Aside from its major headline-grabbing capabilities, macOS Mojave brought a new Dynamic Desktop feature that automatically adjusts a special wallpaper to match the time of day.
How macOS Mojave’s awesome time-shifting Dynamic Desktop wallpapers work
Desktop
Facebook is testing desktop posting for Stories
Doubling down on the Stories format, Facebook is now testing a new feature with some folks that would allow users to upload Stories from a desktop web browser on their Mac or Windows PC in an effort to push the ephemeral sharing feature to as many people as possible.
How to remove the Macintosh HD icon from the desktop on Mac
Neat freaks like me like to keep the desktop of their computers free of any clutter. That includes files, folders, and of course, the Macintosh HD icon. As a matter of fact, removing the Macintosh HD icon from the desktop is one of the first few things I do when setting up a new Mac.
Although pretty simple to do, hiding that icon is not very obvious to less tech-savvy people. So in this post, I will describe how to remove the Macintosh HD or the hard disk/SSD icon from the desktop on your Mac.
Check out Google News redesign
Rolling out globally in the coming days, the desktop version of Google News has been thoroughly redesigned for easier navigation and readability while adding new features like a dedicated Fact Check section, additional controls for users to specify their favorite news sources and interests, an Apple Music-like For You section and more.
Check out the new-look Google News by visiting news.google.com on your desktop.
As evidenced by the before vs. after screenshot comparison top of post, the uncluttered look is based on Google's Material Design and makes heavy used of a card format to make it easier to browse, scan and identify related articles about a story.
The overhauled layout focuses on publisher names and article labels, and maintains your view and place on the page as you click in and out of stories and explore topics. The lefthand navigation column is customizable and lets you jump quickly to news that interests you.
In addition to the built-in sections like Sports or Entertainment, the lefthand navigation column provides one-click access to your saved search queries like, say, “FIFA World Cup” or “Bollywood.” You can sort your news by relevance or date, see top videos, and browse top news topics in the Related block.
Story cards are designed to you a quick glance into a story.
They can be expanded to show additional articles with different points of view and are labeled with helpful tags, like Local Source, Most Referenced, Opinion, Fact Check and more. Also important, to give you additional context Google News now shows a second labeled article in addition to the top headline for each story.
Clicking the Full Coverage link from the story card brings up a bunch of news stories about a given topic. Another navigation bar at the top of the page provides shortcuts to the following sections: Headlines, Local and For You.
The Local section is your home to local news stories from any part of the world. The For You section is your personal news feed based on your interests. After signing in with your Google Account, you can customize what appears in the Local and For You tabs.
With all settings in one place, Google News now lets you quickly edit existing sections, name custom ones, select what you'd like to see in the For You section, cherry-pick your favorite news sources that you want to see more or less of, and much more.
Videos have seen some much-needed improvements, too.
“Videos have become central to news storytelling, so we improved the algorithmic selection for top videos, highlighted the top video in a story card, and built a better player,” says Google.
“While playing a video, more related videos will be available in the player.”
The Fact Check label introduced last year is now prominently used across Google News.
As a bonus, you now have a new Fact Check section on the right column of the Headlines section, filled with links to the top recently published fact-checked articles.
This section is currently available in the US only.
As I mentioned before, the new Google News is a staggered release rolling out globally in the coming days so you may not get the new look immediately.
How do you like Google's News redesign?
Tell us in comments!
How to show the storage drive icon on your Mac desktop
Depending on how often you access stuff in your Mac's file system, you might benefit from having a quick shortcut to your Mac's primary storage disk(s) on your desktop. In this tutorial, we show you how to enable the hard disk/SSD shortcut on your Mac's desktop.
How to synchronize Desktop & Documents folders across other Macs, iOS devices & PCs
iCloud keeps your personal data like contacts, photos and calendars, along with other files, in perfect sync across multiple macOS, iOS and Windows devices. And with macOS Sierra or later, you can have the same exact files on the desktop and in your Documents folder across multiple Macs.
In this tutorial, you're going to learn how to set up and use Desktop and Documents sync in macOS Sierra, manage and synchronize the files across multiple Mac and Windows PCs, iPhone, iPad and iPod touch devices and more.
Google Chrome 55 won’t take up as much memory on websites that use JavaScript
An upcoming update to Google's Chrome browser won't take up as much memory on desktop or mobile websites that use JavaScript as before, CNET reported. Chrome 55 for desktop and mobile, scheduled to release on December 6, packs in an improved JavaScript engine dubbed V8 that was designed to “significantly reduced the memory footprint” of websites like Imgur, Reddit, Twitter and The New York Times.
macOS Sierra preview: Universal Clipboard + Desktop & Documents sync
Our ongoing macOS Sierra previews continue unabated as Andrew and I take a closer look at two new useful features in Sierra: Universal Clipboard and shared Desktop. You're definitely going to use Universal Clipboard quite a bit: in addition to being a great time-saver, it “just works”.
Universal Clipboard lets you copy and paste items across your iPhone, iPad, iPod touch devices and Mac computers like a boss. Sierra also puts your iCloud storage to good use by keeping any Desktop items along with the files within the Documents folder synchronized across your other devices.
FreeChat for WhatsApp brings a free native desktop app for WhatsApp to Mac
Anyone who uses WhatsApp Messenger who has been looking for a truly free native-style desktop app experience on their Mac has been hard-pressed to find a really good client that didn't have hidden costs and worked extremely well in the same package.
Fortunately, FreeChat for WhatsApp is an app on the Mac App Store that you can download on your Mac at no cost whatsoever, and it will work exactly how you would expect a WhatsApp Messenger client to work on your Mac without any hidden costs, ads, or caveats
How to set your Mac screensaver as the wallpaper with this Terminal command
Anyone who said you had to deal with a boring still wallpaper on your Mac was crazy; well... kind of.
Using just your Terminal app that comes pre-installed in macOS and a special command, it's possible to set your favorite Mac screensaver as your wallpaper for a temporary period of time.
In this short and easy tutorial, we'll show you exactly how that's done.
How to hide device icons on your Mac desktop
If you're a minimalist type of person, then you might prefer to keep your Mac's desktop free of any icons.
Yes, you can easily drag documents and other files that have been cluttering your desktop and put them in a folder on your Mac. However, that doesn't change the fact that icons for external hard drives, USB thumb drives and other hardware devices will still pop up on the desktop as soon as they're connected to your Mac.
Wouldn't it be nice if you could do something about that? Thankfully, Apple's engineers though of that, too, because macOS makes it easy to optionally remove desktop icons for different types of devices with just a few clicks.
64-bit Chrome for Mac in the works, test drive the beta now
The search giant Google yesterday posted the first beta of the upcoming Chrome for Mac browser with 64-bit support, following the public release of 64-bit Chrome for Windows earlier this week.
The 64-bit edition of Chrome for Mac was first made available for testing purposes to early adopters earlier this month, via the Mac edition of Chrome Canary.
For those unfamiliar with it, Chrome Canary is an experimental Chrome version for testing upcoming new features in their earliest form, and before they make their way into the beta and then the stable channel.
Mac users on the Chrome beta channel should have been updated to a new 64-bit version of Chrome 38 for Mac. If not, you can download your copy direct from Google and start reaping the benefits of 64-bit browsing.