Posts By: Gary Rosenzweig

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.

If you are using macOS Catalina and an iPhone with iOS 13, you now have a new option when creating a signature for a Preview document. In addition to TrackPad and Camera, you will see iPhone as another option, You can then use your iPhone screen to create a signature with your finger. But like all Continuity features, it can sometimes be tricky to get the devices to recognize each other.

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.

Mac Catalyst is the set of developer tools that makes it easier for developers to create iPad and Mac apps at the same time. With the launch of Catalina, there are already several new apps in the Mac App Store because of this. Nothing too exciting though. Here are some lists compiled by some news sites.  It is great to see this actually happening already. But over the next months and years we'll see a definite boost in available Mac apps due to this new tech.

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.

Need to create a quick Microsoft Word document but don’t have Word? No problem. Just use TextEdit. Create a rich text document in TextEdit and when you go to save, choose one of several different Word formats from the File Format pull-down menu at the bottom of the save dialog. You can also open Word documents in TextEdit, though it can’t handle any fancy formatting or objects.

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.

Everyone knows you can use Spotlight for calculations. Press Command+Space and then type something like 3+4+5 and you’ll see 12 as the result. You can then use Command+c t copy that result. You don’t need to select anything. If you then use Command+a (select all) and Command+v (paste) you can place that result back into Spotlight to start a new calculation with that number.

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.