[Tech-VI] macOS Sonoma: The MacStories Review

[Colin Howard]

Greetings,

I suspect this will be most useful to Frank Warwick and John Haynes, I am
not sure if Mike Barbour uses a mac, if yes, he could well find this at
least interesting and maybe even useful.

From: David Goldfield
Sent: Thursday, September 28, 2023 3:46 AM

MacStories - Tuesday, September 26, 2023 at 12:09 PM
macOS Sonoma: The MacStories Review


In one sense, the story of this year’s macOS update is that there is no
story, but that’s not exactly right. Instead, it’s a bunch of stories. It’s
the tail end of the realignment of macOS with Apple’s other OSes that began
with macOS Catalina in 2019. However, Sonoma is also part of a work-at-home
story accelerated by COVID-19. The OS is also linked to the story of
visionOS, only part of which has been revealed. Sonoma is a bundle of
narrative threads built on the foundation of past releases, adding up to a
collection of updates that will be less disruptive for most Mac users than
recent macOS updates. Instead, Sonoma is packed with a variety of useful new
features that help draw it closer to iPadOS and iOS than ever before, design
enhancements, and a few disappointing omissions.

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The timing for a more modest macOS update is right. In recent years, Mac
users have had to adjust to substantial redesigns of everything from their
favorite system apps to the Finder’s windows and toolbars. The changes were
inescapable and necessary to harmonize the Mac with Apple’s other products,
but also disruptive for some long-time users.

Sonoma adds a vast collection of new wallpaper and screensaver options.

With macOS Sonoma, the biggest design shifts seem to be behind us – at least
for the time being. Interactive widgets on the desktop are a big change this
year, but it’s not like macOS dumps a bunch of them on your desktop by
default. If you never want to see a widget anywhere near your desktop, you
don’t have to. Other than the subtle way the login screen has changed and
the new screensavers and wallpapers that are available, the core macOS
experience has barely changed.

Instead, this year’s update is primarily about refining and building upon
the foundation of the past few years, coupled with a handful of more
significant updates to system apps. So, while the marquee features and
design changes may be less notable than in recent years, there is still a
long list of new and refreshed items that touch nearly every aspect of the
OS, so let’s dive in.


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Table of Contents
a.. Writing on a New Canvas: Widgets, Wallpapers, and Lock Screens
a.. Nobody Puts Widgets in a Corner
b.. A Clean Slate
b.. System Apps
a.. Reminders
b.. Notes
a.. Note Linking
b.. PDFs
c.. Other Notes Updates
c.. Safari
a.. Profiles
b.. Single-Site Web Apps
c.. More Safari Updates
c.. Video Calling
a.. Disappointments
a.. Shortcuts
b.. Stage Manager
b.. Other System Features
a.. Passwords, Security, and Privacy
a.. Shared Passwords and Passkeys
b.. Apple ID Passkeys
c.. It’s Long Past Time for an Apple Passwords App
b.. URL Tracking Parameters
c.. Sensitive Content Warnings
d.. But Wait, There’s More
e.. Accessibility
c.. Everything Else
d.. Conclusion
Writing on a New Canvas: Widgets, Wallpapers, and Lock Screens
Nobody Puts Widgets in a Corner

Widgets are everywhere this fall, but nowhere is that more true than the
Mac. Not only are Mac widgets interactive, like they are on the iPhone and
iPad, but they’re no longer hidden away in Notification Center. Not everyone
is going to like the aesthetic of having widgets on their desktop, but I
absolutely and unconditionally love it. Widgets are finally useful on the
Mac, and I can’t get enough of them.

Widgets are finally useful on the Mac, and I can’t get enough of them.

There’s a lot going on with widgets in general and even more going on with
Mac widgets, so let’s break it down, starting with what’s unique to the Mac.
OS X Yosemite introduced Apple’s modern take on widgets to the Mac nearly a
decade ago, tucking them out of the way in Notification Center, which in
recent years required you to click on the clock in the Mac’s menu bar to
access them.

