New Odd and Interesting Features in macOS Sonoma

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's take a look at 20 odd and interesting new features in macOS Sonoma.

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By my account there are 175 new features in macOS Sonoma. In a previous video I looked at the ten most useful ones. But there are also a lot of little interesting features that you should know about. Let's start off by looking at Reactions in FaceTime. You can use these in other video conferencing apps as well. Not only can you access these reactions in the Menu Bar, like this, but you can also activate them by using various different hand gestures like these here. (showing examples).

Now Safari has some great new features. But one that has kind of gotten overlooked is the ability to now select multiple tabs to move them around. So I've got this tab active. If I use the Command Key and click on another tab and another tab notice I have all three of them. So if I go back to this original tab and click and drag, I'm dragging all three. I can use that rearrange the tabs and form tab groups and do all sorts of different things.

Every version of macOS has some new things in the Accessibility Settings. Sonoma is no exception. Now there is a whole new little section here called Live Speech. You can use Live Speech to generate Text. I could type here to speak, hello, and you can use this just on your Mac by itself but also in video conferencing apps. In addition, you can also use Personal Voice to record your own voice. Then use Live Speech to talk with it.

This syncs across devices. So you can set this up on your Mac and also use it on your iPhone in the same Accessibility Setting.

Also here in System Settings if you go to Siri in Spotlight you can set Siri to use the two-word phrase to initiate things or just use one word. If you switch to that you can still use the two-word phrase.

Another Accessibility Setting you'll find is under Display. If you look under Text there is Text Size. Now it takes you to a whole submenu where you can set a Default Text Size for different apps to use. You can see how the Settings App is reacting to this. But you could also set Custom Sizes for Calendar, Finder, Mail, Messages, and Notes. This will be a big deal for those that like to make text a little bit bigger in some apps.

Now Freeform has a new interesting trick. You can now drag and drop 3D files. They have to be Apple's 3D file format, which is pretty standard. I'm going to drop this one here. It is a sample that Apple gives out. Then you can have this 3D object inside of one of your Freeform boards.

In the News App, if you are a user of Apple News+, you'll now have access to Puzzles, which are crossword puzzles you can play right on your Mac. This is also available in iOS 17 and iPad OS17.

The Photos App has a few new things. In addition to Pets being added to People you can now easily create sharable links for an individual photo. So I can Control Click on this one photo here. Select Share and then I can just use Copy iCloud Link. It will share just that one photo. Provide me with a Link and then I can share it with somebody else so they can just get it any way they would get a link from you. Then they can go and view that photo.

There are new capability added to Visual Lookup. For instance for food like this I can click on the dish and it will actually give me links to recipes. 

In Memories we now have the ability to add more photos to a memory. So I can click on this button here and then view all of these. I can add them. Not only can I add them but I could rearrange the order of the photos.

In Spotlight Search now if you search for something that is a System Setting you may actually get a switch for that setting right here in Spotlight. No need to go to the Settings App. 

Also if you search for a Contact in Spotlight you not only get a way to go to that Contact but you'll get Action Buttons, like be able to send a message or make a phone call or an email for that person. 

If you perform a search and that looks like what you really want to do is add an event to the Calendar you can do that as well. Just click that button and I never need to open the Calendar App.

On the Messages App now when you get an audio message like this there are two really neat new features. One is that you get a transcription of the audio message. So you don't actually have to listen to it. But if you do want to listen to it, if you Control Click on the Play button, you can choose to play it back at a faster speed.

A blinking text cursor is just a line. But now it has got some new indicators in macOS Sonoma. If you turn on Caps Lock you'll notice that this little Caps Lock indicator under it which is really handy so you know that you're going to be typing in all Caps. You'll also see it briefly there when you switch Languages, and when you're doing Dictation.

The Weather App has two new tricks I want to show you. First, when you go to Maps now you can choose a Wind layer. The Wind layer actually shows you all the wind patterns. You could see exactly what is happening here but also you can zoom into your local area. It will continue to show you all the wind patterns even down to a pretty fine detail.

But for astronomy buffs like me you want to go to the Lunar Section here. It tells you lots of information like the current moon illumination, moon set, and next full moon. But if you click on it you get even more. So you have more details there and you could move the timeline here and see exactly where the moon is going to be at a certain time. It even shows you the distance of the moon at that time.

In the Home App, even if you don't actually use the Home App for controlling anything in your home, you can now go to a section of it and it is going to draw on data from your local power sources to tell you when the best times are to draw power from the grid.

There's been a lot of attention of new features in Reminders but one I don't hear much about is the ability now to go to View and switch to Column View. Then you could see your reminders in columns. There is only one column here because there is only one section. But if I were to add another section I could then move items between columns here and have as many columns as I need and organize things that way.

Also a new feature of the Notes App is the ability to take a note and make a Pages document out of it. So you can start off writing in the Notes app and then when you want to convert that to a regular Pages document to continue building it all you need to do is go to that note and then go to File and then Open in Pages. Now it transfers all of that over and creates a new document.

So there are a ton of other new features in Sonoma. If there is a feature that I haven't named in this video or the previous one that you really like, let me know in the comments. Thanks for watching.