOS Mojave is the News app, a port of the iOS app that has been around for a few years. You can now access news articles from thousands of sources in an aggregated news feed, and read the articles in a distraction-free environment. You can also go directly to sources and topics, and search for specific articles. You can save articles for later reading or look through your history and share articles with others.

Learn how to build an iOS Siri Shortcut for taking a series of photos, combining them into a vertical strip, previewing the result, and sharing the resulting image. To accomplish this, we'll use the Take Photo action and the Combine Images action. We'll wrap Take Photo inside a simple Repeat look. Then we'll use the Quick Look action to see the result and share it. You can also use other actions to instantly send the image via Messages, Email or save to your Photos Library.

A new feature of macOS Mojave is Dark Mode. This favors light text on a dark background instead of dark text on a light background in the system and standard apps. You can see the change in the menu bar, app toolbars and sidebars, and even the backgrounds of apps like Contacts, Calendar, Reminders, Notes, Mail and Maps. Not all apps will change, especially third-party apps. Document content and images will not change either, as they keep using the true color specified in the document. You can also change the accent color used in standard interface elements throughout macOS.

A new feature in macOS Mojave is the ability to temporarily group files on your Desktop into Stacks. These Stacks can contain files of a similar kind, or groups organized by date or tags. You can expand and collapse any Stack to see what is inside, and use the file icons inside the Stack like regular icons. Desktop Stacks can help if your Desktop gets messy and you need to find files right now, but don't have time to organize your Desktop files at the moment.

This feature puzzles me. I can see using it in Keynote to provide narration on specific slides. The only use in Numbers I can see is maybe explaining how a sheet works to someone who didn't create the spreadsheet. For Pages, I can't see the use. You can't export it in the PDF, so maybe just for annotations?But maybe I'm just not the target audience for this feature. What would you use this for?

The new Gallery View replaces Cover Flow View in macOS Mojave. It is useful for flipping though a folder full of images, PDFs or other document types when you need to find one using a large preview image. There are some customization options for Gallery View.

The new Dynamic Desktop feature will change the image on your desktop depending on the time of day, or more accurately, the position of the sun. You can see this in action by manually adjusting your Mac's time. Apple includes two dynamic desktops with Mojave, but we may see more from Apple or third-parties at some point.

The new macOS has many new useful and exciting features. Take a quick look at Dark Mode, Dynamic Desktop, Gallery View, Quick Actions, Continuity Camera, Desktop Stacks, a new screen shot method, new apps like News, and much more.

If you have iOS 12 and an iPhone X, XS or XR, you can create Memoji characters to add to the existing Animoji characters to use in Messages as animated talking videos. You can design the Memoji using a variety of facial attributes. You can then use these in Messages and also in FaceTime to have a live conversation with the Memoji replacing your actual face.

A new feature of iOS 12 is the ability to view how much time you have spent on your iPhone or iPad and what you are doing wit that time. You can also restrict the amount of time you spend with apps, or turn off access to features of your devices completely. Screen Time can be used to help you spend less time on your devices or in certain apps. It can also be used to restrict usage of a device by a child.

The Shortcuts app from Apple allows you to create your own Siri Shortcuts from building blocks. A large gallery of sample shortcuts is a good place to start to learn about using shortcuts. When you select a shortcut from the gallery, you customize it while adding it to your active shortcuts. You can then trigger it with Siri or pressing a widget button.

The simplest way to take advantage of the new Siri Shortcuts feature in iOS 12 is to just use one of the suggestions in the Settings app. You can look through a list of recent activity and quickly create a shortcut from that, assigning a Siri trigger phrase to use the shortcut over and over again.