But even without Dark Mode, there are some serious productivity improvements here, probably the biggest since El Capitan reworked the operating system’s window management. Quick Actions will be a huge deal for heavy Automator users, and they’ll probably make Automator users out of quite a few people who have mostly ignored it. I do wish it synced more easily between Macs, but it’s the best kind of power user feature—put a little time into it, and you can get a lot out of it.
I’d have a hard time losing the new interface for screenshots now that I’m used to it; the password reuse auditing and Automatic Strong Passwords features are good, usable solutions to real everyday problems; and I’m generally a fan of Stacks and the new tweaks to the Dock.
But Mojave also continues High Sierra’s foundational work on the operating system, and macOS’ next phase looms larger than ever. Many, many features have either been removed already or will be removed within the next release or two—32-bit support, OpenGL and OpenCL, Back To My Mac, independently distributed browser extensions, third-party client support in Messages, subpixel antialiasing, and a bunch of other things that have been a part of the Mac for years if not decades. And even though I, personally, do not find any of the proof-of-concept iOS apps in Mojave to be particularly useful or compelling in and of themselves, that will almost certainly change if iOS developers are enthusiastic about porting their apps over next year.
Until the world stops assuming that everyone wants to see black text on a white background, however, Dark Mode is kind of a flop, at least for the range of apps that I use to do my job every day. Your mileage may vary. Most of the apps I use are garish and bright, and while some of them are customizable, others—including many of the emails I receive and the webpages I visit are not. The contrast between them and the dark portions of the interface is painful. I can’t use Dark Mode when so much of the world insists on being light.
True, that’s not a very long list of new stuff in macOS. But look at the bright side: With changes this minor, it means you won’t have many app glitches to get over.
He says that the zero-day vulnerability stems from the way Apple implemented the protections for various privacy-related data.
"I found a trivial, albeit 100% reliable flaw in their implementation," he told us, adding that it allows a malicious or untrusted app to bypass the new security mechanism and access the sensitive details without authorization.
I’ve long recommended creating a bootable installer drive—on an external hard drive, thumb drive, or USB stick—for the version of macOS you’re running on your Mac. It’s great for installing the OS on multiple Macs, because you don’t have to download the ~6GB installer onto each computer, and it serves as a handy emergency disk if your Mac is experiencing problems.
In other words, if police are alerted by an Apple Watch of a possible injury, they do not need a warrant to enter a home under the "community caretaking" exception to the Fourth Amendment.
[...]
"One of the interesting things here is that, whenever there's a change in the technology, it creates an inadvertent Fourth Amendment question," Joh told Ars. "It's a good example of how design can enhance or detract from privacy in accidental ways. I'm sure there are nothing but very good intentions behind this change in how this Apple Watch is going to work. But there are other considerations as well, because every time there is a change of this sort, there will be accidents, and there will be missteps."
But those charts – intended as a way of allowing people to better control their use of their phone – have turned out to be more than a little horrifying to many users. Many appear to have used their last few minutes of available time to tweet about just how miserable their incessant tweeting is making them.
When you set up Screen Time limitations, it'll cut your kids off from playing games after a certain amount of time – like two hours, for instance.
[...]
But if an app has already been downloaded and then deleted, it doesn't require the same permission.
Apple officially owns music tagging service Shazam. After confirming plans to buy the company in December 2017, Apple announced today that the deal has closed and it is removing ads from the service.
OmniFocus 3 for Mac has landed with a new look, tags, highly configurable perspectives, and a brand new Forecast setup. Here’s a quick overview to bring you up to speed on the most important changes.
Waze on CarPlay includes voice search, reporting issues for other drivers, and more.
The 2019 release adds some of the key Office features that Microsoft already has rolled out to its Office 365 subscribers over the past three years.
Qualcomm has unveiled explosive charges against Apple for stealing "vast swaths" of its confidential information and trade secrets for the purpose of improving the performance of chip sets provided by Qualcomm competitor Intel, according to a filing with the Superior Court of California.
The allegations are contained in a complaint that Qualcomm hopes the court will amend to its existing lawsuit against Apple for breaching the so called master software agreement that Apple signed when it became a customer of Qualcomm's earlier this decade.
Unlike manufacturing workers, whose jobs have been lost to automation since as far back as the 1950s, workers in the low-wage portion of the service sector had remained until now largely shielded from job-killing technologies.
Many earned too little to justify large capital costs to replace them. A typical hotel or motel desk clerk earns just over $12 an hour, according to government data; a concierge just over $13.50. And many of the tasks they perform seemed too challenging to automate. Technology is changing this calculus.
Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, the co-founders of the photo-sharing app Instagram, have resigned and plan to leave the company in the coming weeks, adding to the challenges facing Instagram’s parent company, Facebook. [...] The departures raise questions about Instagram’s future at a time when Facebook faces its most sustained set of crises in its 14-year history.
I have three apps on my iPhone that I use regularly for my audio entertainment: audiobooks, podcasts, and music. All three apps were updated for iOS 12 on day 1. (Well, the music app is from Apple, so that is to be expected.)
Unfortunately, the podcast app has a significant (to me) bug that made me missed out on podcast episodes. The audiobook app has an aesthetic bug that prevented me from 'scrubbing' the play position. Both apps had pushed out subsequent releases to solve these bugs.
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Thanks for reading.