Mac OS Sonoma has just launched as I’m releasing this video, and whilst the changes this year
aren’t as significant as previous years, or even the other operating systems, there are
some great new features available to your Mac. But knowing where to start can be difficult,
so in this video I’m going to show you 8 things I think you should check out right
away. Stick with me to the end of the video, if you want to know what your Mac can now do.
OK, let’s get into it.
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Wallpaper on your Mac has just gotten significantly more interesting,
with the inclusion of animated video wallpapers. When locked,
these wallpapers play, just like the ones you get on the Apple TV. The second you login,
they do this nice little freeze animation, pausing at whatever point the video stopped at,
meaning that your wallpaper could theoretically be different every time that you login.
To choose a wallpaper, open System Settings and choose Wallpaper from
the left menu. The Dynamic Wallpapers from the previous OS are still there,
but you’ve now also got landscape, cityscape, underwater and earth, and you can either click
on one to download it and use it, or you go to Shuffle and choose to shuffle a collection,
or all of them. Apple have been adding to these throughout the beta releases,
so it’s possible that we might see more get added to this over time.
***
If there are any websites or services that you use on a regular basis, you can add them
to your dock as a web-app, making accessing them quicker and easier, and it’s really easy to do.
So here for example, I’ve got YouTube open in Safari. I can go to File,
and then choose Add to Dock, and this does a couple of things. First,
it adds a direct link to YouTube, complete with the logo, in the dock of my Mac,
so I can just click on that any time that I like and it will open YouTube. But notice how
it does it. It opens YouTube in its own Safari web app, so it looks cleaner and is less cluttered.
It’s a simple change, but a good one if you’re someone who uses the dock a lot,
and has websites that you tend to use all the time, and treat them like apps anyway.
And if you want to remove a web app, open LaunchPad, notice that you can see the app
in here also, and just drag the app icon to the bin. Just like that, it’s gone.
***
You can now add widgets to your Mac’s desktop, just like you can on your iPhone and your iPad.
It’s a similar experience across all the major Apple devices, and if you found a use
for them on your smaller devices, you might also find a use for them here, on your Mac.
To add a widget, right-click on your desktop and choose Edit Widgets. You can search for
the one that you want, you can choose All Widgets to scroll through everything that
your Mac has to offer, or you can choose by app. To add a widget, this battery one for example,
just tap the green plus to add it. You can then drag it around as you wish,
and you’d tap the minus button if you want to get rid of it.
I’ll add a Reminders widget. Notice that if you then tap on the widget itself,
you can choose specifics for the widget. So here for example,
you can choose which Reminders list specifically you’d like to display here. Oh,
and these widgets are interactive, just like on iPhone and iPad now, which is really useful.
Also, notice that I’ve got a Spotify widget here, even though Spotify isn’t
installed on this Mac. Your Mac can now display some widgets from your iPhone,
so long as they’re both up to date and on the same Apple ID, so if there’s a particular widget
from a third-party that you use all the time on your iPhone, you might be able to use it here.
Also, notice what happens if I open an app. The widgets grey out into the background,
only illuminating again when you tap on the desktop, meaning that you can avoid
distractions while you’re working, but quickly get access to the information you need, when
you want it. I reckon this is going to be better for those of us who use big external displays,
but drop me a comment and let me know how you’re using widgets here on the Mac now.
***
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you can see on-screen, or follow the link in the description of this video to learn more.
***
If you use a video conferencing service like Zoom,
there are some excellent new features in OS Sonoma that you should absolutely try out.
So in this example, you can see that I’ve joined a Zoom meeting, and if I click on the
green Camera icon up at the top of the screen, I have some options to use within the app.
I can enable or disable Portrait mode, and choose how much intensity I want
to use. Portrait mode is where the background is blurred out,
helping to ensure that the focus is on you, and not on your cluttered background.
Then there’s Studio Light underneath that, which helps to highlight you, and can be useful if you
perhaps don’t have a great lighting setup. Again, you can play around with the settings here.
Reactions are honestly a bit corny, but I can imagine some situations where you might use
them to lighten a meeting up a little, you either tap on the buttons on-screen to choose a reaction,
or you can do things like thumbs-up or love heart with your hands to trigger them instead.
Below that you’ve got a couple of microphone modes to choose from, either Standard, or Voice
Isolation, which can be useful if you’re in a less than ideal area when you’re on a video call.
If you then begin sharing your screen, you’ve got some additional options there,
related specifically to screen sharing. Notice that when you’re sharing your screen,
the button becomes Purple instead of green. Here, you can play around with the Presenter Overlay,
choosing from either a small overlay, where your face gets dropped into this small circle
that you can then move around the screen, or Large, where your face is still the focus,
but whatever you’re presenting is still very much visible in the background.
You can combine all of there different things together which is good, so I guess it’s going
to be a case of trying everything out until you find something that you like.