In 2014, Yosemite moved widgets from Dashboard to a new Today view that
became Notification Center.

I’ve never liked Notification Center on the Mac. The way notifications are
handled has issues of its own, but widgets were not only hidden away but
shoved into a corner buried under a list of your notifications. As a result,
I barely used widgets before I installed Sonoma in June.

With macOS Sonoma, widgets have been given room to breathe on your desktop
for the first time since Apple discontinued Dashboard, migrating widgets to
Notification Center. Depending on the size of your Mac’s screen, there’s
plenty of room to spread out your widgets in any way you want, and thanks to
some clever design touches by Apple, the entire arrangement is easy to keep
neat and tidy.

You can still use Notification Center for your widgets if you’d like.

There are plenty of Mac users who don’t like to have files sitting on their
desktops, let alone widgets. If you prefer that kind of minimalist approach,
you’re in luck because widgets can still be tucked out of the way in
Notification Center, although you won’t be able to put extra-large widgets
there.

I understand the appeal of working on a desktop that’s an unbroken expanse.
It looks great and is arguably less distracting. However, for me, the
utility of seeing the widgets I rely on and interacting with them throughout
the day far outweighs anything an empty desktop has to offer.


Apple has created an entirely new UI for managing your Mac’s widgets that
has a lot in common with the iPhone and iPad. Right-click on the desktop or
open Notification Center, and in either case, pick ‘Edit Widgets.’ A panel
will slide up from the bottom of your screen. On the left of the panel is a
sidebar with a search field and an alphabetical list of all of the apps that
offer widgets. On the right are images of the widgets themselves, with each
size and type offered organized with Suggestions at the top, followed by the
apps in alphabetical order.

Sonoma’s new widget management interface will be familiar to iPhone and iPad
users.

On the right side of the panel, some blocks of widgets say ‘From iPhone.’
That’s because the catalog of widgets from which you can choose has been
expanded with macOS Sonoma. Not only can you pick widgets offered by the Mac
apps installed on your computer, but if you have an iPhone on the same Wi-Fi
network or nearby, all of your iPhone widgets are available, too. Curiously,
iPad widgets aren’t available on macOS Sonoma, perhaps because doing so
would result in a lot of duplicate widgets.

The inclusion of iPhone widgets on the Mac was a big surprise at WWDC, but
it makes a lot of sense, especially when considered in the context of iOS 17’s
StandBy mode. By putting iPhone widgets on your Mac desktop, you get the
benefits of the glanceable information they offer on the iPhone, while still
using StandBy on your iPhone uninterrupted.

However, there are a couple of downsides to iPhone widgets being available
on the Mac. It’s the professional hazard of someone who writes about apps
like I do, but I have a lot of apps on my Mac and even more on my iPhone. I’m
undoubtedly an outlier, but the result is that the list of apps and widget
previews in Sonoma’s widget panel are long. Search and the sidebar list of
apps make it faster to navigate, but scrolling is choppy at times. I expect
that if I had fewer apps the situation would improve, but as it is, the
interface feels a little broken on my Mac.

These aren’t duplicate Parcel widgets, just similar widgets for its separate
iPhone and Mac apps.

The other problem is that because some apps offer separate iPhone and Mac
apps, you’ll sometimes see two entries for an app in your list of widgets.
If you do, pick the Mac one because iPhone widgets come with some
limitations. For example, the delivery tracker Parcel has separate iPhone
and Mac apps. The app’s widgets look the same, but if you pick the iPhone
version and click on a delivery, the app will tell you that you need to open
the iPhone app for more details about your package. However, if you use the
Mac version of the same widget and click on a particular delivery, the app
will open immediately with that package selected. Fortunately, the list of
widgets labels the ones that are from your iPhone, so it’s not hard to
choose the Mac version if you see two widgets for the same app. I can’t help
but wonder whether having two widgets that look the same but behave
differently will lead more developers to release Universal versions of their
apps.

