[aneidon]

The biggest change I’m hoping for (but not expecting) is the ability to sort shared iCloud albums by time taken, not time added to the album. Currently they’re all but useless for something like a shared album from a vacation, because it groups photos by when family members upload them. I tend to upload photos at the end of each day, but other family members who were shooting on a normal camera waited until the end of the trip to upload their photos. The end result is that photos that should be appearing next to each other instead show up at opposite ends of the album. Infuriating.

[petercooper]

The biggest change I’m hoping for (but not expecting) is the ability to sort shared iCloud albums by time taken, not time added to the album.

This isn't a criticism of you, but when a major OS update comes down to trivia like this, it seems a bit of a shame to me. I remember the 10.2-10.6 releases and just how significant they were and it feels like rearranging deck chairs in comparison nowadays.

[gradstudent]

I remember the first time I saw Spotlight. It was magic. Then came Expose. Wireless that worked. Sleep that worked. Trivial configuration of things like sshd, apache and samba.

Amazing days.

Lately I only upgrade when forced. I ran 10.8 until earlier this year when I finally upgraded my machine. Then I spent a week trying to figure out how the hell to get gdb working again because binaries now require code signing and there's this horrible new thing called System Integrity Protection that tries to protect me from myself. They also took away my Escape key and replaced it with this TouchBar nonsens just because I wanted an i7 CPU. To put this into perspective: I practically live inside vim.

[nsomaru]

Remap single tap CAPS to ESC and when used in combination with another key or long-pressed - CTRL. This has changed the way I use my keyboard in vim and tmux.

I'm doing this on Ubuntu, but there are ways to get it done on OSX too.

[messe]

I have `jk` mapped to ESC in spacemacs, zsh and anything else I can set up to use vi keybindings. `jk` is essentially a no-op in vi, so rebinding it doesn't cause any issues while carrying the advantage that my fingers never have to leave the home row.

[fred256]

Out of curiosity, how do you type "Dijkstra" in that case?

[eridius]

I've never typed Dijkstra in Vim, but if I had to, there are two reasonable options:

1. Wait a half-second after typing the "j". That causes the mapping to time out and you can type the "k" without a problem.

2. Type something like Dijj<del>kstra.

[njarboe]

Copy and paste from another window? If your use of the word "Dijkstra" is frequent enough for this method to bother you, there must be other mappings that would work.

[rspeer]

I have a similar key binding set up. One option is to press a key that doesn't do anything in between.

[burnte]

I loved his solution until this. This is a deal breaker. Time to go back to the abbacus. ;)

[geerlingguy]

It’s even easier now; the keyboard prefs in settings allows caps to esc reassignment through the UI.

[narkee]

Do you have any hints on how one might implement this on mac OS? I'd love to have my keyboard configured like this...

[dilap]

you can do it with the app karabiner elements.

once installed, open the app, and go to the "complex modifications" tab. then click "add rule". then click "import more rules from the internet". on the web site that opens, expand "Modifier Keys". import "Change caps_lock key".

that'll give you a rule to do what you want in karabiner. (the rule is "Change caps_lock to control if pressed with other keys, to escape if pressed alone".)

[AlphaSite]

It’s in keyboard modifier keys.

[dilap]

that'll get you caps-as-control, but not caps-as-control-AND-escape (unless they've added that in high sierra, but I don't think so).

[ithkuil]

Ctrl-c can be used as esc in vim

[CodeWriter23]

SIP is protecting you from rootkits. And it’s pretty trivial to turn off if you want to do that.

[robert_foss]

And from being productive!

[acdha]

Details? Unless you’re developing malware or low-level system extensions SIP should have no impact on day to day work.

[qhwudbebd]

It breaks all sorts of things, even the version of py2app that Apple themselves ship - but are too lazy to test or read bug reports about for year after year.

[Cthulhu_]

What kind of work are you doing that you need to fertle around in macOS's system folders (etc) all the time?

