Hands-On With macOS Mojave

6 min readJun 13, 2018

WWDC 2018 offcially takes place June 4th. Just like the reports from media, no new hardware but focus on the updates of software, WWDC brings iOS12, macOS 10.14 Mojave, watchOS 5 and tvOS 12 up. Of course, they are all in status of Developer Preview, only for developer adapting the new features and early adoption, not suggested update in production environment. If you plan to update, you can find the way to do it at the end of this post. OK, let’s begin.

New Functions & New Features

Dark Mode

Let’s talk about the update experience first. The whole process of updating is pretty easy, taking about 35 minutes. After finishing the process and getting into login screen, the biggest change we can find is the wallpaper.

After logging in, the system shows us an important part of this update: Dark Mode.

The Dark Mode, as one of the most popular features of the people, finally comes out on Mojave. Dark Mode let users feel more comfortable when watching the screen at night. And after so many years of white background, changing it into dark occasionally also changes the spirit of us.

And surely, we can choose the light of dark mode when finish the update and get into desktop, or reselect it in System Preferences -> General .

So far, the Apple’s applications including Finder, Safari, Xcode, Calendar, Photos, App Store etc. have adapted Dark Mode, but the adaption situation of third party apps is not positive. Telegram, Evernote etc. have not adapted yet. (Spotify at the cornor whispers: Maybe I need’t to? )

Dynamic Desktop

After enterring Desktop, this wallpaper shows up. Default wallpaper Mojave changes with the time going by, and this is Dynamic Desktop. But only this default wallpaper Mojave supported the new feature yet.

New Apps

This update also brings new apps: Apple News, Stocks, Voice Memos and Home. But whether it is due to the system of Chinese version, I don’t find the Apple News application. (Just a moment ago, the system rebooted😂).

Mac App Store

This update alse brings the new designed Mac App Store, here is the comparison of Mac App Store before and after update.

Before:

After:

Before:

After:

Stacks

This Stack is not the stack in programming languages, it is a way to sort out the desktop materials.

Stacks function can be found in context menu of desktop’s right-click or menu bar’s View. Stacks could generate different stacks according to files’ Kind, Date Last Opened, Date Added, Date Modified, Date Created, Tags, etc.

After turing on Stacks, all the single file will be identified and collected into corresponding category.

Without Stacks:

With Stacks:

Screenshots

macOS 10.14 Mojave drastically improves the function of Screenshots and supports record screen. After pressing Command + Shift + 5, the following screenshots toolbar will apprear, we could use it to customize the screenshot options.

When finish the screenshot or recording the screen, a thumbnail will appear at lower right cornor. Click it to mark it up.

Quick Look

In previos versions of macOS, select any file in Finder, press space key and we could check out the file’s content. macOS Mojave improves the functionalities of Quick Look, supporting edit and mark up the file directly. For example, we can mark up a PDF file, rotate and crop an image, trim video and audio. When we are ready, we can share to others via Mail, Messages or AirDrop.

Finder

This update adds a functionality named Gallery View to Finder, we could preview files’ metadata in the way like in a gallery view. Right panel of the window shows the metadata of the file, on the right-bottom side, it displays some shortcuts to the file or folder.

The Recents

macOS now supports show recent used apps in Dock, 3 recent apps at most. We could turn it on or off in System Preferences -> Dock, default is on.

Others

Continuily Camera: In simple words, we could take photos for Mac with an iPhone. I don’t have an iPhone(Yes, I am a member of the minority group, macOS + Android users), so no test about this function.
FaceTime: Supports a FaceTime call up to 32 people.
Privacy and Security: As usual, improves the privacy’s security.
Safari: Supports display favicons in tabs.

Mail: Easily add emoji in Mail.
Metal: Better support for external graphic cards.
Machine Learning: Create ML gives developers a faster and easier way to build and train machine learning models; Core ML allows developers to speed up and improve the scale of models.
…

Problems

macOS Mojave still supports running the applications based on OpenGL and OpenCL, but Apple has stopped the development and update of these two APIs, and Apple hope developers adopt Metal technology. For us ordinary users, it means we may receive compatibility problems when we play games on macOS Mojave.
As for fluency, Mojave does not improve obviously like iOS 12.
Some bugs of Dark Mode, for example(ignore my spelling mistakes):