A Live Look At macOS Tahoe’s New Features

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com.

Let's take a look at some of the new features in macOS Tahoe.

Alright, so thanks for joining me.

This is a live episode.

I'm just going to go and take a look at some of the stuff that's in macOS Tahoe and, you play around with some of the new features.

You can ask me questions in the chat, but I'm just going to kind of explore what's new, which is kind of what I do all the time anyway.

So in macOS Tahoe, we've got a ton of new things.

One of the new big things, of course, is a whole revamp of Spotlight.

So we have Spotlight that works still in the same way as before with command space bringing it up like that. but now we have these four sections so kind of like five sections really of spotlight uh the main one which allows us to do everything we did before and we could just search for anything right so you can search for apps you can search for files all sorts of stuff like that um in addition to that uh you can choose one of these four subsections of it uh the first one being applications only the second one being files only the third being special actions only and the last one being the new functionality of the clipboard history the applications only section is important because we don't have launchpad anymore launchpad is no longer part of mac os um people have mixed feelings about that a lot of people hated launchpad a lot of people just used it with uh neither loving it or hating it and then a few people loved it um but you still need a good way to launch apps and you've got the dock here at the bottom sure that's the best way to launch your most common apps right but uh you want to use launchpad which is usually here on the dock and now we have something new um but you know before people could trigger it with the keyboard shortcut bring up launchpad and you can launch an app with this new thing here in the dock is a replacement for Launchpad, which just takes you to this here, which is just Spotlight, but only apps.

So you now have a list of all your apps.

And this kind of looks like Launchpad, but it also kind of looks like the app library in iOS and iPadOS, the last screen on your home screen sequence.

It's an alphabetical list of all the apps.

So we've got, you know, all the apps here, starting with A.

You've got some suggestions here at the top.

You've got categories here.

So you could just say, oh, I just want utilities.

And it would just show you what is categorized as utilities.

Categories are, according to the app themselves, you can't like categorize yourself.

So you can go through here, but also the most important thing is you can do what you did in Launchpad and what you do in Spotlight and just start typing to narrow things down.

So you get like CA and there's calculator, calendar and all that.

And if the app is the one that you want, like calculator, you can just press return and it launches it.

So for those of us that used launchpad like that, trigger it, type a couple keys, return, this new functionality works the same way.

And there is a keyboard shortcut you can customize for this.

If we go into system settings, keyboard, and then keyboard shortcuts, then you can go to spotlight and there's this customizable show apps keyboard shortcut here you could set it to whatever you want set it to what you had launchpad set to before and enable it and then you kind of your workflow is uninterrupted you could use the keyboard shortcut trigger it type return but you could also click this scroll through it find what you want and launch what we lose from launchpad is the ability to you know customize things put folders rearrange the apps put some apps on the first screen, some on the second.

It's now just a big alphabetical list, which ironically, I think is what a lot of people kept asking for in Launchpad.

How can I alphabetize everything?

And now you can do that.

But then there's people on the other end of it saying, oh, I'd like to customize everything and not having things in alphabetical.

So you've got to mix, but you could still use the doc.

You can still go to the applications folder and launch things, create any of your own aliases, shortcuts, all sorts of stuff.

And if you bring up a spotlight search normally, just command space, you could still just type and then it will go and show you, you know, the obvious result, which in this case is the calculator app.

So you don't even have to go to that special section to launch things.

So that's that.

You've got the other sections here of a spotlight.

I'll escape here to go back to this.

And here's, you know, the files only.

And this is great.

If you know, you want to search for files, you just go here.

You even can, you know, narrow it down right off the bat there and say, I just want pages and just can be pages, documents, results.

The third section is actions.

It's all these quick actions that you could perform.

And this isn't new.

You could have done these before, but now they're spelled out.

They're like all listed here.

So you could find, you know, what's available and not have to kind of like look for some secret list online.

So here's like send message.

And when you do it, it does it in Spotlight.

So you can send, you know, whatever to, and then you choose a recipient or recipients and you send it right there from Spotlight.

And there's a bunch of stuff in here, a bunch of interesting things, some of which existed before, some of which are kind of new things you would expect, like being able to create notes and reminders and stuff.

And then a few utility things, but you could also add your own stuff that are shortcuts.

So you can create shortcuts in the shortcuts app.

And you not only can have those triggered here, but you can have input in the shortcuts app be like something you type, which is really neat.

And also it kind of turns shortcuts into a, or sorry, Spotlight into a shortcuts launcher.

So you don't have to rely on this menu up here to launch stuff.

You can now go and, you know, use Spotlight to do it, which is nice.

And then the last part of Spotlight is the history.

And the history, it's got no results here.

Let's get some results in there.

So I will launch text edit here.

And, or actually, let's just go to there.

There we go.

And I'll copy stuff.

