10 New Things To Try On Your Mac In macOS Monterey

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Here are ten new things to try after you upgrade to macOS Monterey. 

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So macOS Monterey includes tons of new features. Here are ten things to try out right away. First there's Focus. Instead of Do Not Disturb, On or Off, you can now set all these different modes and customize Do Not Disturb to meet your needs. To set these up go to System Preferences, Notifications & Focus. Then in there go to Focus and now you can create these different modes. Just use this Plus button here, create a mode, and then for each mode here you can add people or apps that can contact you even when you're in that mode. You can also have ways to have it turned on automatically. Like when you're using an app or perhaps at a specific time or location. 

Once you've set up Focus you can go to Control Center and then you can click here and then choose a Focus mode to go to.

Notes has a new feature called Quick Notes. You can trigger it either using the 

fn key and Q or on newer Macs the Globe key and Q and you can also go to the bottom right hand corner and get this little square here. Click that and it will open up the Notes app and instantly give you access to this little note here. If you click the Link button it allows you to add a link to the page that you were at. Quick Notes appears separately here at the top. But anytime you want you can drag them into the regular categories here to make it a normal note. 

Another new feature of Notes is Tags. You can now add any tag to any note anywhere in the note with the hash or pound symbol and type whatever you want. That instantly becomes a tag. You'll see them listed here and you can click on a tag to see only the notes with that tag in it. It's easy to add and remove tags and use them anyway you want to help your organize your notes. 

Photos App have something called Live Text which allows you to select text in a photo and you can copy that text and paste it into a document or you can Control Click the text and have it translate the text or have it speak the text to you. This works in more places than just photos. You can use it on an image in Preview. You can use it on some images in Safari and you can also use it in Mail when you get an image. 

There's also a System-Wide Translation feature. This works in just about any app. So here I am in Safari, for instance. I can select some text and then Control Click it, two-finger click on a trackpad, right click on a mouse. Choose Translate and you could choose the language and you can have it speak the original. You can have it speak the translation and you can have it copy the translation. You can also have it paste the translation in if you're in an editing app. So if you want to translate something on TextEdit or Pages you can.

In System Preferences there's a new preference page for Passwords. This gives you the same features that you find in Safari. So you can access your passwords here rather than having to launch Safari. You could also use this function here which allows you to export passwords and save them. It's a way to backup your passwords. 

In System Preferences and Apple ID you can go to Hide My Email. This is a feature where you can create fake email addresses that will forward to you so you can give them out when you're signing up for things and you don't trust that service with your actual email address. 

Now one of the things I don't like about Full Screen Mode for apps is that the Menu Bar is gone. You have to move your pointer all the way to the top for the Menu Bar to appear. But now you can turn the Menu Bar on for Full Screen Apps. In System Preferences go to Dock & Menu Bar. There's an option here. Turn this Off and now when you go into Full Screen Mode the Menu Bar will remain there. 

The Voice Memos App just became a lot easier to use. Now you can go to the Settings here for each memo. You can not only set the speed but you could also have it skip periods of silence. So you see these areas of silence. It's going to skip over those. It will just jump over them making it a lot easier to listen to long voice memos. 

So now your Mac can act as an AirPlay Receiver. To turn this on go to Sharing. Then turn on AirPlay Receiver. Set it for just you for anybody on the same network or anybody that can contact your Mac. You can set a password if your want. Now with that turned On on my iPhone I can try something like Screen Mirroring. You'll see this Mac show up and then I can select it and it will mirror after I accept it here and show on my Mac screen. 

So there's some things to try right away. I'm going to be taking a closer look at a lot of these in future videos as well as a really big new feature of macOS Monterey which is the new Shortcuts App. A new way to automate things on your Mac.