The slick new macos desktop
Mojave delivers a dramatic new way to see your Mac
One of the few details we knew in advance of WWDC was that macOS Mojave will have a system-wide Dark Mode. We knew because developer Steve TroughtonSmith spotted an accidentally released preview of the Xcode development environment running in this mode. That got a cheer of its own from developers when it was shown officially during the keynote. For the rest of us, the new System Preferences option will affect macOS itself, its default apps, and third-party apps that choose to support it. (Apple’s Pro apps already have a dark interface.)
The impact of Dark Mode varies. In Safari, not much changes except the title bar, in which tool icons appear in white over gray. In Messages, blue and green bubbles stay the same but everything else becomes dark gray with white text, feeling very different from black on white. The Calendar app goes dark with neon-tinted boxes and reversed-out text. Striking? Definitely. Legible? Maybe not so much. Dynamic Desktop This new feature animates your desktop’s background, very slowly, according to the passage of the sun in your location. While Night Shift, introduced last year, adjusts the color temperature of your whole display at sunset, Dynamic Desktop only affects the wallpaper image, which has to be created specially and stored in the High Efficiency Image File format (HEIF), Apple’s rival to JPEG. So far there’s just one Dynamic Desktop, a photo of the Mojave desert (of course) that gradually shifts from bright yellow during the day to cool blue at night.