Dec 01, 2016 With Sierra, Apple brings never-before-seen features to macOS—like Siri voice control, file sharing across all your iOS devices, picture-in-picture mode for iTunes and Safari, and AI photo search. Selection from macOS Sierra: The Missing Manual Book. Nov 11, 2018 You can upgrade to macOS Sierra from OS X Lion or later on any of the following Mac models. Your Mac also needs at least 2GB of memory and 8.8GB of available storage space. MacBook introduced in late 2009 or later MacBook Air introduced in late 2010 or later.
MacOS High Sierra is the 13th major version of Apple’s Unix-based operating system. It’s got very little in common with the original Mac operating system, the one that saw Apple through the 1980s and 1990s. Apple dumped that in 2001, when CEO Steve Jobs decided it was time for a change. Apple had spent too many years piling new features onto a software foundation originally poured in 1984. Programmers and customers complained of the “spaghetti code” the Mac OS had become.
So today, underneath macOS’s classy, translucent desktop is Unix, the industrial-strength, rock-solid OS that drives many a website and university. It’s not new by any means; in fact, it’s decades old and has been polished by generations of programmers.
Note
Beginning with Sierra in 2016, Apple stopped calling the Mac operating system “OS X.” It’s now “macOS.” That’s partly because Apple sought consistency with the software in its other products—iOS and watchOS—and partly, no doubt, because it was tired of hearing people pronounce it “oh ess sex.”
Having run out of big cat species (Lion, Jaguar, Panther, Tiger, Leopard, Snow Leopard), Apple has begun naming its Mac operating systems after rock formations in California. There was Yosemite, and then El Capitan, and then Sierra, after the Sierra Nevada mountain range. As its name suggests, High Sierra is really just a refinement of last year’s Sierra.
High Sierra doesn’t look any different from El Capitan, Yosemite, or Sierra before it. Instead, it’s a representation of all the little nips and tucks that Apple engineers wished they’d had time to put into the last version.
A New File System
The file system is the underlying, invisible software that controls the management of files and folders on your Mac. For almost 20 years, Mac fans used one called HFS+. And now there’s the Apple File System, or APFS, designed for the new era of solid-state drives, like the one in Mac laptops.
Most of its benefits are under the hood: far better security (for example, more-sophisticated FileVault encryption for your whole hard drive), better crash resistance, more efficient storage, and faster operation.
These are the two aspects of APFS you’ll probably notice first:
Safari Upgrades![]()
Apple has continued to work on Safari, its web browser—and says that the new version is the fastest desktop browser in the world.
It also uses less power. Apple claims you can watch Netflix for two hours longer in Safari than other browsers.
Maybe even more thrilling to the world’s Internet surfers (and less thrilling to advertisers), Safari can now auto-block auto-play videos. For each website, you can choose Safari→Settings for This Website and specify that videos are never allowed to play; always allowed to play; or allowed only if they don’t have sound.
This feature works beautifully, and it makes the Internet a calmer place.
That’s not the only way Safari will frustrate advertisers. Apple says that “Safari now uses machine learning to identify advertisers and others who track your online behavior, and removes the cross-site tracking data they leave behind.”
This is cool, too: You can create different viewing settings for different sites. You might like The New York Times site to appear with larger text, Flash turned on for Dilbert.com, and so on. Page zoom, Reader view, location services, and use of your camera and microphone are among the settings memorized for each site.
And if you like the Reader view—which hides all ads, navigation stuff, blinking stuff, competing colors and fonts—you can now tell Safari to use it for everything. Every time you open an article that works with Reader, it pops into that format automatically. You end up with far fewer migraines from just trying to surf the web.
Photos
Ladies and gentlemen, the Photos app is finally ready for prime time.
The editing tools have been redesigned and goosed nearly to Photoshop levels; you can now manipulate the curves of a photo’s histogram, or edit only the reds (for example) in a photo.
Mac Os High Sierra Download
The Auto-Fix button is now right on the Photos main toolbar; you can now send a photo into an external program (like Photoshop) for more powerful editing; a new Imports view shows not just the latest batch of imported photos, but the batch before that, and the batch before that, and so on; Memories (automatically grouped and curated slideshows with music) are much smarter now, capable of auto-building slideshows of your pets, babies, outdoor activities, performances, weddings, birthdays, and games; and Apple has opened up its “order your photos printed on mousepads, books, and calendars” feature to other companies. Soon, you’ll be able to install Photos extensions that permit all kinds of photo-product ordering.
