What's Coming In macOS Sequoia

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's take a look at some of the new features coming in macOS Sequoia. 

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So this week Apple announced the next version of macOS, Sequoia. They released the developer beta and in July will have a public beta and then we'll get the final version released to everybody this Fall. Now a lot of the new features revolve around AI. Those aren't wired in yet in the first developer beta. But there are still a lot of cool new stuff to take a look at. 

First let's take a look at Window Tiling. This allows you to snap the windows on your Mac's Desktop to the sides or top or bottom, fill the screen, or even do quarters. So it's basic windows management. It's not going to replace some of the third party apps that have all this advanced functionality. But for most users it will get the job done. There are a few ways that you can use it. One is that you can simply drag the window over to, say, a side. You can see when I do so it shows this area where it will snap into that space. If I were to drag it to the right you could see it will do it there. If I drag it up just into the middle you can see it wants to fill the whole space. Now you can also drag all the way to a corner and it will want to fill a quarter of the space, like that. Now you can also drag the window around and hold down the Option Key and then you'll get these little spaces that you can drop into. There is some settings for this in System Settings if you go to Desktop & Dock and scroll down there is a new section under Windows where it's got Tiled By Dragging Windows to Screen Edges, Hold the Option Key While Dragging, and you can also have Margins. This is on by Default. You can see it there with it On and with it Off. 

But you also have the ability to move your Pointer over the Green Button there. You can see the different options right here. So I can move to, say, to the top half of the screen like that. In the Window Menu you also get an entire subsection here for Move & Resize. So you can go Left to Right to Top to Bottom, Keyboard Shortcuts, and you can do Quarters as well and Arrange. The way Arrange works is if you have multiple windows, like I have here, you can go to the Move & Resize submenu here and say I want to Arrange that into Quarters and it will put them all like that. I may do a more detailed video on just Window Tiling soon. 

There are a bunch of new things in Notes. When feature I know a lot of people are going to like is Highlighting. So you can select some text and highlight it. You can go to Format and then Font and then there is Highlight. But you can see the keyboard shortcut, Shift Command E, is probably what you would use. So Shift Command E will highlight the text like that. So you can easily highlight text. 

You've got a choice of five colors. So I can highlight some text but I can also click here, there 's a Highlight button I can use but I can also click here and change the Highlight color as well. 

There's also the ability to collapse sections. So if you have something that is formatted as a Heading here then everything under it can be collapsed, like this. You may notice the button here near the top for audio recordings. You can click here and you get this little audio recording interface that looks just like the Voice Memos App. You can record something. "This is a text". Then you can see it's embedded inside of the note. Now you also get a transcript. You can see the transcript here. As a matter of fact if you double-click it it goes back to the Sidebar here and you can play it back and also look at the transcript and you can even Copy and Paste out of the transcript. 

You could also do math notes which is something that was talked about for the Calculator App on the iPad but it is here in the Notes App on the Mac as well. So, for instance, I can do you know 5+9= and you can see it gives me an answer there. I can press Return and it shows it. There is some settings for this under Format. You've got Math Results and you can have the results always inserted just suggested. So if you always want this to happen it will do that. You can do complex things. So I can do A=a number, B=another number and I can do A+B= and it gives me the answer. Then I can go up here and change this value and it changes the result. 

Now the Calculator App is also new. When you look at it it looks very similar at first to the old one. But it is a Universal App now between the iPhone, iPad, and Mac. Like before you can switch to the different modes but you have this button here that will do it for you too. So I can switch to say the Scientific Calculator like that. Now a big new feature here is the ability to use parentheses. So I can do something like 5+ and then I can use the left paren like that and then type something else and then right paren and multiply like that and get the answer.

There is also a Conversion Mode that you can switch On. Switch on Convert and now you have two slots here at the top and bottom. You can convert from one thing to another. So you have all sorts of different things that you can convert to and from. 

Now of course if Notes has transcriptions for audio recordings you would imagine that Voice Memos does too.....and it does! "This is a test". So when I'm done with a voice recording you get this little icon here to represent a transcription. Getting to it you would just click here and you could see the transcription and you could jump to the portion for that word and you can copy and all of that. 

A new app for macOS Sequoia is the Passwords App. It is not really a new functionality though. The Passwords App just breaks out that section of System Settings into its own app. So it feels like a regular Password Manager now. You can go to this Password's App, access all the same stuff that you could before in System Settings but now it kind of looks a little bit more like Notes and Reminders with this sidebar here but actually assessing the information and storing the information it is just a lot nicer to have it in its own app like this. There is also going to be a windows version which is great. Meaning that you can go with Apple's Password Manager even if you sometimes need to log into a website on windows or some other device. 

The Messages App has some new things. The biggest one, the one that is going to get the most attention is you can now Send Later. So you can set it up like that. You can schedule a time and date to send the message. 

