Not so long ago, Apple released their latest installment of their OS, Mojave. It was kinda exciting to see what new features they were going to reveal. Many tech enthusiasts fully explore every feature to the fullest detail. I mean why wouldn’t you? If i’m paying an exuberant amount of money for these devices, mine as well use it to its full potential . Some people do the heavy lifting and show what’s new to try out. They tell you what to do instead of yourself figuring it out.
For me though, I like to think i’m pretty simple when using my laptop. Don’t get me wrong, seeing the features is pretty cool and very innovative. I guess i’m just more realistic on knowing what i will use or not. I don’t try to memorize every command stroke or have to necessarily try every new feature. Nor do i force myself to use something, in hopes that it will be beneficial for me.
With that being said, I will go through some recent features from Mojave and High Sierra that I use quite often or find beneficial for majority of the user base.
Dark Theme
This is more of an aesthetic pleasure than anything else. The community though seemed to really want this. You can now change the window background color to a dark theme. I didn’t think i would be into just a color change of the menus, but i have to say, it’s growing on me and i do appreciate the change of look. A simple General Setting change and boom!
Stacks
This feature is perfect for icon hoarders ( you know who you are. it’s okay i’m one of them :] ). When this was announced, i instantly had to try it for myself. I had so many screenshots on my desktop for note taking and my Desktop screen looked ugly. I like to not have a clutter look despite my messy habits. You can really customize how it groups your data without having to go full cleanup mode and make folders for everything.
Handoff
This I can see everyone use this once they realize its true potential. So handoff gives you the ability to transfer data between Apple devices. This makes sense to implement. With Apple wanting to buy all of their devices, you would think you should get this seamless transition so it seems you’re not working on separate devices.
The best example for my experience is websites and copy/paste. Sometimes i find an article on something and want to dive in deeper, but i forget about it as i transition to working on my MacBook Pro. Now if i want to dig deep but on my laptop, i can just start Safari on my web browser, wait for the icon to show on my Macbook Pros dock, hit the icon, and voila! That exact page transferred to my laptop. This is a very similar experience when you copy/paste text between phone and laptop.
All you have to do is go to Settings > General > Handoff and turn it on and you’re good to go. There is no reason to not have this on and as time goes on, I will be using this more and more.
Screen Capture
Speaking of screenshots, Apple made great progress in this. Being a visual learner, I like to document things and use pictures to convey my ideas/thoughts in the documentation. This takes Windows Snipping Tool to a new level. Before Mojave, you can quickly click and drag a window size, or capture one specific window with ease (Command + Shift + 4 + Space). Now, if you hit Command + Shift + 5, you get a whole tool for capturing screenshots and video! and for screenshots, you now get a small preview you can check on. They also updated editing capabilities, but i truly wanted to highlight the act of capturing being easier than ever. i hope Windows follows up on upgrading Snipping Tool to match this. great job Apple!
Split Screen Mode
For the longest time, dealing with multiple application windows on a Mac has always been mundane of a task to manage. I always had to manually adjust the windows I would actively use. Which would be great… for like 10 minutes till I needed another application open which would trump all that effort. This annoyance would really be noticeable if you were working off of a 13 inch model versus leveraging a multiple monitor setup.
Now, they’ve made an enhancement to allow split screen two application windows on one screen. This is a great step forward and allowed desktop screen setup to quickly adapt and change to your liking.
Picture-In-Picture
This was out in Sierra and i’m slowly using it more. this allows videos to be pushed out of it’s current window and be placed in any area of your screen in a small format. A button may be visible on the video player or you can hold the Control button and double click the video to have that option.
For me, this comes in handy when i’m actively working on something, but I want to watch something (specifically podcasts published on YouTube). I don’t have to sacrifice huge screen real estate and it keeps the video on the same screen without switching between browser tabs or application windows in general. I
Storage Management
Out of all of the features i mentioned so far, this one i appreciate the most i think. This also has been out for some time (Sierra/High-Sierra). I always remembered it being a pain when going through your storage management for Apple. I was always so confused on storage would be used up so fast and i couldn’t figure out what to do. For Windows, i used a tool called WindirStat that would help accomplish pointing out exactly where my data was being put on C drive. This tool might not be that granular, but this is HUGE to what it used to be.
If you go to About My Mac > Storage you will see a bar that breaks down the data into categories. if you press the Manage button, it goes deeper of what files are taking up space. It just makes it slightly easier to find out what i can do to save space. This is also native so there’s no need to compare third-party apps on how to control this problem
Siri
I’ll admit, i’m not fully on-board with voice control for devices yet. They have come so far from when they were first introduced, but I just don’t work in that way yet. By the time i conjure up the right command to tell my device, i could have done the task with my fingers. I will say though Siri is pretty accurate in fulfilling my commands. I even was able to play around with my computer settings to listen to me by voice versus hitting a shortcut to have Siri start listening. I’ll link how to do that here.
For now, i treat this as a fun thing to be able to do. I think once i explore the potential of what i can tell Siri to do, i might eventually start commanding versus typing & clicking.
Messages
I won’t go into too much detail about this, since this one is self explanatory. I like to mention this works great. It syncs really quick, works with phone calls and texts, and much more. This handoff approach helps in my productivity and removes me from switching between devices when in the zone working on my laptop. Just make sure to add contacts to your MacBook otherwise you’ll be looking at phone numbers only…
In a nutshell
There you have it, my favorite features to use. For as long as I’ve used MacBook Pros, I don’t use the full scope of features it offers. As time goes on or depending on what project I work on next, that could very well change. Tell me what are your favorites. I realize how late this but I figured i still make my opinion on this OS. In my opinion, I think this is best iteration yet. I’ve little to no issues and the new features are nice enhancements. I don’t need something to completely change the industry. I want them to be practical not always unique. As Catalina approaches in the fall, i will dive into that OS and hopefully play around the great features.