A Clock widget guided into alignment using Sonoma’s automatic grid layout.

Apple’s designers have come up with a clever tiling system to avoid your
widgets becoming a jumbled, disorganized mess. When you drag a widget to the
desktop near another widget, an outline appears, showing where it can be
placed in relation to your other widgets. However, if you drag a widget to a
spot far away enough from other widgets, you can drop it anywhere you want.
Also, if you have folders and files on your desktop, moving a widget over
them will cause the folders and files to flow around the widget so they’re
not obscured. Another way to avoid widgets competing with your folders and
files is to activate Stacks, which organizes your files and folders into
neat piles along the right edge of your desktop.

Files and folders flow around your widgets.

What you can’t do with widgets on the Mac is overlap them or stack them the
way you can on the iPhone or iPad. I feel like I have plenty of room to
place widgets on the Studio Display’s 27” screen without stacking, but that
limitation will undoubtedly be a problem for some 13” MacBook Air users
(myself included), especially if you’re used to being able to assign
different widgets to multiple Home Screens on a similarly-sized 12.9” iPad
Pro. That’s because you can’t place a unique set of widgets per Space on a
Mac. So, if you were hoping to create different sets of widgets and assign
them to project or task-specific Spaces, you’re out of luck, which is a
shame and something I’d love to see Apple address in a future update.

Limitations aside, simply having widgets where I can see them has been a
game changer. I’m especially happy with how well widgets work with Stage
Manager, which I’ve been using full-time since last fall’s Ventura’s
release. I usually don’t cover Stage Manager’s strip with apps, so I can see
what’s available to me. On the Studio Display, that leaves a bit of space at
the ends of the strip that is perfect for widgets. The top corner is where I’ve
put a small Weather app widget with the current conditions and predicted
high and low temperatures. The rest of the widgets are loosely arrayed in
the top left corner of my screen in an orderly grid, thanks to Sonoma’s
layout system.

Widgets fade into the background when a window is active, but they are still
interactive and take on the colors of your wallpaper.

I’m also a fan of the way widgets fade into the background when an app is
active, taking on the color scheme of the wallpaper behind the widgets. Some
may find this distracting, but for me, it’s not been any more distracting
than having information in the menu bar or other app windows peeking out
from behind whichever one I’m currently using.

Using a Hot Corner to activate my desktop widgets.

When I want to see a widget that’s covered up, I can click on an open space
on the desktop, which whisks all windows away into Stage Manager’s strip.
Alternatively, I’ve set the top right corner of my screen as a Hot Corner
that reveals the desktop, which has a similar effect. Whichever way I choose
to clear my desktop temporarily, doing so not only reveals all of my widgets
but returns them to their full-color glory, allowing me to focus on the
information each has to offer.

But widgets on the Mac’s desktop have more to offer than just up-to-date
information on things like the weather, your calendar, or packages making
their way to your home. As on iOS and iPadOS 17, macOS Sonoma widgets are
interactive, even if they’re faded out in the background. That allows me to
do things like adjust the lights in my office or turn off a battery charger
when I see from another widget that a device is fully charged. Other times,
I’m checking off tasks in Reminders or starting a timer in Timery. What all
of these widget interactions have in common is that they’re the sort of
things I repeatedly do throughout the day. Over the course of the summer, I’ve
discovered that bringing these micro-tasks to my desktop is far less
distracting than grabbing my iPhone to do them.

Examples of some of the updated system widgets.

Along with moving widgets to the desktop and making them interactive, Sonoma
also introduces new and updated system widgets. The one I use the most is
one of the two new Home widgets. The widget comes in small and medium sizes,
which accommodate four and eight actions, respectively, and can control
individual HomeKit accessories or activate scenes. If your needs aren’t met
by the eight tiles available in the medium-sized widget, you can add
additional Home widgets to cover more devices and scenes, but I also
recommend checking out Home Widget by Clément Marty, which I recently
reviewed on MacStories.

