Our 12 most anticipated features
1 No more intrusive online audio
Apple’s aware that online video that automatically plays when you land on or scroll down a page is irritating, and sometimes embarrassing. Safari deals with that by stopping videos that include audio from playing in the first place. Of course, you can tell the browser to make exceptions if you want to.
2 Improved privacy from trackers
Apple’s machine learning initiative is applied in Safari to stop your online activity being tracked and used to target you with tailored content that isn’t always beneficial. Time will tell how effective this is; similar initiatives are often circumvented by websites.
3 Custom site settings
Safari has previously provided the ability to adjust the default zoom level for all sites. Apple has recognized that you may want to use different settings for specific sites, so you can tell Safari to automatically use the Reader view for pages that it supports, what a site’s page zoom percentage should be, whether a site can autoplay video, and whether to prompt you or provide automatic access to your cam, mic, and location.
4 More quickly find emails
Mail’s search feature can feel a little rudimentary at times, so the new version adds an important feature to help you pinpoint an important old message: it highlights likely matches, or Top Hits, above all other search results. These rankings take into account things like messages you’ve read and your designated VIPs, and the algorithm learns as you use it – machine learning once again!
5 Keep important notes in sight
The capabilities of Notes have grown considerably in recent years, and you may no longer feel the need to use third-party alternatives such as Evernote. But the more you use Notes, the more likely it is that important stuff will get lost among the many items you create – so in High Sierra you can pin those notes to the top of the app.
6 Share files from iCloud Drive
We’ve been hoping for this feature ever since Apple discontinued MobileMe and iDisk, the predecessors of iCloud and iCloud Drive. When you share a link with someone, they work on your original copy, which ought to reduce – and perhaps even eliminate – your need to send email attachments.
7 Once more, with feeling, Siri
Both High Sierra and iOS 11 include voices for Siri that sound more natural, with the ability to convey subtle inflection. This news is like music to our ears, and we’re hoping Apple can use this development to similarly enhance the Mac’s Text-to-Speech feature.
8 Ta bular data in Notes
Got a few related figures to jot down and thinking Apple’s Numbers spreadsheet is overkill for the job? Or maybe you have other sets of data that are best summed up in a table. You can do all that in Notes now that it supports the creation of tables.
9 Live Photos from Fa ceTime
The FaceTime app can save precious moments in calls as Live Photos, which are stored in your Photos library. Presumably to address privacy concerns, both people on a call receive a notification to tell them this has been done. This all sounds good, though we’re conscious of how short Live Photos are.
10 Share your iCloud storage
If you’re reluctant to pay for more iCloud storage for your family members, there’s great news. Soon you’ll have the ability to share a single plan among multiple people – though only if you choose a 200GB ($2.99/month) or 2TB ($9.99/month) plan. (In case you were wondering, Apple recently discontinued the 1TB plan, and reduced the price of the largest tier.)
11 Advanced photo editing
The Photos app continues to evolve, gaining powerful color manipulation tools. Firstly, the app now has a Curves tool – as found in many professional image editing apps – enabling subtle contrast adjustments with just the tweak of a few points on a curve. There’s also a new Selective Color tool for isolating and selecting where you want changes to be applied.
But if all you want is to quickly make a picture more striking, colorful, or dramatic, there are new filters for that, too.
12 Third-party photo editors
It seems you’ll no longer be dependent on apps providing an extension in order to access their tools within Photos. When you choose an app from the Edit With menu and make changes to a picture using that app’s tools, your alterations are automatically saved back to your Photos library.