What’s New In macOS Ventura

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's take a look at what's new in macOS Ventura. MacMost is brought to you thanks to a great group of more than 1000 supporters. Go to MacMost.com/patreon. There you can read more about the Patreon Campaign. Join us and get exclusive content and course discounts.

So there are a ton of new things in macOS Ventura. Let's take a look at the biggest changes. First we've got a new way to multi-task called Stage Manager. You can still use Mission Control. You still can use multiple windows and manage them as you like. But Stage Manager is a new tool and helps you deal with lots of windows, like all the different windows that I have here. You can turn it On in Control Center, Stage Manager, and now you can see that I just have the window for Reminders here. All the other windows are now pushed over to the left. I can switch to anyone of those very easily just by clicking. It just swaps them out. You could also group some windows together, even windows from different apps. 

The Mail App has a bunch of new features. One of them is that it will remind you if you forgot to include an attachment. See how I wrote in here that I was going to include an attachment. It will recognize that. If I try to send the message then it will ask me if I maybe forgot the attachment. When I send a message I now have the ability to Undo Send. It basically delays sending for about 10 seconds so you can change your mind before the mail is sent. You don't have to send a message right away anymore. You can now click up here next to the Send button and you can choose to send later and schedule an email to go out. In addition to that searching is a little smarter. So if I search for something like this, see I've misspelled that. But it still recognizes the word even though I haven't spelled it correctly. 

There's some changes in Spotlight. For one thing it will now show you images. So you search for something like this. Now if I scroll down I could see a section of results comes from my Photos. That's not a tag or subject or anything like that. That's actually recognizing what's in the photo. You could have already done that in the Photos App. The thing is now that it is in Spotlight as well. Instead of seeing previews for files inside the Spotlight window you're now going to see them in Quick Look. So you select a file, like one of these here, and I just tap Spacebar and it opens up a Quick Look window and I can continue to do arrow down to go through the Spotlight results here to see different things. Now you have all the power of the Quick Look window combined with Spotlight. You can do things like Share and Open and even select text inside of Quick Look right from Spotlight. 

There are now a small set of Quick Actions that you can use in Spotlight. Like, for instance, now you can type Start Timer and the first result there is Start Timer and it's actually a little quick action that you can now trigger to begin that timer. This will work with the Quick Actions you can create in the Shortcuts App. So another way to run Shortcuts besides having them in this menu here. 

In Safari there are a couple of new features for Tab Groups. One is now you can Share a Tab Group. So you can collaborate with somebody with a Shared Tab Group. They see the same tabs on their Mac in the group as you do and you can both add and remove them. So when you go to a website and signup for an account Safari, of course, will suggest a strong password. But now you also have other options. You can choose to edit the password directly. So maybe you removed characters that you don't like from it or choose a No Special Characters random password. 

In the Messages App you now have the ability to change your message after it is sent. So if you sent something like this you can now Control Click on it, select Edit, and then change it. Then you can see it is edited and you can see the edits that were made. This works best, of course, if the person on the other end is using the latest version of iOS, iPad OS, or macOS as well. You could also Control Click on it and Undo Send and that requires that the person on the other end has and updated operating system. Also, you now have the ability to Control Click on a conversation on the left and mark as Unread. 

I know a lot of people are going to like this! You can now use Command and Click to select multiple conversations. Or you can Shift Click to select a range. Then you can go to Delete Conversations and delete a whole bunch of them at once. 

A huge new change in macOS Ventura is System Settings. Previously System Preferences, System Settings is a whole new app and it looks very different. As a matter of fact it looks almost identical to the Settings app on the iPad. It's got a column here on the left with all the major categories. Then whatever you select the settings appear on the right and it is a linear list now. So it goes from top to bottom. If you select something, like for instance Control Center here, you can see you can scroll. That means it is easy to have a lot of different settings here. It's going to take some getting used to because things have moved around. Some things here match what we saw in System Preferences. But other things have changed either in name or in location. Here's a whole new one called Wallpaper where Screen Saver is now completely separate. Other things are now down under General. It's going to be hard to figure out where all the settings are now if you've grown used to System Preferences. But a pretty advanced Search field here should help. It gives some more detailed information about what it finds and you can jump right to any section. 

There are two major new apps. One is Clock and it looks just like the Clock App on the iPhone. So you've got the World Clock section here and it shows you a map and you add clocks here to the bottom. You've got Alarms. Now we have native alarms on the Mac and you can have multiple alarms. You can switch them On and Off. You've got Stopwatch and you've got Timer. When you use the Timer it appears here at the top so you can see it without the app being open. 

There's also the Weather App. The Weather App has a list of cities here on the left. You can search for any city that you want and then jump to it and get weather. You can use the Add button to add it to your list here. You can dive down into any of the information here. So, for instance, click on the map and that will expand. Click on sunset, sunrise times and you'll get more information. Everything here has a deeper level. 

