MacOS High Sierra: Siri Itunes Iteration, Safari Always On And Other Features You Might Not Know About

Apple launched the next iteration of its MacOS – High Sierra at the World Wide Developers Conference Monday. While the company did introduce the OS at the event, many of its features weren’t revealed at the event.

Read: WWDC News: MacBooks and iMacs Refreshed, macOS High Sierra Introduced

Upon closer examination, it is evident there are many new features in the offering, which include:

Siri integration in iTunes: Prior to MacOS High Sierra, Siri only used to search through iTunes, but did not offer integrative features. Siri is now more deeply integrated into the operating system and will actually let you give it some more complex commands which would require artificial intelligence to function — for example, you could ask the voice assistant to play “rock music,” and it will actually sort through your iTunes library and find music that belongs to the rock genre. Furthermore, it will actually learn your taste in music as you use it more, which means that you will be able to listen to songs that you listen to regularly in an easier manner.

The feature, which seems to have been actually designed for the Siri-based Apple HomePod will actually be available on your MacBook itself if you have a 2015 or later model.

Flight Tracking and reminders: You will be able to search for your flights within Apple’s all-inclusive search engine for Mac, Spotlight. You can just type in your flight booking number in the spotlight and it will actually find the flight status. You can then instruct Siri to set a reminder for when you want to leave home. It will even tell you about in-flight planes and let you see where the flight is at a particular point in time.

Safari improvements: Apple has upgraded its proprietary browser, Safari in MacOS High Sierra. It can stop autoplay videos. Safari also has reading-related features such as a ‘Reading List’ that it is known for. You can now read better in MacOS High Sierra since the browser has an always-on mode. The browser can actually a page and provide you just text and images. In other browsers, if one does not have an ad-blocker on, one has to wade through adverts and other non-contextual information to really get to the part he/she wants to read.

Read: Apple MacBook Pro 2017 vs. Microsoft Surface Laptop: Price, Specs And More

iCloud Drive File Sharing: If you have been using iCloud for some time, you might realize that it hasn’t been as convenient to use as other similar services such as Dropbox and Box. Up till now, sharing files stored in the cloud was difficult. Post-MacOS High Sierra, you can simply right-click on a file and a ‘share’ option will appear on files in the cloud, which will let you share files easily on Mail, Bluetooth, Facebook etc.

Live Photos Editing: You will now be able to edit Live Photos taken from the iPhone — simply double-click on one, then click on ‘edit’ and you will find ‘live’ among the options in the menu, along with ‘bounce,’ ‘loop’ and ‘long exposure.’