[rahoulb]

Use Ctrl-C instead of Esc - you don't even have to move your hands off the home position

[coldtea]

>This isn't a criticism of you, but when a major OS update comes down to trivia like this, it seems a bit of a shame to me.

There's a whole new FS that went into production in something like 4-5 years (unheard of) among lots of over things...

[johnbellone]

I am very skeptical of a new filesystem that is going out to users that fast. I haven’t tested the beta yet, but I would imagine we still have the option of using HFS+? Otherwise I’ll wait six months or more to even attempt it.

[AsyncAwait]

I hear you, but the FS has been silently deployed to millions of iOS devices already, so I'd imagine it's pretty well tested for them to bet customer data on it. I also haven't had any issues with APFS on 10.13 beta, but I haven't used it in any fancy way yet.

[lvillani]

If you have an all-SSD Mac, the file-system will get converted during the upgrade. I think you still have the option to choose HFS+ when you perform a clean install.

Anyway: I installed the GM with an HFS+ boot volume that would fail an `fsck_hfs` (and when attempting to fix inconsistencies, it would get stuck indefinitely). Given the amount of bitrot I experience with HFS+ I welcomed the in-place conversion to something (hopefully) better and I'm surprised it worked so well.

[empyrical]

If I'd like to stick with HFS+ for now, do I have the option to during the upgrade? I dual boot with Windows and I'm worried about something getting messed up and am not sure if there's a way to read APFS from Windows yet (I back up of course, but want to avoid potential issues)

[empyrical]

Update: I upgraded, and everything happened automatically. No option to opt out of APFS conversion so yeah, if that effects your workflow you should know that. Went without a hitch for me though!

[eridius]

There is not any way to read APFS from Windows.

[cuckcuckspruce]

You do have backups, right?

[aneidon]

Just to clarify, I’m very excited overall for the update, although of course it is lots of under-the-hood stuff. When I wrote biggest I meant the biggest feature I’m not sure will be launching with the update.

[dkersten]

I've been finding the same with iOS updates lately. iOS 11 has some nice improvements, imho, but they're not any major advancements, just the usual incremental improvements. Could have just called it iOS 10.4 and be done with it. That wouldn't be PR-friendly enough though.

[wlesieutre]

If you have an iPad the iOS 11 update is huge. Being able to run two apps side-by-side with drag and drop supported across the system is a fundamental change to how you interact with stuff.

The new dock and changes to the multitasking interface and behavior take some getting used to, but my iPad feels like a much more powerful device than it did a week ago.

[dkersten]

I do have an iPad on which I've been using the 11 beta for the past few months and I love the new multitasking support, but is it really big enough to warrant a major version bump?

You already could run two apps side by side in iOS 10 (I was a pretty heavy user of that feature, which is incidentally also the primary reason I opted into the beta), it just wasn't quite as flexible. Drag and drop is new, for sure. I suppose I haven't used it much so haven't really noticed it.

The dock seems like a small improvement over the old dock, added because of the better multitasking.

They're great improvements for sure, but they still seem like incremental improvements to me.

[wlesieutre]

Everything Apple has done since iOS was first introduced (or arguably the initial iPad support in iOS 3.2 ) has been incremental improvements. But drag and drop is one of the bigger ones, IMO on-par with the initial multitasking support which incidentally was the update that finally convinced me to buy an iPad.

For an example of where this smooths things out, I've been using Readdle's Documents as an approximation of a local filesystem for a while now. Saving an image to that before was tricky; iOS doesn't have a way to isolate an image out of a page, just copy or save to camera roll. So you could save to camera roll and then import it over, but you lose the filename in the process and replace it with something generic like "Image 10". Or you can do weird workarounds like using Workflow's "Get images from page", which pulls up a slideshow of all the images on the page, which you then get to scroll through and find the one you wanted.

Now you just drag it and put it straight into the destination. You can also drag the URL bar over, which saves the URL as a new text file.

And if I have data in Documents that I want to use elsewhere, there's no shenanigans required with piping it through share sheets, I just drag it out and use it.