Copy, copy.

And now when I go to Spotlight, Command-Space, and then Command-4 to get to that clipboard history, it should show me the stuff I copied.

And it's not.

I wonder if it's because I'm screen sharing here to be able to pull off this right here.

Yeah, see, there it is.

Interesting.

It's not showing me results.

So normally you would see the results of your clipboard history here.

So you could look at stuff you copied a few back.

But obviously, one of the things I'm doing here is getting in the way of it remembering the clipboard history.

Maybe it's not doing it because, you know, or maybe it's not showing me the clipboard history as a security measure here since I am broadcasting.

That's certainly very possible.

I'll try copying here something from pages and then going command base four and nope, still no result.

So I'm thinking it's a security thing uh but i'll have that in many of my regular tutorials coming up so that's a look at that um so yeah so dave asked uh command space launches the old style spotlight how do you get the additional four options so yeah i mean there are several ways right you can click here and then you can click on one of you can use command one command two command three command four by clicking cool thing is is because command space is already using command you can do command space Command 1.

Hold the Command key down the whole time.

So Command space 1 or Command and then 3.

Command space 1, Command space 2, Command space 3 to get to them.

The app, I showed you the shortcut for getting to the app section.

It would be great if Apple would add shortcuts for the other three, especially clipboard history, right?

Be able to, great to be able to map that to a keyboard shortcut.

So far, they haven't done that.

So, so Michael asks, is the OS appearing any slower or faster or more responsive or less responsive?

I didn't really notice any difference.

I'm using it primarily on my MacBook Air M2.

So not exactly the most robust newer system like my Mac Studio.

My Mac Studio is actually older, but it's a Mac Studio M1 Ultra and it's got tons of memory in it.

The M2 MacBook Air is a base M2 with 8 gigs of RAM.

So I don't really notice any issues with speed on that.

So that's good news.

Let's go and look at some other features.

I think a big new feature here in the Finder, right?

You've got the ability in the Finder now to customize the folder size.

Let me go and switch to icon view.

And notice I've got two folders already customized here.

But it starts with basically these blue folders.

These folders have been this shade of blue forever, but now we can customize the folders by going to system settings, go into appearance, and then we can change the folder color right here.

So you can change the folder color, the default folder color to red or one of those other colors or choose a color from here.

So, you know, we could bring it down like that and you could see a change.

And then you have this other slider here.

So this will take it darker. lighter so um yeah the colors and you can even do a color picker here so if you're doing something like you you want it to match the desktop background uh you can do that so that's nice for the default color and i'll go back to automatic to get to that you know mac os folder blue color but you can also customize each individual folder like i have here so control click right click or two finger click it and then choose customize folder um and you get to this whole interface also have just chosen one of these colors here.

So I can make it green like that.

You don't get custom colors.

You only get these seven.

That's it.

And they correspond to the seven colors that were previously used and still used by tags.

And in fact, what you're doing is you're tagging these folders.

So the old color tags like red, orange, blue, yellow, the ones that originally go back to labels from 10 years ago in macOS.

You use those, but you could also create your own.

You can create a work label that's red and use that, and then the folder will be colored red.

Whatever the last color is here, and you can just get rid of all the tags, and it'll change back to its default color.

So let's keep that at that green there.

And then you could also, in Customize Folder, now you could go and choose from all these different standard little icons.

So the idea is here is you can pick something.

So maybe, you know, you can choose this globe or maybe this is school stuff.

So a little graduation cap there.

And then, you know, if you get tired of all of these, which kind of do a little imprint on the folder, you could go to emoji and then choose from all the emoji or Unicode characters, right?

Because you could select anything here.

Strangely, you can't just select regular letters but that's okay because like if you search for g for instance you'll find all the unicode g's like these which aren't the standard g's but you can do like you know g circle kind of thing um but you could also just choose like a cool emoji so you know if you wanted to like uh have a folder that had reviews of restaurants or something that you were saving you could put a pizza slice there or just, you know, have fun with it.

But the idea is they differentiate themselves and visually, you know, we can grab onto these.

I think it would get a bit cluttered if we just put emoji on all of them, right?

But if you had like the important folders, the ones you needed to get to had a color and or emoji character, it will draw you right to them.

Here's what they look like in list view.

So you can see it's a lot harder to see here.

Of course, you could bring up the view options and and change the icon size.

That's not new.

That's always been around, but that helps to identify if you put emoji characters for these.

So it's like a really cool new feature.

And I know people have been customizing their folders forever.

You could still do Command-I and you still can paste something completely your own here.

So your own folder graphic or whatever, that all still works.

It's just that now we have a quick way to do it and a way that works with iCloud and will sync and everything where those custom icons didn't.

So we've got that.

Yeah, so I've, okay, so let me go and try to show you some more things that we've got here.

