My favourite OS X Yosemite feature… yet to be

It’s not fair to say this to you yet because I’m only tried it exactly once and exactly one minute ago. But it didn’t entirely work and I can’t see why, so I want to explore it. And also, frankly, tease you.

This is the feature and this is the bit that is working: I can now make phone calls from my Mac. It uses my iPhone but that’s the thing, it uses it, I don’t. Scroll through my Contacts list and click or right click on any phone number anywhere – in an email, on a website, in an OmniFocus task – and I can dial it from there. It may ring using my phone but you don’t care and I don’t notice: the sound comes out of my Mac’s speakers and my voice is sent via the Mac’s microphone.

I found the call quality to be a bit crackly and the person I called – okay, it was my mother – had trouble hearing me but it did work and it was useful.

Except.

I realise now that I will use this for all my calls when I’m in my office because it’s just so handy but I did originally want to use it for recording interviews. And that’s the bit I can’t get to work yet. I use Rogue Amoeba’s Audio Hijack Pro a lot and it’s the obvious choice for this kind of thing but it isn’t working for me yet. I tried grabbing the audio from FaceTime, the application that the Mac uses to do these calls and got exactly nothing recorded. I tried switching to have Audio Hijack Pro grab my system audio – so every little bleep and whistle my Mac makes – and that did work except it audibly dropped the volume on the call so that now I was having trouble hearing my mother.

I wonder what we’ve both just agreed to.

So let’s consider the interview-recording to be a work in progress but, blimey, calling from your Mac. As with so many things, this is the way it should always have been – and so this is the way it will be. If you’re on a PC then thank you for reading this far but you’re going to get this Mac feature as soon as Microsoft finishes its cycle. That would be stage 1) deriding Apple, stage 2) claiming you could always do that anyway with a PC, stage 3) announcing it as a new feature and hoping you don’t notice Apple’s already done it, stage 4) eventually shipping the new feature and stage 5) eventually shipping a version that works.

Handiest. Thing. Ever. Make and take phone calls on your Mac

If you’re the kind of person who leaves your iPhone in a pocket or purse placed inconveniently across the room, you’ll appreciate the ability to answer an incoming call with your Mac. You can also initiate calls from your Mac—to the other person, the call will look like it’s coming from your iPhone, but you’ll be chattering away with your Mac’s built-in microphone and speakers. For this to work you have to configure both your Mac and iPhone.

How to make and receive iPhone calls with your Mac – Christopher Breen, Macworld (17 October 2014)

This is the thing I think I am most looking forward to using now that I’ve moved from the OS X Yosemite beta to the final release. In theory it worked before but I had problems and put them down to the beta nature of it all. Plus I just put it down, decided to do it again some day.

That day is now. Or it would be if I were back at my office. I’m away with my iPad and I have already used that to make and receive calls. The audio quality is subtly different but receiving calls sounds great and making calls sounds fine. I love how it just happened, too. I’d left my iPhone in my office and was reading something on my iPad somewhere else in the house when the phone rang – and then so did my iPad. One tap and I was taking that call. Gorgeous.

So I know I’ll use that again and I know that I’ll use it when my Mac is doing it too. Maybe even more so: I do a lot of phone interviews so I’m assuming I will be able to use Audio Hijack Pro to record these. This could even transform my biggest problem of prevaricating before phoning people. When they are one tap away, I’m going to tap.

If you’re using iOS 8 on an iPhone and an iPad, those two already work together, you’re set. If you want to do it with your Mac too, you need to do a couple of things. Read this full piece on Macworld for exactly how to do it.

What I’ll be buying after yesterday’s Apple announcements

Nothing. That’s no reflection on the new hardware, it is a semantic reflection on how the three things I will take away are all free software. Apple announced OS X Yosemite and I know this is good because I’ve been using it for months.

It’s one of those that, like OS X Mavericks before it and iOS 8 now, you can’t necessarily point to a feature that is overwhelming and an absolute must-have, but you try going back to the iOS 7 or the previous OS X.

Tell a lie. Continuity. I’ve experienced this feature already and it’s going to become normal. Start a message on my iPhone and finish it on my Mac without doing anything in between. Just pop the iPhone down on the desk, if I like, and carry on typing mid-sentence, mid-word on my Mac. Answering calls on the iPad when my iPhone is in another room. Definitely a killer feature.

So much so that if you have a Mac that will run OS X Yosemite, go get it. Available now and free on the Mac App Store.

An update to iOS 8 is also free but coming on Monday. The biggest new feature is Apple Pay and I don’t yet know how that will work here in the UK but for the States, it’s great.

Just to wrap up the three, there are actually two more three free things and Apple calls them all iWork. I honestly don’t know whether anyone else ever uses or remembers that term now as I think of the three parts of iWork as separate things. They’re Pages, the word processor, Numbers, the spreadsheet and Keynote, the presentation software. All very good, now all updated – twice. Once for OS X Yosemite, once for iOS 8.

In late 2012, I think it was the possibility of a Retina-screen iMac that made me look at replacing my ancient Mac Pro. They didn’t bring out a Retina one, not until yesterday, but I am so very happy with the 27in iMac I did buy that I’m not fussed. And I will remain unfussed until I see one in the flesh and covet its screen.

Down at the cheaper end of the Mac line, there is the newly revamped Mac mini. If I were in the market, I’d be looking seriously at that.

Still, who knew that Apple’s advertising line for yesterday’s event would be a gag? “It’s been way too long,” it said, and I don’t know what people expected but not that it was a reference to the iPhone 6 launch a few weeks ago.