macOS Mojave Public Beta is now available

macOS Mojave Public Beta is now available. Here is an instruction on how to download it.

http://osxdaily.com/2018/06/26/download-macos-mojave-public-beta/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+osxdaily+(OS+X+Daily)

My initial impression; the new Dark Mode may take some getting used to.

Running it on a 2014 MacBook Pro Retina with 16GB RAM, it runs fairly smoothly.

Most apps I use (Adobe CC apps, MS Office, Default Folder, Suitcase Fusion, 1Password, Bartender3, MonoSnap - most graphic design-related apps) run just fine, but there are some issues. For instance, some tracking app that launches in the background for Adobe’s CC apps simply won’t launch. It’s not a “necessary” app, but who knows if it’ll cause issues a month from now.

Dark Mode is moderately cool, but it’s likely going to annoy the heck out of many people. The mix of dark interface and blindingly white web pages, emails and page layouts is tough to get used to. And there are a few menubar apps for which the switch between light and dark mode has never worked correctly. A dark black icon on the dark mode menubar is annoying, though still usable. Switch to light mode? Not so fast. In light mode, most menubar icons are a dark gray (like 80% black) and some are pure black. This mix is more annoying than having a black icon on a mostly black background.

If you want to see the true Dark Mode, try Canary Mail. They did a much better job than Apple did with their own Mail app. One problem, though. There is no trial version. You have to fork over $20 to download it.

I’m taking my usual ‘wait until these apps all state they’re compatible’ approach. Dark mode is fine for certain aspects but not all. Anyway I’m holding off. My CS5 days might be done with the lack of support for 32-bit, let’s see how it goes…

No, Apple officially announced at WWDC18 that Mojave will be the last macOS to support 32-bit apps.

-Al-

Ah thanks, misread it.

Personally, I’m not really concerned about Dark Mode since it appears you can simply turn it off and it will be like nothing has changed.

That said, I do hope Apple has more substantial improvements ready for Mojave by the time it ships. After a full year, I expect a company that prides itself on innovation will have achieved more than just a darkened GUI, Stacks, and a desktop pic that changes hue as a function of time of day. Better data control and tracking prevention definitely sound interesting to me.

I’m quite interested to play with the quick actions in Gallery View and Quick Look, and the new capabilities related to screenshots, which we work with daily. And I do think the Desktop Stacks might be a useful approach for me.

Group FaceTime is also quite compelling as yet another Internet telephony solution for when the others fail, Continuity Camera might be useful at times, and I think having access to the News and Home apps on the Mac will be welcome since I don’t think to use them on iOS devices.

I think Gallery View could end up being very useful for folders full of pics or music.

The updated QuickLook seems like a good idea. Even though QuickLook might sound like a rather mundane feature, there are few things I end up doing in Finder more often than QuickLook. Just the other day I realized how much I actually use that. Then again, I’m a column view guy so maybe people using cover flow in Finder tend to use QuickLook less.

I’m guessing that not many people use Cover Flow view, which is why Apple is replacing it with Gallery view.

Yeah, to me personally Gallery seems like a much more useful view than Cover Flow.

I actually know two colleagues here who seem to use CF a lot. I’ll have to ask them one of these days what they like about it.

Macworld has posted an article with some observations from Jason Snell.

He mentions the new screenshot options. I wonder what this means for Grab? Is Apple discontinuing it? Or will Grab just launch the same panel that cmd-shift-5 does?

Here is what he says about Grab in the same article:

“You can’t choose to take a screenshot of the Touch Bar from this interface. For that, you need to use Grab, which continues to have a reason to exist after all these years.”

Thanks! Missed that.

I wonder if that really makes sense. Could Apple not have consolidated it all in one location?

2nd PB has been released. AFAICT no big changes noted so far.