New Small And Hidden Features In macOS Tahoe

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's take a look at some of the smaller, more hidden, features of macOS Tahoe.

So many of the new features of macOS Tahoe are going to be discussed everywhere, including here, like the new look, the new Spotlight features, the ability to customize Control Center and so on. There are a lot of smaller new features that are worth your attention. For, instance you may know that you can customize Control Center now. Bring up Control Center and there's Edit Controls here and you can now add new controls by dragging them over, remove other controls, and customize it as much as you want. 

But, did you know that you can also add a second, or third, or more Control Centers to the Menu Bar. So, of course, you've got the one, the default one, that you're customizing here. But when you're actually customizing there's a Plus Button here. Click that and it will add another one here. You can change the icon that is being used for this by clicking on these icons here. So, for instance, if you wanted to make a Control Center that was music oriented you could and just give it this little musical note here. Then you could go through the controls and with that Control Center icon selected you can select controls and put things in here that have to do with music. Like that. Now you've got your regular Control Center here as before but you have this other Control Center here as well with the controls that you want. 

Now a big part of the new look of macOS Tahoe is that the Menu Bar is now no longer a bar. It's just menu items floating at the top of the screen. Yes, it dims the color behind it a little bit but there is no longer a visible background to it. However, you can add one if you like. Go into System Settings and then go into the Menu Bar controls here. One of the options you've got is Show Menu Bar Background. So now you've got a real bar there. Just like before you can go into Accessibility if you like. Then go to Display and turn on either Increase Contrast or Reduce Transparency to make the Menu Bar even more solid. 

One of the things you may notice on your Desktop, if you've got your Drive Icons turned on like this, is that Drive Icons probably are going to change. It is no longer going to represent a spinning hard disk drive. Apple hasn't been putting those into Macs for a while and now it looks a little bit more like a SSD. That's not the only icon change you'll see. You'll notice here in the Dock and other places where you see Apps many of the System apps now have new looks to them. 

A new interesting feature in the Messages App is the ability to add a background to a conversation. So this could be a conversation with one other person or a group conversation and you can click on the Info about the conversation here at the top. Then one of the things you'll see is Backgrounds. Now you can choose one of your photos or one of these backgrounds here, like this, and it will show you what it looks like and then you can set that as your background. Usually you have light and dark versions of this. So now you can see what the background of this conversation looks like. You can also go to Image Playground and create a new background or choose one of these suggestions here from your photos. 

There's another new feature as well. If you click the Plus Button next to the textbox there you'll see all the standard stuff. But a new one is Polls. This, of course, is really meant for group chats where you'll have several people responding. So, for instance, you could take a poll of where to go for dinner that night. Just put the choices here. Write a comment and everybody will see that as a poll and can respond with their choice.

Now, of course, Spotlight has lots of new tricks. I've talked about those before. They're major new features. One of the things not talked about as much is that Spotlight now has a History. So let's say I were to use Spotlight to launch the Calculator App. Then another time I were to use Spotlight to look for a file, like this, and I found the file. Well now that is all saved as part of Spotlight's Search History. If I bring up Spotlight and I use the up arrow it will show me the previous search. Do it again and it shows me the search before that. It's kind of like using the History in the Terminal. 

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A new feature in the Notes App is a simple one but could be very useful to some people. You can now go to File and Export As and export as Markdown. Markdown will export a note, like this one, to a simple format in a folder like this in the .md format, Markdown. If you look at it it's just simply a text file. So it is kind of exporting to text but using special characters to represent various different pieces of formatting. It is very useful because there is lots of other apps that will import Markdown and also developers tend to use Markdown for documentation and things. So having compatibility between Notes and Markdown is very useful. You can imagine there is also an Import Markdown. So you can export things to Markdown to save them in nice compact files instead of big PDF's and if you need them back in Notes you can import them again. 

Now before in Reminders we had the ability to create grocery lists and it would automatically categorize things you entered in there into various sections. Like you would add milk and would put it in a dairy section. But a new feature is the ability to automatically categorize things using AI's. So this uses Apple Intelligence here. You can see I've created a list. If I go to File and then Auto-categorize it will figure out what's in the list and then create sections based on what it thinks the list is about. So, it took this packing list and put it into sections, clothing, electronics, personal care, and travel essentials. 