If you want something less permanent than a file manager, the popover multitasking is also a good platform for temporary "shelf" style data buckets. I'm currently trying Scrawl Pouch, but I've seen a couple others that looked equally nice. It's basically intended as a drag-and-drop destination to temporarily store any type of data until you want to drag it back out somewhere else.

This can be the obvious stuff like images and links from Safari, PDFs and other files out of Documents. You can also drop things like map pins, which can be shared via messages or email or dropped as links into Pages documents. I haven't experimented a lot with 3rd party apps, but presumably we'll see this show up in other ecosystems, maybe dropping things like audio effects between a family of media creation tools, or someone could make a 3rd party service for sharing paintbrush presets that you could drop into Procreate.

They've also brought in the "spring-loaded folders" behavior from Finder for this. If you're dragging a URL and you want to add it as a Safari bookmark, you can hover it over the sidebar button to pop it open and then navigate to the folder where you want to drop and save it. Or after the sidebar opens, you can hover over the Reading List tab to put it there instead of bookmarks. It's integrated like that throughout the entire OS.

A whole lot of things that just weren't possible on iOS are now a 2-second interaction.

[wlesieutre]

Addendum on spring-loaded folders, you can even swipe up from the bottom to open the dock and then spring open another app. If you open Mail you can tap the new message button while still dragging the data, and then drop it into the new message popover. So splitscreen and slide over multitasking aren't even required to use drag and drop.

[dkersten]

Ok that's fair. I suppose the update seemed less to me because I haven't needed the drag and drop for my workflow (basically I don't find myself needing to copy files/images very much and the documents I author on iPad are typically text only), so I guess this feature kinda slipped by me a bit.

[wiredfool]

Snow Leopard was a boring release, but a very nice OS. This release feels like it might be similar.

[phamilton]

Snow Leopard freed up something like 12 GB of space. I was impressed.

[kiliankoe]

I submitted a radar for this last year or the one before, it was closed as a dupe, so there's at least two people Apple knows that want this feature^^

[4ad]

I'll settle for when shared iCloud albums support a decent size and resolution.

iCloud Photos is frustratingly bad, but I don't want to buy into other cloud ecosystem, like Google's. Does anybody know if it's possible to replicate the integration with Photos on both iOS and macOS, so I could write my own sync thing?

[aneidon]

Not aware of those issues, what exactly are the limitations?

[4ad]

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202299

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202786

Some highlights:

> When shared, photos taken with standard point-and-shoot cameras, SLR cameras, or iOS devices have up to 2048 pixels on the long edge.

> Videos can be up to five minutes in length and are delivered at up to 720p resolution.

> Maximum shared albums an owner can share: 100

> Maximum shared albums a user can subscribe to: 100

> Maximum number of photos and videos from a single contributor across all shared albums, per hour: 1000

[gumby]

That’s dreadful! I had assumed that iCloud (rather than Dropbox) sharing would share the original as that is already in the cloud anyway. It would just be a pointer or DB entry

I was horrified when I learned that Google wasn’t going to save full resolution by default. Had no idea Apple would do something similar.

[snuxoll]

That's what I thought myself, but then I realized pictures put into shared albums are actually copied - you can delete the original and it's still available in the shared album, at 0 cost to your iCloud storage.

It's kind of a nice feature, but at the same time it makes doing things like collecting photos from my wife for a photo book annoying.

[hmage]

Don't confuse storage and sharing.

You still have full resolution originals without any recompression in iCloud Photo Library.

[AlphaSite]

It’s full res for your photos, but it won’t share that publicly.

[aneidon]

Ugh, wasn’t aware of that. That plus my annoyances with the sorting will definitely make me reconsider using the shared albums as the primary way of sharing family photos.

[Terretta]

Serious question: What family sharing use case needs more than 100 albums for sharing family photos, and what family sharing use case needs more than 1000 photos "per hour" (you can add thousands, just rate limits the uploading)?

Agree with you on the time ordering. If people want a particular order, they could upload in that order. If they want time ordered, they could tap a button to refresh sort by time taken.