The other Home widget comes in small and medium sizes and is a timeline
showing when it’s estimated that the energy in your area will be cleaner,
using a new Home feature called Grid Forecast. By keeping track of when
energy will be cleaner, you can defer tasks that require a lot of
electricity to a time when their environmental impact will be less. I’d love
to see this feature built out as part of Shortcuts to allow me to shift my
electricity usage automatically. Apple has also introduced Contacts,
Shortcuts, and Safari widgets for the first time on the Mac, each of which
is the same as its counterpart on iOS and iPadOS 17.

Apple Podcasts has added interactivity, too, allowing users to play and
pause episodes from its widget. In a future update, Apple has promised a
Music widget for the Mac, which would be a first for the OS. According to
Apple, the Sonoma Music widget will include playback controls, allow users
to follow top charts, and offer music recommendations for Apple Music
subscribers. There’s been no word yet on when the Music widget will debut.

Of course, the new interactive widgets can be offered by third-party
developers, too. We’ve already covered some of the apps that feature
interactive widgets on MacStories and will continue to cover them throughout
the fall.


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Until Sonoma, widgets on the Mac seemed like a half-hearted experiment.
Hiding them away in Notification Center allowed Apple to check the feature
parity with iOS and iPadOS boxes, but that’s about it. As originally
conceived, widgets were meant to provide glanceable information to users, so
tucking them away where they couldn’t be seen at a glance defeated the whole
purpose of them.

With interactivity and moving widgets to the desktop, Apple has placed a
bigger bet, of which widgets are just one part. As Federico explained in his
iOS and iPadOS 17 preview story,

Widgets are transforming apps into modular experiences that go beyond
glanceability.

[T]o an even greater extent than what Shortcuts has been doing for years,
interactive widgets take specific functionalities of apps and make them
available as à la carte components that you can mix and match however you
want. It shouldn’t be surprising, then, to know that this is possible
because App Intents, the technology that powers Shortcuts actions, is being
used for actions in interactive widgets, too.

When you look at widgets and features like Live Activities, Focus modes, and
App Shortcuts through this lens, it’s easy to see similar modular solutions
playing out on visionOS, a HomeKit hub device with a screen, and other
products Apple might be considering. All are built on top of App Intents,
the technology that underpins Shortcuts, which is fascinating, but it is
widgets that have begun to emerge as the glue among Apple’s hardware
platforms.

Those connections among devices have fundamentally changed how I work. I
find myself using a combination of Mac desktop widgets, iPadOS widgets on my
iPad Pro using Universal Control, and my iPhone in StandBy mode. That may
sound like a lot, but as a substitute for grabbing my iPhone or iPad and
risking getting sidetracked, having the right widgets arrayed across
multiple devices working in concert is a far better solution.

A Clean Slate
Sonoma features over 100 new wallpapers and screensavers.

Sonoma adds an elegant, updated canvas for macOS with a streamlined Lock
Screen, plus new wallpapers and screensavers.

As with so many design tweaks to macOS in recent years, the new Lock Screen
is reminiscent of the iPad’s. It’s also more customizable than before. With
the redesign, your login image and the password field have been moved to the
bottom of the screen. They’re also smaller, and you can even eliminate your
login profile picture entirely, which I’ve done with my Mac Studio because
only I use it.

Sonoma’s new Lock Screen design.

The top of the Lock Screen is dominated by the date and time by default, but
that can be turned off for an extra minimalist look. I’ve settled on a Lock
Screen with the date and time at the top and no account profile picture,
which makes my Mac’s Lock Screen look almost exactly like the one on my
iPad. It’s a small thing, but I like the consistency between the two and
appreciate the ability to eliminate my profile picture because I don’t need
it.

Examples of the new Sonoma wallpapers.

