10 New macOS Catalina Features You May Not Know About

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. In this episode let's check out ten small but useful features of macOS Catalina that you should try right away.

MacMost is brought to you thanks to a great group of supporters. Go to MacMost.com/patreon. There you could read more about it. Join us and get exclusive content.

So there are a lot of big new changes in macOS Catalina. But like every macOS update there are also all these small little useful things that you should know about. So let's take a look at ten features that I think you'll find very useful.

So let's start off by looking at something that's rarely mentioned but you're bound to notice it pretty quickly when you upgrade to Catalina. The green button on all windows you can use that to go full screen and you can also use that to go to split screen view. But now with Catalina it's a little more obvious what it does because if you hover your cursor over it you get a little menu here that gives you all the options. So instead of having to kind of guess and remember how it works you can just hover over it and select one of these. Go full screen or tile to one side and then select another app there for the other side. Likewise when you're in full screen mode if you hover over it you'll see Exit full screen. Also if you have an iPad near by that's using iOS 13 and the same Apple ID as your Mac you get the option here to use the new SIdecar feature.

Now Dark Mode isn't new for Catalina but there is a new feature. If you go to System Preferences and General you have not only Light and Dark modes that you can switch between but a new Auto mode. If you use that then at night is will switch to Dark mode automatically and then back to Light mode in the morning.

There are also minor new things in the Mail app. But the one that I like the most is the ability to easily block a sender. So if you're getting something from a company and they just won't stop, even if you unsubscribe, you can click on their email address here and then there's a Block Contact. You'll see this message is blocked from the sender up here and a shortcut to the preferences. You can also just go to Mail Preferences and then look under Junk Mail. There's a tab here for Blocked. Here you can see that it's enabled. There's that email address in the list and you can add some manually and remove any that you want and determine what happens when you get an email message from someone in this list. This really isn't useful for spam because spam is always going to come from some random address, and sometimes from a legitimate address that they're faking. So this really can't be used for junk mail filtering but it is useful when you want to block a real person or a real company from sending you email because they just won't stop.

Let's go back into System Preferences here and there are a lot of new options under Accessibility. But a couple small ones that haven't been talked about much are Zoom style and Hover Text. Zoom style isn't new. You were always able to go to Split Screen and Picture in Picture for it. What's new is Full Screen. This works is you have more than one screen attached to your Mac. So a second screen attached to your MacBook or you just have multiple screens attached to your Desktop. If you choose Full Screen then you Choose Display and the second display acts as a Zoom for the primary display.

Hover Text is really cool. If you turn it on then hold the Command key down as you move over text the text will enlarge. Just about any text will enlarge. So you can be in the Finder here now and you can look at all the different text. You can be in all sorts of different apps and read the text in all sorts of different places just by holding the Command key down when you have this option turned on. You can also go to Options here. Change the modifier, change the location of the text, the size of it, and what font is used.

Also in Accessibility under Display you now have the option to use color filters and tint your entire display. So you can enable these color filters, decide what you want to use here, use Color Tint and pick a color and the intensity for it and it will tint the display. It's something you actually see live on your physical display.

Now one of the new things in QuickTime Player is the ability to go Picture in Picture with QuickTime Player. You're watching any video that you opened in the Quicktime Player. You've got this Picture in Picture button here and now you can be viewing it in any corner of the screen. You can stretch it a little bit to make it bigger or smaller and then you can Exit and go back to the regular view in QuickTime like that. 

In addition you've got Picture in Picture in Safari. Now you had it before but the problem was it worked differently for different types of videos. For YouTube, for QuickTime video embedded in a page, for all sorts of different things it worked in different ways. Now if you're playing video in a page and you actually get the little speaker icon there you can click and hold that speaker icon and use that for Picture in Picture in a consistent way. So now you can see I've got it here and I can exit and go back to the webpage like that. 

Now while we're in Safari there's a cool new feature in the Address Bar here. Of course you can search the web, you can enter webpage addresses, and do all sorts of things here. But a new thing is to be able to find Tabs. So if you've got like thirty tabs open this will be really useful for you because you can type something and one of the results you get is Switch to Tab. So you can do this all with the keyboard. You can Command L to go to the address bar, type something, arrow down, and hit Return and it jumps to that tab. So not a big deal for these four tabs but if you're one of those people who have tons of tabs open it will be easy to switch to it. You kind of get reminded that you have this opened as well. So you go to a site like this and you'll see Switch to Tab here. You'll be like, oh yeah I've got a tab for that website already opened.

So one last little tip here that not many people are mentioning. If you're using iCloud Drive and you have Optimized turned on you may have some documents that have been downloaded to your Mac, like these here, and then some that aren't. You can see this little cloud icon there saying this one is in the cloud. Now if you have a large file and you want to get it off your drive you can Control click on it and there's a new option called Remove Download. What this does is it forces the file off your drive so it restores that space. Because it's in the cloud you'll still see it here and when you open you'll be able to just load it automatically and see it. You can, of course, Control click on it and use Download Now to grab it without even opening it. So really useful for those that are using the Optimize feature for iCloud drive.

Here's a bonus tip. In System Preferences if you go to your Apple ID then you can now see a list here at the bottom left of all the devices that have been setup with your Apple ID. Then you can select a device and get information about it and remove it from the account if you no longer have it.

Now remember there are a lot of big new changes as well. We've looked at some in previous episodes and we'll be looking at more, like all the new features of Notes and Reminders, in episodes to come.