However, and this is a big gotcha -- you may find that causes more problems than it solves, as a group of n people are likely to have >n different time stamps and at least 2 time zones on their various devices. The resultant sort will be interleaved by sets out of order by hours in case of time zones, or out of order by minutes for individual devices.

What Apple could do is recognize contributors and devices in a shared album and let you assign an offset to each contributor plus device pairing, then sequence these all sensibly.

What I do is have a inbox type album for everyone during and following the trip, then import, sort and select and manually fix time offsets (if I remember, I have everyone take the same photo of the same phone clock at the same moment to make this easier), then re-order and curate to taste, then re-publish.

[4ad]

> What family sharing use case needs more than 100 albums for sharing family photos.

100 albums is nothing. Looking at my photo share history (on Google+, not iCloud as iCloud is useless) I have about 500 albums shared with friends and family over the last five years. And of course, there have been innumerably more albums shared with me, while iCloud limits that too to only 100 albums.

The best thing about these Google+ albums is that I don't even have to give them a name, unlike iCloud shared albums.

> and what family sharing use case needs more than 1000 photos "per hour"

It's easy, I don't share photos every day, I share them e.g. at the end of a holiday, and then there are more than a thousand. In any case I might need to share even more, since I might share the same pictures to different people in different albums, and that counts multiple times.

Of course this is all moot, since the quality is degraded too much to use this service anyway.

> (you can add thousands, just rate limits the uploading)?

It doesn't rate limit, is blocks you out and it tells you to try again in an hour. I have to remember to do that and I have to remember where it errored out. It takes forever to do something that should take seconds. They already have all my pictures stored in iCloud. They are already there! "Sharing" doesn't consume resources, it's just an entry in a database referencing data they already have. Which, btw, means that they should not have to reduce the photo quality. They already keep my high quality data, and I pay for this storage. Reencoding into lower quality actually increases the storage they have to use for my data.

I suspect iCloud Photos and iCloud Photo sharing are two completely disconnected services at Apple that don't communicate properly.

> you may find that causes more problems than it solves, as a group of n people are likely to have >n different time stamps and at least 2 time zones on their various devices. The resultant sort will be interleaved by sets out of order by hours in case of time zones

Erm, no, because you sort by actual physical time keeping track of time zone and everything?

I despise Google as a company and I try to avoid their products and services, but their photo solution just works so well on Android (it works like crap on iOS and macOS even if you install Google Photos, but that's a discussion for another day). Good model, fast, and no artificial limitations. I wish Apple would keep up.

[zeusk]

> as a group of n people are likely to have >n different time stamps and at least 2 time zones on their various devices.

Which is why we have UTC.

> The resultant sort will be interleaved by sets out of order by hours in case of time zones

See UTC.

> or out of order by minutes for individual devices.

which is alright, compared to the sort by time added to album.

[lloeki]

> When shared, photos taken with standard point-and-shoot cameras, SLR cameras, or iOS devices have up to 2048 pixels on the long edge.

Wow, what a deal breaker. I always felt like something was off quality-wise but never took the time to delve into that.

[4ad]

Yeah, and it doesn't make any sense as they already have the pictures in the original quality stored on their servers already.

I think (but I am not sure) you can use iCloud Photo sharing even if you don't use iCloud Photo library, but that's a special case. Then you could limit the quality of those photos, I guess. But why degrade the quality of photos that you already have? Sharing doesn't use any extra space than non-sharing. They are in the cloud anyway.

[snowwindwaves]

I live in Canada and am born in the early 80s. 1 in 20 of my friends has a phone that isn't an iPhone, we often use iCloud photo sharing for albums but I don't know anyone who is using iCloud Photo Library, so not a special case in my circle

[roymurdock]

Workaround: download the photos to your local storage and create a new album with them, you can then sort them correctly by date taken. Can delete the original and reshare if others want access to the photos in chronologically taken order.

[mikeytown2]

Switch to Google Photos[1]; it's amazing. I'm always a little worried about what they are doing with all the data though...

[1] https://photos.google.com/