MacMost: Archives

The Notes app gets a bunch of new features with Catalina, bringing it up-to-speed with Notes in iOS 13. You can do a lot more with Checklists now, share folders of Notes, and view your notes in a gallery. You can also search your Notes for objects in photos and words in scanned documents.

Improved security is a big new feature of macOS Catalina. Some features, like a read-only system volume, extra checks by Gatekeeper and the deprecation of kernal extensions will barely even be visible to the typical Mac user. Other features like new permission settings for apps and websites and Sign In With Apple will give us new security techniques that we can practice.

The iTunes app is gone. So how do you sync your iPhone, iPad or iPod? If you are still using a cable or Wi-Fi to sync your devices and not iCloud, you can still do it in macOS Catalina. That functionality has simply mostly moved to the Finder. You can sync music, movies, photos, books and other things this way. Ringtones is tricky, but you can still put custom ringtones on your iPhone. Even older iPods are supported by Catalina.

There are hundreds of keyboard shortcuts for Mac users. There are Mission Control shortcuts, Finder shortcuts, system shortcuts, application shortcuts and more. Many you can find by just looking through the menu bar for that application. You can find system ones by looking in the System Preferences under Keyboard.

The new Reminders app adds a lot of new useful features. You can now set an icon and color for each list, place lists inside of folder, and view all of your lists in one long screen. You can also see which reminders items from all lists are due today or in the upcoming days. When creating a new reminder, you can easily add a due date, location, photo or URL.

While major new changes get all of the attention, here are 10 minor things that you may not have heard about, but could become your favorite new features in macOS Catalina. You can put Dark Mode on automatic, block email senders, use picture-in-picture with QuickTime Player, tint the color of your screen, and much more.

The latest Mac operating system has arrived with a general release today. Catalina has been in developer and beta testing since June. It joins iOS 13 and other device operating systems that Apple released last month to bring the entire line of Apple hardware up-to-date.

A new feature in iOS 13 and iPadOS is the ability to have Shortcuts trigger automatically, at a certain time of day, when you launch an app, change a setting or move to a new location. You can use this to make Shortcuts much more useful. Take a look at two quick examples. The first simply forces the Calendar to jump to the current day every time you open it. The second will display a special Reminders list when you turn on Do Not Disturb, but only if there is at least one item in that list.

When you buy a new Apple device, you can also purchase an extended warranty called AppleCare+. This not only covers the Mac, iPhone, iPad or other device for an extra year or two, but also adds accident protection and other benefits. With AppleCare+ you can replace a broken screen or other accident damage for a fee much less than the cost of an actual repair. You can also get additional theft or loss protection for iPhones. But is AppleCare+ worth the price?

With iOS 13 and iPadOS you can now swipe-type using the default standard keyboard. Apple calls it QuickPath and it can significantly speed up your typing on the tiny iPhone touch screen. You can also use it on the iPad, but you have to switch to the floating keyboard first.

A new release of Pages, version 8.2, includes a much-requested feature where you can set the default font for basic templates. This allows you to continue to use the Blank template in Pages, but with a font face and size set in preferences. The Body style will match your font and size, and other styles will use the font and a size of the appropriate scale to Body. Another new feature is a new View, Go To menu which is also in Keynote as Slide, Go To.

Apple has been quick to release minor updates to iOS 13.1 and iPadOS 13.1. The second update, 13.1.2, has a whole list of bug fixes for users. Most notably, it fixes a Camera app bug and a car Bluetooth connection bug. It also fixes a problem where sometimes the flashlight feature didn’t work.

The new Markup tools in iPadOS look and work better than ever. You can use them to add lines, arrows, highlights, shapes, text and other things to your PDFs, images, screenshots and more. Learn how to access and use the new tools.

It can be annoying to have notifications appear at the top right corner of your screen while you are typing. Normally, you have to move the cursor to click on the Close button to dismiss those. However, you can build a simple JavaScript service in Automator to do it, and then use a keyboard shortut to trigger that service.

A new feature of the iPhone 11 and iPhone 11 Pro is the ability to take better photos at night and in low light using a combination of techniques. Multiple cameras and used and many images are taken over a period of time, and then pieced together to create a brighter image with much more detail than can be done with a regular photo. Moving objects are handled without trails or streaking.

The new version of Safari in iPadOS (iOS 13) is now a desktop browser rather than a mobile browser. This means sites should look and work like they do on a Mac, not an iPhone. With this comes new features such as a download manager, zoom buttons, per-site settings, and one new feature that even Safari for Mac is missing.

A new feature of iPadOS is the ability to control your iPad using a Bluetooth mouse. You can add a mouse as an assistive touch device in the accessibility settings and then you get a round cursor on the screen that you can mose with the mouse. You can click to simulate a tap at that location. You also get a menu that you can bring up to access things like Home and volume. There are a variety of ways to customize this feature.

The new major update for iPad, known as iPadOS or iOS 13.1 for iPad is now available. This major release includes changes to the home screens, new features and switches Safari to a default-desktop browser instead of a mobile one. Version 13.1 is the first version of iPadOS, corresponding to iOS 13.1. iOS 13.0 was a short-lived iPhone-only release.

iPadOS (AKA iOS 13) brings a ton of new features to your iPad and makes it behave more like a Mac. You can now switch between multiple slideover windows and have windows from the same app in a slideover. You can select, copy, paste and undo more easily when typing text. The Home screen can include both app icons and the Today widgets at the same time. You can swipe-type in a floating single-finger keyboard, add fonts, and use a column view and other new functions in the Files app.

A little-mentioned feature of iOS 13 and iPadOS is the ability to apply the same effects to videos as you can to photos. You can easily adjust light, colors, cropping, rotation and apply filters to entire videos, right in the Camera and Photos apps.