and take a look at the rest...
Lots of other goodies are lurking in macOS High Sierra – but not all of them are visible
FaceTime photos
There are various hacky workarounds that allow you to save bits of FaceTime conversations to your Mac. Now, though, there’s an official one from Apple. As you’re chatting away to someone, you can click the camera shutter button to capture a special moment and save it as a Live Photo. The other person on the call is immediately notified that a photo was taken, and so this is all very much above board. The animated snap ends up in your Photos library.
If you’re not keen on people being able to take such photos of you, it’s possible to disable this functionality. In FaceTime’s preferences on the Mac, untick ‘Allow Live Photos to be captured during Video calls’. On iOS, the equivalent option is FaceTime Live Photos, which is found in the FaceTime section of the Settings app.
A smarter Siri
Apple’s rather proud of Siri’s voice revamp in macOS High Sierra. Although the virtual assistant hasn’t quite clambered out of the uncanny valley, Siri now sounds more natural and expressive, whether telling you the weather, or complaining that you haven’t actually enabled Siri to use Location Services yet (as happened while writing this very feature – oops).
In macOS High Sierra, Siri’s designs on being a personal DJ go up another notch. Already, you could ask Siri to “play some music” or start playing something by a specific artist. But now Siri can respond to moods and make recommendations – at least if you’re a subscriber to Apple Music. (If not, Siri curtly notes “I can’t play music for a particular mood”.)
Siri has one other trick in macOS High Sierra: if you nip into the Accessibility pane of System Preferences and select Siri (under Interaction), you can tick ‘Enable Type to Siri’. Although primarily intended for people who cannot speak to Siri, it’s a handy feature if you need to ask Siri something, are armed with headphones, and are in a place where you should really be silent. (Alternatively, if you want total silence in both directions, you can also have Siri
Virtual reality
respond without speaking, by turning off Voice feedback in the Siri pane of System Preferences.) We’re not quite in the Matrix just yet, nor hanging around with Johnny Mnemonic, but virtual reality is increasingly worming its way into the world of technology. As far as macOS High Sierra goes, you’re not (yet) going to be creating virtual worlds on a MacBook. But if you’re armed with a suitably powerful supported iMac (which at present means the new iMac with Retina 5K display), you can in macOS High Sierra fashion entire worlds using the likes of SteamVR and the Vive VR, along with Final Cut Pro, Epic Unreal 4 Editor, and
Unity Editor. If that feels a bit much like hard work, just sit back in actual reality and let someone else bring lovely new apps to you when they’re ready.
Copy and paste
You may be familiar with Universal Clipboard. This feature, which is part of Continuity, works with any Mac that has Bluetooth LE (and also a range of iOS devices). Both Macs need to be signed into the same iCloud account and have Handoff enabled in System Preferences. Then, as long as the Macs are connected to Wi-Fi and have Bluetooth active, you can copy and paste text, images and videos between the two.
In macOS High Sierra, this is taken up another notch, in you being able to copy and paste files. To do so, use ç+C to copy on one Mac and ç+V to paste on the other. This is less hassle than messing about with AirDrop or file sharing. That said, if even this seems a bit like hard work, you can always share your Desktop and Documents folders via iCloud to efficiently move files between Macs.
For a list of devices that are supported by Continuity, visit the following Apple support document: bit.ly/continuity_support.
64- bit apps
If you spend a lot of time using an iPhone or iPad, and you happen to have a large collection of apps and games, chances are iOS 11 thinned your collection somewhat. This was down to Apple ending support for 32-bit apps – something that’s long been on the cards. Unfortunately, though, it’s simply not viable for every developer to update their apps, and so we’ve had to say goodbye to thousands of them.
It looks like ‘appageddon’ is going to come ‘back to the Mac’ at some point. There were rumours macOS High Sierra would start warning users about 32-bit apps, but that’s not happened at the time of writing. Apple did announce at WWDC 2017, though, that all apps and games submitted to the Mac App Store would have to be 64-bit as of January 2018. Updates must be compliant by July.
If you use 32-bit apps, it’s time to bug a developer. If you’re not sure, go to About This Mac under the Apple menu, click System Report, and select Applications from the sidebar. Click the 64-bit column header however many times it takes to get apps marked No at the top, make some notes, and get cracking writing some polite emails.