Now in addition to being able to add a color to Folders and an icon on them, that's a big new features. But a little new feature with Folders is the fact that now they show whether there is something inside. Notice these three folders, you can see a little piece of paper sticking out of the icon. It is showing that there is at least one file there. Where this folder doesn't show anything sticking out. It's an empty folder. 

Another thing is that when you drag and drop an item into a folder there is a little animation of it going inside. I'll take this image and put it in this empty folder here. You can see the little animation.

An interesting feature in iOS is the ability is to have vehicle motion cues which basically puts dots on the screen and help you look at your iPhone screen while you're in a moving vehicle. We now have that on the Mac as well. So that's under Accessibility and if you go down to Motion, here, you'll find Vehicle Motion Cues. You can turn it On and you can customize the appearance which is something that is also new in iOS26. You can have a regular pattern or dynamic, the color of the dots, and whether they are large and how many there are. The dots will appear on the side of the screen. They don't appear in Screen Captures like this. But they basically are dots that kind of move with the motion of the vehicle as it turns or accelerates. So the idea is for some people it will help you read things on the screen without getting carsick. 

Now in addition to there being a new Game App in macOS Tahoe, there's also something called Game Overlay. So let's say that you're going to start a game. I'm just going to use the default chess app that we all have. You're in the game now and let's go full screen. Now let's say you want to control some things. You can go up to the top here, and you've got the Menu Bar. But you also have something called Game Overlay. You get to it using the Command and Escape Key. That brings it up here on the right. It actually has several different sections here. It's got a section specific to the game. So in this case there is some achievements here for the chess game. You also can go here and you can contact friends through this interface. This one gives you things like Brightness and Volume. It also lets you work with controllers and turn On or Off Game Mode. So you can do these things in this Overlay instead of having to find individual settings when you're using a game. It also works even if you are in Window Mode. You can do Command Escape and it brings up the Game Overlay here. 

Now in addition to the major new Apps of Journal, Games, and Phone there is another app that is kind of hidden, called Magnifier. But you can search for it and run Magnifier. It basically lets you use the Camera on your Mac to capture something. So you just capture an image, whatever is there, and you can then also Click here and it will attempt to read any text that is on the screen. So you can hold up a label that is hard to read to you Mac's Camera and then capture it and then get the text. You can also, in live view, Zoom in and out to magnify something. So it is very similar to the Magnifier App that's been around on the iPhone for years. 

The Clock App has a new little feature. If you create an alarm notice that you can now set the Snooze Duration, anywhere between one minute and fifteen minutes. We're not stuck with only nine minute snooze times. 

The Lock Screen on your Mac displays the time. But now you can customize that. You would think that you would go into System Settings and then Lock Screen to do that. But actually you go to Wallpaper. Wallpaper now you've got Clock Appearance. You can set things here for how the clock looks. You can see the preview of it right there so you can see how it looks. 

Image Playground has a very important update. As a matter of fact it is far more useful now because you can create a new image like before but one of the things you can do is for Styles instead of choosing one of the Apple Intelligence Styles, the three here, you can choose ChatGPT as a style. You get these other options here that you can use or leave it at Any Style and just describe what you want. So it is basically like generating an image inside of ChatGPT with a full description including the style. 

Also notice that another selection here is Genmoji. So now you can actually create Genmoji in Image Playground. You don't have to go into the Messages App to create one, even if you don't intend to send a message right now. So you can create something with Genmoji and the neat thing is that now you can create something by combining two emoji characters. After all that's what a lot of people just wanted to do. Just combine two emoji characters, not describe something completely new. So I can take this suggestion here and this suggestion and it will combine the dinosaur with the sunglasses emoji and I get a dinosaur wearing sunglasses. 

Now to end with I'm going to go back to Menu Bar. The Menu Bar has a really cool new feature where it can show you live activities. Live Activities are something that goes on your iPhone. But if you've setup your iPhone with iPhone Mirroring and you've turned on Notifications and Live Activities in the Settings for this, then any live activity that's on your iPhone that is trying to display there at the top or on the Lock Screen should also show on your Mac's Menu Bar. So here you see one that is a live activity from an App on my iPhone showing flight information. But I'm also seeing it at the top of my Mac. 

There's even more than that but some things are hard to demonstrate. For instance there's live translations in the Messages App and FaceTime. But I had a hard time getting this to work in a demo state. I think you really need to be conversing with somebody else that has their settings for a different language and is speaking a different language. 

So once you've upgraded to macOS Tahoe take the time to search out these small new features to see if they're useful to you. Thanks for watching.