Today, Apple released the public beta for macOS Mojave. It adds dark mode, makes significant user experience overhauls to Finder and Quick Look, adds a bunch of apps you might be familiar with from iOS, provides new ways to organize your desktop icons, and more.

Installing a beta this early is not advisable for most users—though if you want to brave it, knock yourself out—so we've spent the past week exploring this new build in order to give you a sense of its major features without the risk (and illustrated with a plethora of screenshots to boot).

Generally, Mojave's changes paint a picture of a Mac platform that continues to seek a tighter relationship with iOS. There's a new way to bring iOS apps to the Mac. Continuity features have been expanded for more use cases. An overhauled Mac App Store takes cues from the iOS 11 App Store, and system updates have even been relocated to the OS's settings panel.

On top of all that, there's also dark mode, which is surely a welcome addition for Ars readers. There are a lot of poorly implemented dark themes out there, and we did find some cracks in the veneer with this beta. But, generally, we were impressed at how comprehensive dark mode initially looks in macOS.

As we spend more time with Mojave over the next few weeks, we'll be looking under the hood to explore macOS's new security features, to hear developer perspectives on the deprecation of both 32-bit and OpenGL, and to see what's new with Automator in Mojave. Plus, of course, there's that short novella signature Ars review in progress. Expect it to be ready for the public rollout later this year.

For now, let's start the tour.

Finder and Quick Look

There are a number of very small changes to Finder, but the most significant ones are gallery view, metadata in a side panel, and expanded Quick Look actions. The images below offer the clearest idea of what to expect, but to put it simply gallery view replaces cover flow. It serves the same function, but it offers a slightly different presentation and easier use.

Samuel Axon

Samuel Axon

Samuel Axon

Samuel Axon

Samuel Axon

Finder will now show you metadata on photos and videos, too. That means EXIF data like color space and profile, aperture value, camera model, and so on. To see it, you just go to "view" in the menu bar while using Finder and click "Show Preview." This opens the right sidebar, where the data is visible.

You'll find another Mojave improvement at the bottom of this sidebar: quick actions. These are buttons right in Finder that prompt actions like rotating an image, combining PDF files, or editing videos. You can customize what appears here; for example, you can add Automator scripts to the quick actions panel. That's huge news for photographers who spend a lot of time renaming or watermarking images in Finder.

These are some of the supported quick actions:

Cropping and otherwise tweaking an image in Markup

Rotating an image

Trimming audio and video files

Automator actions

Merging images or PDFs into one PDF

Many of these tasks are also possible in Quick Look, which is accessible by tapping the space bar with a file selected. You don't have to open the Preview app to do very basic things in Mojave.

You can use Quick Look for Markup, rotating and cropping images, or trimming audio and video files. First impressions are that this is very convenient; in fact, I'd like to see more actions added. Hopefully this is just the beginning.

Stacks

Icon clutter on the desktop is a problem for a lot of users. It bugs me so much, I actually stopped putting anything at all on my desktop years ago. Apple has added a new feature in Mojave called Stacks to address it.

To use it, you right click on the desktop and click "Use Stacks," and Mojave will sort all your apps into expandable collections based on whichever sorting criteria you choose.

Samuel Axon

Samuel Axon

Samuel Axon

Samuel Axon

Samuel Axon

The sorting criteria supported include:

Kind

Date Last Opened

Date Added

Date Modified

Date Created

Tags

You can move the pointer over them and scrub through the individual items with two fingers on the touchpad. I find this approach laborious; if you have a lot of files, the more efficient approach is to simply click on the stack. This expands it, as pictured above. Once you've accessed the file you want, you can collapse it again.

If you prefer to have 50 icons on your desktop, you can leave Stacks disabled, and Mojave still offers you some new ways to keep things organized. You can right click on the desktop and click "Clean Up," which will move the icons to different parts of the desktop based on your chosen criteria—the same ones by which you can sort Stacks.