We have some big new things that I'm really excited about in the shortcuts app.

So let's go to shortcuts.

And in addition to like the standard shortcuts and stuff we had before, everything before is there.

We've got two big new features.

One is automation.

So this is something that has been around for a while on the iPhone, the idea that you can create an automation that's a trigger for a shortcut to run.

But it's even more powerful on Mac.

Why?

Because, well, we can do like stuff like shell scripts and Apple scripts and JavaScript.

And we can react to things like changes in folders, like connecting drives or stuff like that. you know, even display connections and stuff.

We can react to lots of different things on the Mac, including the basics like time of day or alarm going off, or when we get a message or an email.

So that's really cool.

So you could set something up to run on certain time of day.

And then once you set it up in here, now you set it, okay, when is it going to be?

And you set the time and you could say run immediately, no confirmation needed, maybe notify or not.

And you say next, And then you can choose one of your existing shortcuts to make, or you can just make a new shortcut.

So that's important because you can test it out and all that stuff.

But then you can schedule it to run here.

Like I have one set when items are added to the screenshots folder.

Here, if I can, I can double click on this automation and I could do this whole thing.

This is some future tutorial I'll be doing, but it's basically going to look for the folder contents of the screenshots folder.

And this actually isn't even a working one right now.

It's something I'm doing in progress.

It's gonna look for what's in the screenshots folder and then make decisions based on what's there, what to do.

But in this case, I've got it changing the file name.

So not using the standard file name and screenshot goes in the screenshots folder and then the file name gets changed.

You could do all sorts of other stuff with this.

I think you can see it's going to be incredibly powerful.

So, okay.

So we've got that.

Also, the other big thing is a simple, one little simple action.

Let's create a, well, actually, I don't even need to create a new shortcut.

I've got one right here.

This simple action is this one right here.

You can see this is actually a one action shortcut.

And all it does is it's set to receive some input.

The input is, if I look at the details here, Input is show in Spotlight, receive input from Spotlight.

That's important because that ties to what I was talking about earlier, that you could trigger something from Spotlight in that actions section.

So it's just going to do that.

And it's going to do one thing.

It's going to use this new action here.

I'll search for model, use model.

And this is Apple Intelligence.

It's allowing you to access Apple Intelligence through the shortcuts app.

It's not completely new because if you install the chat GPT app, before.

You got ChatGPT actions that you could use.

So you already could make a shortcut that sent something to ChatGPT, got a response and did something.

But this uses Apple intelligence, which is one thing.

The other thing is, is you get to choose a private cloud compute, which is Apple intelligence with Apple's servers, standard Apple intelligence.

On device, which is just use a large language model that is on your Mac.

That's Apple intelligence with no server, no internet connection required, or ask chat GPT.

So you could do any one of those.

The on-device is very attractive, especially if you're not looking to ask it, like, give me some information, tell me about the war of 1812 or something.

You're not looking for that.

You're looking for something like, you know, to categorize these items or something like that, where it really doesn't need to draw on a lot of knowledge to it.

But I have this one set to private cloud compute, and then just sends the prompt, give me a list of synonyms for the word or phrase, and then it takes the shortcut input and inserts it here.

Just give me a list of the single line separated by commas, don't include any other text.

So what happens when I run this using command space, command three for actions, and this was called synonyms, but I assigned a quick key to it.

You can assign these little quick keys to things.

So I can do SN and then return, and it asks for input.

So I'll type clever, and it's going to call out to Apple Intelligence, and hopefully it'll get a response here.

Let's see, oh, there it is.

So it gives me that.

And then even cooler, remember I talked before about how I can just do SN, and I could have the input on the same line.

So space, clever, like that, and return, and it'll do it like that, and gives me a list of synonyms. and yeah i know a lot of people are saying well the thesaurus built into mac os can give you synonyms but uh two things about that one is just just a demo of what you can do here insert your own useful thing second is i think uh this could be more useful than a thesaurus because i set it up to be word or phrase right so you can maybe describe something here or put a couple words or put something that may not show up in the thesaurus and come up with some answers anyway way, this little result that shows here, you know, it's easy to copy and then paste it somewhere.

So I now have a cool little synonym finder that I could use when writing, basically an AI thesaurus.

So that's really cool.

So that's the new stuff in shortcuts.

It doesn't seem like much.

It's one new thing, automations, and it's one new action, the use model.

But boy, are both of those powerful.

I mean, I can't wait to come up with some ideas of like, you know, a list of things that could be done, but it's all fed into AI and then produces kind of an interesting, interesting results based on that list.

I don't know, there could be all sorts of stuff.

Plus you can take the results, like you could ask the AI maybe to say only respond with like these three things, like do this, do this, or do this, you know, choice one, two, and three.

And then you could give it some input and then have the AI decide which one of those three things you should do.