The Reminders App has some new tricks. One is that you can now Pin a list to the top. Another is that you can create templates from a list. So you can take a list like this. Save it as a Template and when you go to create a new list you can now select from a template and use that template there. Then you can customize it from that point on. It could be really handy. Plus that we have boolean operators in tag searches. So you can search for a tag and you could select Any Selected, which would be the equivalent to OR or All Selected which would be equivalent to AND. 

The Photos App has some new things as well. One is you'll find a Duplicates Album. This may not appear right away after you update to macOS Ventura. It may take some time to find duplicates. Also note that if you don't have any duplicates you won't see this here at all. But if it does find some then you have the opportunity to merge the two items or say select one and delete that one photo. If the items are identical it doesn't really matter which one is deleted. They are identical. But merging will mean that things like titles, or tags, or which albums they are in will all be merged. So the one remaining photo would be in all the albums that each of the individual photos were in. If photos are found that aren't exactly the same, like here's a high resolution version and there are two lower resolution versions of this, then the higher resolution version will be kept, which makes sense. 

A new feature is now you can Copy and Paste edits. So I can go into a photo like this. I can edit it and maybe, you know, change some things about the photo like that. I can go to image and then Copy Edit. Then I can go to another photo and I can do image and Paste Edit and those same changes will be applied. 

The Folders recently deleted and hidden are now Locked. So if you select it you need to use Touch ID or enter your password to get access to them. That is a Setting. So you can go into Photos, General, and there's a checkbox for that. 

Now we have the new feature Copy Subject. So in a photo like this where there is a subject you can Control Click on it or right click or two-finger click on a trackpad and then you could choose Copy Subject. Notice even just hovering over it kind of outlines the subject right there. So I'll Copy Subject and now I can Paste it somewhere. So I can paste it into an image editing app. I can paste it into a Mail message. I can paste it into Notes. I just get the subject, not the background. 

So a big new feature is Continuity Camera. This allows you to use your iPhone's camera as a Webcam. So here's an example of me doing that. I'm using FaceTime here in this example. I'm going to switch from the FaceTime camera that's part of my screen to my iPhone's camera. It helps, of course, if your iPhone is somehow mounted to the top of your Mac. Then you can use the much better camera on your iPhone as a webcam. 

If you go into System Settings and then Accessibility there's a new feature called Live Captions under Hearing. If you turn on Live Captions you'll get the text of whatever is spoken in a video that is playing on the screen. So this could be a video that's playing say on a website or it could be a video that you're playing in Quick Time Player. Let's go into a video here where it is just me talking. I'm just going to play it. I have that Live Captions turned on and then you're going to see exactly what it is I'm saying in the video. Then with Live Captions you can turn it On for FaceTime as well. So while you're FaceTiming with somebody you would see the words that they are speaking.

Also some notable new things in Accessibility under Voice Control. If you look through the commands there's now one for Spelling Mode. If you just say Spelling Mode while using Voice Control, that's not regular dictation that's Voice Control, then you could spell out letters. So you can spell difficult words and include numbers and everything in there as well. Then you just say Dictation Mode and it will switch back to the regular mode. 

Another new feature under Audio is background sounds. So this was new on the iPhone last year but you can turn this On and then choose from a variety of background sounds to play through your speakers or if you've got AirPods or whatever connected just to drown out outside noise and help you concentrate and such. 

Here's a few other miscellaneous things. In Notes now if you go to Lock a Note you can still choose a regular password like before but a better option is under Notes, Settings, Lock Notes you can choose to use your Login Password. So use Touch ID or your regular Mac login password. You don't have a separate password. This is really important because if you set a custom password and you forgot it, then there is no way to ever open that note again. 

Last year we got Live Text which allowed you to copy text from images. But now you can do it in video. So you can have a video like this. Just pause it and now you can select text inside the video and paste it elsewhere. 

The Maps app have one big improvement. That is you can have multiple stops now. So I've got directions here from one point to another. I can add another stop like that and I can even rearrange the stops. 

Finally, back in Settings under Focus in addition to having all the things we had before with Focus you can now get more specific with Focus Filters. So you can add a Filter here and instead of saying you want to get Calendar notifications or not, you can actually have specific Calendars selected. The same thing, say, with Mail. You can have specific accounts. So you're work account will only send you Notifications during the day while you are in Work Focus but at home you won't get those Notifications.

So there is a look at all the major new things in macOS Ventura. There are a lot of minor changes throughout the entire system as well. And there are some features that are scheduled to come out a little bit later. Like, for instance, iCloud Shared Photo Libraries and also the Freeform Tool which will allow you to kind of sketch things while you are in FaceTime or Messages. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.