A Quick Early Look At macOS Sonoma

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's take an early quick look at the new features in  macOS Sonoma. 

MacMost is brought to you thanks to a great group of more than 1000 supporters. Go to MacMost.com/patreon. There you can read more about the Patreon Campaign. Join us and get exclusive content and course discounts.

Now macOS Sonoma is the new version of macOS, also known as macOS 14, that we will have probably around October of this year. Apple announced it at the Worldwide Developers Conference. Let me show you some of the new features that will be coming. 

So one of the things that is sure to get a lot of attention is the new Screen Savers or to be more accurate Wallpapers because they are not really screen savers. You go into System Settings and then you go to Screen Savers you're not going to find them You want to go to Wallpaper. Now the dynamic wallpapers are shown here and you could see a whole bunch of them. They look a lot like the Apple TV screen saver. If you select one like this then you'll see it now as your Desktop wallpaper. It's just a static image. But it turns into a moving arial view if you lock your screen. So I'm going to go and lock the screen and you could see here how it moves. Now when I use Touch ID here to login you could see that it is then going to slow down and it will stop wherever it was. So that's now my Desktop wallpaper. Wherever it was I stopped here. As you can see there's a whole bunch of those. Landscapes, Cityscapes, Underwater, and Earth views. 

Now the Desktop behaves a little differently in Sonoma. If you click on it notice that border around the edge. It's a little clear what's happening if I were to put some icons here on the Desktop and also open some windows. So I've got a Finder window and a Reminders window. Now you're probably used to the idea of using F11 to clear everything away and reveal what's on the Desktop. You get this border around it. That's been there for many years. But now you get the same thing if you just click on the Desktop which is very intuitive actually and it gets the windows cleared away and now you can access the files that are here. Click again and it brings everything back. But you can use F11 the same way. This is actually highly customizable. If you go into System Settings and Desktop & Dock you could see here under Desktop you've got Show Items, so you can have those On or Off, you've got Show Widgets, which we'll look at in a minute, and Click Wallpaper to Show Desktop Items, Always or Only in Stage Manager because this is how it works in Stage Manager in macOS Ventura. 

So now let's talk about these Desktop Widgets. If you go to the Notification Center you'll see your regular widgets here. But you can take anyone of these and drag it now to the Desktop and place it there. So let's put a couple here like this and you can see how I can drop them. Now, when I Dismiss Notification Center you could see I've got those that just sit right here. If I open another window here like this you could see how they kind of fade back. You have Settings for this. In Desktop & Dock you can see there's a section called Widgets and you can see the widget's styles are Automatic, Always Monochrome, or Always Full Color. 

Safari has got a couple of new features. One of those is Profiles. So here you can go into Safari, to Settings, and then there is a new section here for Profiles. You can create a new profile. So I can create one here, let's call this Normal for normal use. I can set a color to it. I can choose whether or not to create a new Bookmarks folder for this Profile or use the existing one. I'm just going to keep on using my Favorites folder there. Create that profile and then I'm going to add another one here and say that this is one for Facebook and maybe I'll change the color here to reflect that a little bit and then I'm going to use the same Bookmarks Folder. So now I've got these two profiles. So now anytime I create a new window, you can see I can create a new Normal window or a new facebook window, the idea being that I've got, maybe, this one window here where I'm not logged into Facebook and this one where I am that could protect my privacy as I browse around and go to other pages that may have Facebook trackers on them. Or I could simply be logged into one Facebook account here and one Facebook account there. Or maybe I've got two Goggle accounts. One for home and one for work and I have a Profile for each. That way I don't have to keep logging in and logging out. 

Now you can also create something call Web Apps. So Web App is basically a website, like I'll choose MacMost here, and I'll go to Add To Dock. I'll say Add and I can quit Safari and I could see in the Dock here, here's this Web App. If I launch it you could see here it's like I'm in Safari but it says it's the name of this website instead of Safari and I'm just in this one website. So I can still navigate around in this website if I do Command Tab for switching apps you can see it acts like it is an app. If I launch Safari that's a completely different app. So I can see I've got Safari and this Web App here. If I were to click on a link here that took me to another site you can see how it actually does that in Safari. It doesn't do it inside the Web App because it is a different site. 

So there have been third party apps that have done this for awhile and they have been really handy. I think having this as a native feature is going to be great. 

A new feature in Notes is going to be the ability to link from one note to another. So I've  put some text here and I'm just going to Control Click on it and say that I want to add a link. You can see I can actually enter a Note Title. So there's this one here. I can link to this note. So now when I click here it takes me to that note. So you can now have inter-linking notes of all kinds which is going to be great for organization. 

There are a couple of new tricks in Reminders as well. One is you can create a new List and set it to the type of groceries. So we'll create this and now when you add an item it is going to categorize things. So I'll add milk here and I'll add ice cream and you can see how it is putting them in different categories like that. I could just add to a specific category or I can add something else here and it will figure out the category for that. I can drag items from one category to another if it gets them wrong. You can also just create a new regular list here and then in this list you can add things. Then you can go to Edit and there's Manage Sections. So I can add a section here and I can call this, Test 1. Then I could add another section as well and call this Test 2. Now I've got two sections here. I can drag items back and forth between the sections in this list. 

Now a big new feature for any video conferencing is going to be the new ability to do Overlays. So I'm going to do something here. I'm going to Share my screen with another computer. Now this is what I'm sharing here and I can have myself appear as something small and I can move it around, like that, or large so it puts the screen in a little window so you have a couple of neat options here for presenting your screen any yourself at the same time. 

You can also choose these things called Reactions here. I can click there and I can use Reactions like, for instance, I click the little Celebration one here and this is what the other person will see. I can also do Gestures instead. So if I put my thumbs-up right next to my head like this you could see it does a thumbs-up Reaction right there. If I do a heart shape with my hands, like this, you can see it does like that. 

Autocomplete works a little bit differently in macOS Sonoma. Watch as I type something. You could see here it has gotten gray the letters that it wants to autocomplete. If I just hit Space it does. It also sometimes appears like this. So you can see Autocomplete can make it a lot easier to quickly type things if you just kind of get in the habit of looking for those words that are there in gray and just hitting the Spacebar and going to the next word. 

I spotted something new in the Accessibility features. If you go down into them and then go into Display there's a new setting for Text Size. Go into here and you could see various different text sizes for different apps. So you've got this default setting here and if I increase it, like that, you can see how it increases there on the Desktop, here in the Finder, here in Mail. If I set this to the default but I go into a specific app and change it, it will just change it for that app. So this isn't changing the items here on the side. I assume you can still do those using the regular settings that we already have in Ventura. This is changing the content in there. It's something that we didn't really have before. So now if you have trouble reading something and in just one particular app you have the ability to go and change that. I assume more apps can be added here. Maybe even third party ones. 

Also in System Settings if you go to Siri, and now you have the ability to have the two word combination or two words and one word here as well. 

Now if you're wondering which Macs will be able to use macOS Sonoma it's no big secret. Apple has it right on its macOS Sonoma information page. For the most part it is newer Macs with Apple Silicon, you know the M1 and M2 chips in it. But you could see here in the lost older Macs including some models from 2018 and 2019 will be able to use it as well. No doubt there are a lot of smaller features we will also be getting with macOS Sonoma and there may also be new features that are added later on as we get closer to release. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.