You also have Text Styling. So if I have some text selected like this notice Command B makes it Bold and you can actually control click on it and see other styles here at the top. You also can apply Text Effects. So you can use an effect like, say, Shake and you can see how it applies an effect there. The other person, if they are using iMessage will be able to see that effect as well. So you can have certain words emphasize in different ways in your message. 

Tapback just got a lot more powerful. Before I could Control Click on this and I can choose a general tapback thing like a heart or a thumbs up. But now I can actually click right here and choose any emoji I want and have that for Tapback. 

Now whenever you're using your webcam, whether it is with zoom or FaceTime or something else, you have Controls here in the Menu Bar where you can turn things on like Portrait Mode, Studio Light, and all of that depending upon your webcam. You can do this with Apple Webcam, for instance. Now you've also go this background setting here. So I can have the background removed and replaced with something else. I can choose a solid color like this. I can choose an image like this. I can even choose one of my own photos or just add one here. So I can have anything as my background. 

So the Calendar App and Reminders App are now linked, at least a little bit. So now when you go to add an event in the Calendar you can do it just as before. But you can also add a Reminder like this. So this is a full form for adding a reminder in the Reminder's App and you can do it here in the Calendar. So you don't have to switch apps. In addition you'll see any Reminders that you have set with a time and date in the Calendar. So, let's go to the Reminders App here. I'm going to add a new reminder like that. So you can see this has a time and date set. So now when I look at the Calendar that reminder is actually in my calendar as well as in the Reminders App. So you can just look at your Calendar to see what reminders are due today. You can see here there's actually a switch to turn On and Off.

Now Safari has got a bunch of new improvements but a lot of those require AI so they are not really there yet. Like, for instance, you can see the beginnings of Highlights which would give you, say, a summary and a table of contents for this article here but it doesn't quite come up. It just gives the title right now and a Show Reader button. But what is already in place is this new ability that when you're looking at a webpage that's a video, not really an article, in addition to seeing Show Reader you're also going to see this Video Viewer option here.   

It is also under View, under Enter Video Viewer. This will only be active if it is mainly a video page, like this one. You can see the keyboard shortcut, Shift Command R, changes to this. So you can use the same keyboard shortcut to basically just go to Reader View for an article or just go to Video Viewer if it is a video. Then you get something that looks like this that focuses on just the video and cuts the rest of the page out. 

Freeform has a new feature called Scenes. This is basically like a bookmarks for a Freeform board. So the idea is that suppose that you want to show somebody some information but you really want to start off showing them this. You don't want to have to go and zoom in on that particular area. You could go down to the bottom here and add Scene. This sets this up as a scene in the list here. Then I could go somewhere else and maybe zoom out of it and set this up as another scene. Now I can use these scenes here to jump really easily between sections. So you can basically use Freeform as a presentation tool now. There are even some keyboard shortcuts here to move between scenes.

Another new feature Freeform has is Snap To Grid. So, before you had a grid. But now you actually have it snapped to it to make it easier to build nice looking Freeform boards. 

There are going to be some new AI features in Photos like the ability to create really smart memories and also to Edit objects out of photos. Those aren't there yet. But what is there is the change where now at the top you see if you're in Library you've got only Years, Months, and All Photos. Days is not there. Instead it is under Collections. So the idea is that different ways to organize your photos are under Collections and Days kind of fit into that more than just the months and years. Apple is definitely doing more in Photos now for people like me who don't want to spend time creating their own album. They just want everything to be kind of automatically organized and easy to find.

Now another feature that is not in this first beta but I know it's going to be my favorite feature so I wanted to include it in this list anyway. That's going to be the ability to show your iPhone's screen on your Mac. So you can have your iPhone put away. It could even be in your pocket and it could show your iPhone screen there. You don't have to pull your iPhone out to see what is going on, to use different apps on your iPhone. You can just have it on your Mac's screen instead of actually as a separate screen sitting on your desk. It will be great to be able to use the keyboard, trackpad, and mouse to be able to navigate on the iPhone's screen and get things done. For people like me that sit at their Mac's all day it is going to be great to be able to access their iPhones like this. Even to be able to drag and drop things from apps to your Mac into the iPhone that's in a window on your Mac. 

There is one more thing I want to show you. You may have noticed that the Desktop background is new for Sequoia. It kind of looks like you're looking up through sequoia trees. Well, you can go into System Settings here and you can go to either Screen Saver or Wallpaper and find this right here. This is kind of what it looks like when it is in Screen Saver mode. But in addition to that there's this other one called Macintosh. This is kind of a look at retro macOS as your Desktop background. Here's what it looks like. It keeps shifting around doing different apps and different parts of the original Mac interface. 

There's a look at the new features we have so far in macOS Sequoia. It's really early in development now. So we're obviously going to see a lot of these features deployed over the summer as we move towards the Fall release. Then maybe even some features that will be added after that. I'll do some videos that goes into more detail on some of these and also, of course, updates as new features are added to these betas. 

Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.