Finally, Apple introduces some editing options to Live Photos: weird, three-second video clips that the iPhone can capture. You can now shorten a Live Photo, mute its audio, or extract a single frame to use as a still photo. Photos can also suggest a “boomerang” effect (bounces back and forth) or a loop (repeats over and over). And it has a new Slow Shutter filter, which (for example) blurs a babbling brook or stars moving across the sky, as though taken with a long exposure.
NotesMac Os High Sierra Missing Manual Used Cars
The Notes app has continued to improve, too.
Miscellaneous
There are lots of smaller changes. For example:
So the changes in High Sierra are, as you’re figuring out, pretty subtle. This new OS won’t throw anyone for a loop. But it’s a big speed-up with a lot of touch-ups—for free.
To find your way around macOS High Sierra, you’re expected to use Apple’s online help system. And as you’ll quickly discover, these help pages are tersely written, offer very little technical depth, lack useful examples, and provide no tutorials whatsoever. You can’t mark your place, underline, or read them in the bathroom.
The purpose of this book, then, is to serve as the manual that should have accompanied macOS—version 10.13 in particular.
MacOS High Sierra: The Missing Manual is designed to accommodate readers at every technical level. The primary discussions are written for advanced-beginner or intermediate Mac fans. But if you’re a Mac first-timer, miniature sidebar articles called Up to Speed provide the introductory information you need to understand the topic at hand. If you’re a Mac veteran, on the other hand, keep your eye out for similar shaded boxes called Power Users’ Clinic. They offer more-technical tips, tricks, and shortcuts.
When you write a book like this, you do a lot of soul-searching about how much to cover. Of course, a thinner book, or at least a thinner-looking one, is always preferable; plenty of readers are intimidated by a book that dwarfs the Tokyo White Pages.
On the other hand, Apple keeps adding features and rarely takes them away. So this book isn’t getting any skinnier.
Even so, some chapters come with free downloadable appendixes—PDF documents, available on this book’s “Missing CD” page at www.missingmanuals.com—that go into further detail on some of the tweakiest features. (You’ll see references to them sprinkled throughout the book.)
Maybe this idea will save a few trees—and a few back muscles when you try to pick this book up.
About the Outline
MacOS High Sierra: The Missing Manual is divided into six parts, each containing several chapters:
About→These→Arrows
Throughout this book, you’ll find sentences like this one: “Open the System folder→Libraries→Fonts folder.” That’s shorthand for a much longer instruction that directs you to open three nested folders in sequence, like this:
“On your hard drive, you’ll find a folder called System. Open that. Inside the System folder window is a folder called Libraries; double-click to open it. Inside that folder is yet another one called Fonts. Double-click to open it, too.” See Figure 1-1.
About MissingManuals.com
To get the most out of this book, visit www.missingmanuals.com. Click the “Missing CDs” link—and then this book’s title—to reveal a neat, organized, chapter-by-chapter list of the shareware and freeware mentioned in this book.
The website also offers corrections and updates to the book. (To see them, click the book’s title, and then click View/Submit Errata.) In fact, please submit such corrections and updates yourself! In an effort to keep the book as up-to-date and accurate as possible, each time we print more copies of this book, I’ll make any confirmed corrections you’ve suggested. I’ll also note such changes on the website so you can mark important corrections into your own copy of the book, if you like. And I’ll keep the book current as Apple releases more macOS 10.13 updates.
To use this book, and indeed to use a Mac, you need to know a few basics. This book assumes you’re familiar with a few terms and concepts:
Tip
You know what’s really nice? The keystroke to open the Preferences dialog box in every Apple program—Mail, Safari, iMovie, Photos, TextEdit, Preview, and on and on—is always the same: -comma. Better yet, that standard is catching on in other apps, too, like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.
A few more tips on using the Mac keyboard appear at the beginning of Chapter 7. Otherwise, if you’ve mastered this much information, then you have all the technical background you need to enjoy macOS High Sierra: The Missing Manual.
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