NOW DO THIS...
1 LIVEN THINGS UP
Live Photos are gimmicky, but also fab, infusing your stills with life when you hover the cursor over them. And in the new High Sierra operating system for imac, you can finally edit them. at includes being able to turn off the sound, loop that shot of you jumping into a swimming pool as though you’re stuck in a Matrix-like time glitch, and pick a different key photo for each snap.
2 KEEP THE NOISE DOWN
Do sites that auto-play videos over your music annoy you to the point that you hurl your Mac out of the window? Your bank manager will be pleased at the new Safari, which by default stops noisy videos playing until you click them. Auto-play can also be defined on a per-site basis, allowed (if you’re mad), or disabled entirely. It’s a small change, but an absolute godsend.
3 BE AHEAD OF THE CURVE
Photos was already a capable picture-tweaker, but Apple’s gunning for pros in High Sierra with a new Curves tool. is enables you to work with individual channels, and use colour-pickers to select black, grey and white points. Are you more of a filter-clicker? Well they’ve had an overhaul too. If you’re not yet familiar with Photos, now is very much the time to get on board.
4 STRIP IT BACK
Apple’s Reader feature removes clutter from websites, leaving only text and images, the former of which can be configured to your liking. is option can now be triggered automatically on user-defined sites when Reader is available (usually on individual article pages). In the early beta we’ve tried, this feature doesn’t always work; when it does, it’s handy for getting content without cruft.
5 DO THE SPLITS
Go full-screen in macos Sierra’s Mail, and the composing area covers the emails in your inbox – annoying when you’re trying to refer back to something. In High Sierra, you instead get a split-screen view, with your inbox on the left and a compose window on the right. In short, Mail is no longer a memory test or an ‘amusing’ game of Keep Opening And Closing e Compose Window.
6 SHARE AND SHARE ALIKE
It’s going to take a lot to wrench people away from sharing files using Dropbox and Google Drive. Still, Apple’s having a go with icloud Drive. You can now share icloud Drive files, but there’s a catch: the recipient needs to have an icloud account before they can get access. Still, at least the wall on this particular walled garden’s been lowered a few feet.