***
A huge feature that’s come to Safari across all platforms this year is the inclusion of profiles,
so let me show you how to create them on your Mac. In Safari, choose Safari
from the menu bar up top, and then Settings. Here you’ll see a new option called Profiles.
If you’ve not already started using the feature, you’ll see the option Start Using
Profiles. Notice that this also gives you some information about what profiles are,
they’re like separate versions of Safari with their own separate history,
cookies and website data assigned to each one, and you can have lots of different ones if you wish.
Choose Start Using Profiles.
On this next page, we’ll give our profile a name. You could of course have one for personal use,
one for work, one for school maybe, or you could get a bit more granular,
so I’ll call mine Work Project. Assign a symbol, and then do the same for a colour.
You also have the option of creating a new bookmarks folder for this profile,
or using an existing one. Choose Create Profile when you’re done.
So, we’ve created our profile, as the extremely bright wallpaper will confirm. You can see in the
upper left that this window is a Work Project window. You can see that if I click there,
I can create a new window in the Work Project profile, or I can create one
in the Personal profile, as well as being able to switch between the two profiles.
Let me show you why this is useful. I’ve logged into Google using my Work Project
profile, but I’ve not logged in on the Personal Profile. I’ve put the two windows side by side,
and if I refresh both pages, you can see that the Work Project Profile is
still very much logged in, while the Personal one isn’t. So if you
have different logins for different websites that you use depending on
the kind of work you’re doing, profiles are a quick and effective way of managing them.
***
If you have websites or web apps that you access using a login that you share with
another trusted contact, you can now create password groups, specifically
designed to let you share constantly updated passwords with other people.
Open Settings, choose Passwords, and unlock the option using your computer password. On
the next screen, choose the plus icon next to the search bar, and choose New Shared Group.
You can see that your Mac will explain to you what this is and how it works,
we’re going to assign people to our group,
and we can choose which passwords we do and don’t want to share. Choose Continue.
We’ll give the group a name, I’m going to call this one Family,
and then we need to choose Add People, to being adding contacts to our group. Simply search for
the contact from your contacts list, and add them in, by selecting them and choosing Add.
When you’re ready, choose Create. You can see that your Mac may prompt you
to ensure that both you and the other contacts in your group have updated your
devices to the most recent operating systems to ensure that this works.
On the next screen, you’re going to choose the passwords to move. This is important,
because you’re not copying passwords from one group to another, we actually move
them from our main account into the family group in this instance. Don’t worry though,
you’ll still have full access to the passwords,
and if anyone has to change the password, it gets updated for everyone automatically.
If you like, you can notify the person via Message that you’ve shared the password group with them.
And that’s it, the password group is created. If you tap on the Plus icon here,
you can create a new password, move passwords into this group,
or add people to it, and if you tap Manage just above this,
you can delete members if you need to, giving you full control over how you share passwords.
***
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***
Notes is a great stock Apple app, better than ever now,
and whilst it’s great for jotting down ideas and research, it’s not so good if
you want to then take that information and present it in a slicker format. In Sonoma,
you can now take a Notes, and with one click, dump the contents of that note into Pages.
So to do this, open a Note in the Notes app, and click the Share button. From the dropdown menu,
choose Open in Pages. Your computer will take a moment to convert the content over,
but then here it is, visible in a new Pages file.
Now obviously, once you’ve got the content here,
you still need to go through and format it how you want to in Pages,
there isn’t a magic button you can tap that does that for you, which is kind of a shame,
I reckon with AI that’s something Apple could and should implement, perhaps in a future version,
but if nothing else, you’ve now got a quick way of getting content from Notes, into Pages.
***
Spotlight Search isn’t new in MacOS Sonoma, but it’s improved, and I would absolutely encourage
you to check it out, whether you’re someone who lives in Spotlight Search on your Mac like I do,
or whether you’re someone who doesn’t really know what all the fuss is about,
there’s never been a better time to start using it than here on Sonoma.
A reminder, you access Spotlight Search by tapping Command and Space Bar. You can search for pretty
much anything, there are far too many things to cover here in this short video section, I’ve
created an entire video all about Spotlight Search on the Mac which I’ll link to in the description
of this video, but you can see on screen now the kind of searches you can run and get really rich,
useful information back. Sports teams, music artists, the weather in different parts of
the world, the time in different parts of the world, you can run conversions and
perform mathematical sums here, you can lookup stock just by typing in the name of the stock,
it’s really clever, and more than ever, your Mac can provide you with a wealth of information,
just by quickly typing something into Spotlight Search. Definitely check it out in Sonoma,
I reckon it’s something you’ll find yourself using all the time.
***
So there you go, those are the 8 things I think you should check out right away,
after updating to Mac OS Sonoma. What do you think,
anything here that I should have included instead? Drop me a comment and let me know.
And as ever, if you found this video useful, do please consider leaving me a like,
and subscribing to my channel for more content like this in the future.
See you on the next video.