Like maybe which folders should something go into?

Based on the name of this file, should this be business, personal, or other?

And then actually look for those three words and then put it in there.

Could be some interesting stuff.

So that's really cool.

Let's go and take a look here at some of the others, maybe some of the smaller stuff.

Oh, control center, I think, is a really cool thing here.

You got control center, and you could customize the controls.

That's a big new deal.

You could add all sorts of controls to this, mostly which are buttons.

So you can drag a button and add it here.

Oh, you got to like, okay, capture screen.

I can add it to control center if I want for whatever reason, and I can remove it.

But you can also, and Apple just really glossed over this and all other stuff.

You got this plus button here.

You do plus, and now you can add a second control center.

And let's make this music.

And I'll go to sounds.

And on the music control center here, there we go, sounds, I'll add volume.

I'll add recognize music.

I'll add now playing.

And done.

And then, so now I've got regular control center.

And I also have music control center, right?

So you can have multiple control centers.

That really cuts down on how many little buttons you need here, right?

because you can have multiple ones.

This could just be a simple list of just a few things that you can do, you know, that takes away a lot of these items here.

So that's really cool.

What else?

We've got lots of tiny little features in this.

We've got new apps.

The Journal app is new.

And the Journal app is, of course, what was on iOS before.

And you could basically add images, add text, you know, create a journal.

And I think a really cool thing on both iOS 26 and macOS Tahoe is you can create multiple journals.

I have always kept a business journal where I just kind of record what I did each day, what I accomplished each day.

It's usually like one line of text.

And I just, you know, do that elsewhere.

But I could now have a second journal here.

You know, I can have my journal where I do regular stuff.

And then I could have a journal, it's just a business journal.

And it's just going to be a bunch of these one lines.

And that'll really be cool.

But also you can, you know, add links and stuff to it.

So you can have a journal that you just record like, you know, music you liked that day or ideas or whatever.

I think it really expands the journal app.

And also, of course, this syncs over iCloud.

So you can, you know, have multiple journals and add to them both in your iPhone and Mac and your iPad.

And then also, you know, review them on that.

So there's a lot of cool stuff like that.

Let me go and take a look at the chat here.

Let's see.

Does Tahoe finally allow you to create a sticker?

I don't believe it does, but it does allow you to create those Genmoji in Image Capture.

So that's another thing I didn't.

Or Image Playground, sorry.

Image Playground, I know people love to hate on this, but new features in Tahoe allow you to create Genmoji in Image Playground, which is, I think, important.

You don't have to go to messages to create them.

You can just kind of play around with them here.

And in addition to that, you can create a Genmoji by simply adding two emojis together.

So if I wanted to take, say, this emoji with the sunglasses and this one of the chick, and it doesn't like that one.

Let's try that.

Let's do the dinosaur, maybe.

Sunglasses and dinosaur.

It likes that one better.

It's just going to combine the two of those and create a little Genmoji.

So it's kind of like that.

But yeah, I get what you're saying about the stickers.

I don't think you can.

At least I haven't seen it.

The other thing you could do is in addition to the Apple AI, you know, Apple intelligence to create images, you can now just say, I want ChatGPT to do it.

And if you choose any style, you basically just describe whatever you want.

ChatGPT will create it.

Like using the ChatGPT app or website and asking it for an image.

But you can also choose from a few styles that has here. this is good because chat gpt is a much more general image creator whereas apple intelligence creates things that always look like apple intelligence like you know you know that oh that was created with apple intelligence it kind of has that look to it but if you then go down to say chat gpt then it will create stuff and i like to use it for things that you know the examples are always like of people doing stuff and all i like to create like backgrounds.

I like to create images for playlists and give it some, you know, idea of like what I want it to be.

And, and, and sometimes just like desktop backgrounds and wallpapers for the iPhone and stuff, uh, you can use this to just quickly generate those from like cool ideas you've got.

It doesn't have to be like a big, like, Oh, what am I using Apple intelligence for?

You can just have fun with it.

Um, so there's that.

So, yeah, I mean, that's a, I'm glad you mentioned that because I did want to talk about image playground there.

I think it's really useful, especially if you create presentations to be able to get your graphics from someplace other than having to use the same clip art everybody else's or buying clip art and stuff.

So that's a lot.

I've got a bunch of videos coming out.

I've got a video that's going to go through the top 10 features to be next week.

I've got another video that's going to run through small features, and then I'm going to do deep dives on some of the features, just like going really into like what they do and stuff.

And there's enough for me to basically, by the end of the year, I'll still be doing videos, deep diving into stuff on macOS Tahoe and what you can do.

But for now, I think I want to close off this live.

Hopefully this was a success.

Thank you all for joining me.

I'll leave this up in a little bit.

It'll appear for anybody to review it and comment and ask other questions there.

So, thanks for watching.