Apple launched a third developer beta of its desktop OS. The beta version of MacOS Sierra 10.12.4 is available for all users who signed up for the public beta test program. The latest beta build brought one cool feature from Apple’s iOS.
The feature that saw the light of day on the latest build is night shift. Night shift alters the color balance of the screen as night comes, reducing the percent of blue light emitted from the screen.
As you probably know, according to theories, blue light exposure can make us harder to sleep since blue light prevents the creation of melatonin, a natural hormone that helps us fall asleep.
The night shift was featured on the iOS ever since iOS 9.3 and is now available for the MacOS Sierra too. The feature proved to be very popular on iPhones and iPads, even though its effects are unproven.
Other improvements found in the latest beta version of MacOS Sierra include support for dictation in Shanghainese, as well as improvements to Siri, giving the virtual assistant more knowledge about cricket scores, with detailed cricket info regarding international games as well as the Indian Premier League cricket games. There are some tweaks to how PDFs are displayed, in the case when developers use the PDFKit API in their code.
You can sing up for Apple’s beta programs here, and the new beta builds can be found in the updates section of the Mac App Store.