We Walked Through macOS's "Mojave Desert" and Came Back With 12 Changes Worth Knowing

A system upgrade made of small fixes

From wild cats to mountain ranges, and now a desert: the newest macOS, 10.14, takes its name from the Mojave Desert, in California, where Apple is headquartered. The way light shifts in the desert at dawn and dusk matches the biggest new feature in macOS 10.14: Dark Mode.

In the new version Apple has cleaned up a long list of details and added several features people have been asking for — a Dark Mode that is easier on the eyes, Stacks for tidying the desktop, a redesigned App Store. Mojave feels like a "small," finishing-touches release, and it also pulls iOS and macOS closer together.

The iOS 12 developer beta runs fairly smoothly right now; macOS 10.14 does not. It is still full of bugs, so back up with Time Machine before you upgrade.

We tested several system apps Apple says have been adapted for Mojave, including Finder, App Store, Messages, Keynote, Safari, Calendar and Xcode, along with apps people use every day: Tencent Video, iQiyi, Youku, Youdao Dictionary, WeChat and QQ.

Dark Mode, built for working at night

Once the developer beta is installed, it asks whether you want Dark Mode. You can also switch between the two modes under System Preferences → General → Appearance.

In Dark Mode the whole macOS interface turns gray and black and takes on dark backgrounds — including the notifications in the top-right corner and the Today View that slides out from the right edge of the screen. Less white on screen at night means less eye strain.

The other obvious change is the menu bar at the top. To keep everything consistent, Apple has switched almost every icon that lives up there to gray and white.

Dark Mode is not a simple color inversion. Developers have to adapt their apps for it, and because this is a developer beta, most of the software people actually use has not been adapted yet.

A bug kept Keynote from opening at all on my 13.3-inch 2017 MacBook Pro — it crashed every time. Stranger still, Xcode ran fine but showed no Dark Mode whatsoever; its interface stayed white. In Apple's other apps, though, Dark Mode is done thoroughly.

In Finder, different shades of black separate the working areas inside a window, with the type in white. The menus that drop from the bar at the top turn black too. In Messages, Apple uses a frosted-glass effect to divide the contact list from the conversation.

Calendar has changed a lot as well. To make events stand out against a black background, Apple marks them in lower-brightness colors such as purple and yellow, and uses font color to set the current month apart.

Where something needs emphasis, Dark Mode uses white. The payment options inside the App Store, for instance, are pure white.

One catch: Safari's own interface goes dark, but most websites still have white backgrounds, so opening one at night is still a shock to the eyes. Whether there will be a fix for that later is anyone's guess.

We also found that older versions of apps like Keynote and Numbers do not support Dark Mode yet. Neither do everyday apps such as QQ, WeChat, Youku, QQ Browser and Chrome.

The apps that look most at home in Dark Mode are the ones that were already black: Tencent Video and iQiyi, plus Final Cut Pro, Photoshop and Lightroom, which ship with dark modes of their own.

If you want the best-looking result, set both the accent color and the highlight color to Gray in Appearance settings. The whole thing is easier to look at that way.

Two smaller details: the Trash icon has gone black, and the three most recently used apps now show up in the Dock. Both are new in 10.14.

Dynamic Desktop: a wallpaper that follows the clock

Another feature Apple demonstrated on stage is a desert wallpaper that changes with the time of day. Turn it on and the desert on your desktop shifts along with the real world.

It is called Dynamic Desktop. Both the regular appearance and Dark Mode can change with time, but Dark Mode has only two versions of the sky, while the regular mode runs through five different skies across morning, midday and night.

To switch it on, you first have to turn off Location Services under System Preferences → Security & Privacy → Privacy. Then, in Desktop & Screen Saver, pick the first wallpaper in macOS 10.14, Mojave (Dynamic). After that you can either change the system clock and watch the wallpaper move, or simply notice a different sky as you go about your day.

Stacks, which sorts desktop files for you

Stacks is the feature that made developers in the WWDC audience gasp — mostly because tidying a desktop in one stroke looks impressive.

It does not actually sort files into new folders. It is a visual effect macOS Mojave provides: files on the desktop are gathered into piles by type. In Finder, the desktop still shows every file, ungrouped. Click a stack open and the files of that type reappear on the desktop.

You turn Stacks on from the View menu in the desktop menu bar, or by right-clicking the desktop. Once it is on, the system can build stacks by "Kind," "Date Last Opened," "Date Added," "Date Modified," "Date Created" or "Tags," and you can change how the files inside a stack are sorted.

Think of it as a spot that files things away by itself once you have chosen the sorting rule. But it only handles files: in our testing Stacks could not take in folders or the files inside them. Installer packages such as .dmg files were left out too.

The iOS screenshot flow, now on macOS

macOS 10.14 also changes how the system takes screenshots, making the Mac work the way iOS does.

Press Shift + Command + 3, 4 or 5 and a preview of the shot appears in the bottom-right corner of the screen. Click the preview and you can mark it up, share it or delete it. This is the screenshot feature from iOS 11, and it makes screenshots on macOS both more capable and genuinely useful.

This version also lets you customize how you capture. Shift + Command + 5 brings up a toolbar on screen with the full set of options: the area to capture, screen recording, where the file is saved.

The screenshot editor gains two fun tools in 10.14. One is a magnifier that blows up part of the image. The other is a spotlight that dims everything outside the area you want to call attention to, using shadow to frame it — a bit like the "lights off" button on video sites.

Gallery View in Finder

macOS has added or upgraded features in several system apps this time. In Finder, Apple has added a new browsing mode called Gallery View.

In it, every file in a folder is shown as a large preview in the middle with a scrolling strip along the bottom. A panel on the right carries the file's details — for images, that means EXIF data, creation date, dimensions and so on.

Gallery View makes it easier to see a file and its information at once, and to save time Apple has added a set of simple "Quick Actions" in the bottom-right corner of the view.

An image can be rotated, marked up, turned into a PDF or encrypted right there. A video can be trimmed or password-protected.

Besides photos, Gallery View can preview documents, videos, PDFs and more. Finder also has a new feature that suggests what to do next based on what you have selected — pick several photos, for example, and Finder asks whether you want to turn them into a slideshow.

In our testing, Gallery View has one problem: it does not work in folders that have already been sorted by tags. Turn it on in a sorted folder and you see only the first file, with no scrolling strip underneath.

Quick Look picks up editing tools

Select a file in macOS and press the space bar and you get a Quick Look preview. In macOS 10.14 Apple has added more editing tools, turning a viewer into a light editor.

You can now annotate PDFs and images inside Quick Look — circle things, draw on them, mark them up. In effect, Apple has moved the markup tools out of the old image viewer and into the preview.

Also worth remembering: pressing space on an MP3 or M4A file now starts playing it.

A redesigned App Store

Screenshots are not the only thing borrowed from iOS. In macOS 10.14 Apple has given the App Store a heavy redesign modeled directly on the iOS store, reworking both the interface and the way content is presented.

Down the left side there are now seven sections, organized around Discover, the app categories and updates for apps you already have.

Discover works as the home feed. The item pinned at the top is an editors' app of the week, presented through what the app does plus the story and thinking behind it from its developer. You can share that write-up too.

Below it, in smaller slots, sit an editors' note and themed collections. The App Store's editors on macOS have explained the thinking behind the redesign.

App pages have been redesigned in the iOS style as well, introduced by auto-playing video and images, with ratings and the most-upvoted reviews below.

One more thing: downloads are much faster than they used to be. The crawling progress bars and dropped connections are all but gone.

iOS apps arriving on macOS

Apple said at the keynote that it has no plans to merge iOS and macOS apps, but it is still working on bringing iOS apps to the Mac. In macOS 10.14 it has added three from the iPhone: News, Stocks and Voice Memos.

Stocks looks good in Dark Mode. The sidebar on the left is where you pick the stocks and markets you follow; the first item defaults to market news. Apple's stock data comes from Yahoo.

Voice Memos and Home, the app for controlling smart-home devices, are both fairly plain, and both fit Dark Mode well.

Because of network and policy restrictions, Apple News does not ship with the 10.14 developer build in China. From screenshots, it looks much like Stocks: you pick your news sources in the left sidebar, with Today at the top by default.

At WWDC 2018 Apple said making macOS compatible with iOS apps is work now underway. So far it has brought parts of the iOS frameworks into macOS Mojave, and it plans to port more iOS apps over. But the project is still at "step one," and we may not see much more until 2019.

More protection for user data

The other significant change in macOS 10.14 is how it handles private data.

First, apps now have to ask before they use your location, your photos or your camera, just as they do on iOS.

Second, Safari's settings now cover tracking cookies: under System Preferences → Privacy you can check "Prevent cross-site tracking" and "Ask websites not to track me."

That spares you the experience of searching for something on one site and then seeing an ad for it on every site you visit afterward. You can also block all cookies outright.

Continuity Camera, which you cannot try yet

Before macOS 10.14, a screenshot or photo taken on an iPhone had to be AirDropped to the Mac before you could edit it, and a photo you needed for a Keynote deck had to be sent over too.

Not anymore. From the Mac you can switch on the phone's camera, take the picture, and have it land on the Mac ready for editing.

For now, though, there is no way to try this: Keynote's new version is not out yet.

Automatic system updates

Updating macOS used to mean going to the App Store yourself to look for the latest version. System Preferences now has a Software Update pane of its own.

There you can check "Automatically keep my Mac up to date," or set finer options and control each step separately: checking for updates, downloading them, installing them.

A few other details worth noting

Several apps get new Chinese names in macOS 10.14. Translated back, Mission Control becomes "Command Center," Dashboard becomes "Instrument Panel," Launchpad is formally "Launch Pad," Time Machine is formally "Time Machine," and Boot Camp Assistant becomes "Startup Switching Assistant."

Set a password before you upgrade: a blank password will not log you into the Mojave developer beta. Pressing Enter at the first login does nothing either, another small bug.

The Logitech MX Master 2S wireless mouse I use ran into trouble as well — the scroll wheel stopped working properly.

On the whole, macOS Mojave is a more finished system than its predecessor, and it makes some work go faster. It is also another step in Apple's effort to connect the phone and the computer more directly.

The final version ships this fall. For now the only way to get it is to join the Apple Developer Program, and it only runs on Mac hardware released after 2012.

Cover image credit: Apple