Apple has added new screensavers and wallpapers this year, too. There’s a
bright new abstract Dynamic Wallpaper that changes depending on things like
the time of day and whether you’re using light or dark mode, which can also
serve as your desktop wallpaper. However, my favorites are the new slow
motion, aerial video screensavers, and accompanying wallpapers that are
similar to what you may be familiar with from the Apple TV. There are four
categories: landscape, cityscape, underwater, and Earth. In all, there are
120 different options across the four categories, plus options to shuffle
them all or by category. The default is Sonoma Horizon, a beautiful rural
California landscape, but there are many, many other excellent options, so I
encourage you to browse them all or try one of the shuffle settings to find
your personal favorites.

The screensaver to wallpaper animated transition.

The coolest trick, though, is that when your screensaver is enabled, and you
resume using your Mac, the screensaver continues to animate for a couple of
seconds as your windows come into view. It’s a subtle but excellent touch
that makes the transition back to an active desktop feel smoother than
before.

Sonoma’s Lock Screen, wallpapers, and screensavers serve a couple of
different purposes. They’re a great way to express your personality by
decorating your Mac with your favorites, of course. However, they’re also
the way to ease into your workflow. The animations between the screen savers
and wallpapers in Sonoma transition you into your work environment in an
organic and inviting way that I absolutely love. It’s a small touch, but one
that is quintessentially Apple and still a delight even after seeing those
animations hundreds of times over the summer.

System Apps
Reminders

It sounds a little silly, but of all the new features in Reminders this
year, it’s section headings that brought me back to the app more than
anything else. Every summer, I move my projects back to Reminders so I can
test all of its features thoroughly, but Reminders doesn’t usually stick. It’s
still a little early to call it a certainty, but I have a feeling this time
is different. There are still things Reminders could do better, but the
simplicity with which it allows me to organize my projects and individual
days is hard to beat.

The reason that the addition of sections to task lists is the thing that
pushed me back to Reminders has a lot to do with Reminders’ history. The app
started as a simple checklist creation tool. In the years since, Reminders
has evolved significantly. The app can still be used for simple lists like
the grocery list I share with my family, but it’s capable of a lot more.

The trouble with using Reminders as a more full-blown task manager was that
for big projects, I’d wind up with very long lists that were a chore to
visually parse. One way I could have dealt with that was through a
combination of breaking down projects into smaller lists or creating
subtasks related to other tasks. I tried that at times but didn’t like it
because it just added more administrative overhead, requiring me to manage
my lists instead of doing my work.

Sections help break up long lists visually.

List sections are an elegant, lightweight solution that works incredibly
well in most situations. If you’ve ever used Things by Cultured Code, which
uses a similar system, you probably know why. Sections allow you to visually
break up related parts of a project into groups within the same list.

I suspect the origins of the new list sections lie in the way tasks are
automatically organized into sections in the Today view, breaking them up
into Morning, Afternoon, and Evening, and Scheduled Tasks, which are
organized by date. User-created lists don’t lend themselves as easily to
automated sections, but that doesn’t mean they don’t benefit from the same
sort of structure.

My work lends itself to a handful of core areas, including MacStories, Club
MacStories, Podcasts, Sponsors, and MS, Inc. As much as I like the Today
view and dragging to-dos between periods of the day, those five lists were
always a problem because they can get long, which made it hard to work with
them.

With sections, I can divide a list like ‘MacStories’ into sections like
‘Writing,’ ‘Research,’ ‘Promotion,’ and ‘Writing Ideas,’ breaking up what
would otherwise be a long list of tasks. Sections help visually, but they
also make organizing related tasks easier. You can add new tasks at the
bottom of a section or simply add a task to that list, in which case the
task moves to the bottom of the list, where you can leave it or drag it to a
section later. It’s not a revolutionary change by any means, but it has a
simple elegance that is fantastic.

Sections become column headers in Reminders’ Column View.

However, there’s even more to those sections than meets the eye. First, from
the View menu, you can switch from the default list view to a column view.
That arranges your tasks into multiple side-by-side lists that are organized
by the section headings you’ve assigned to them. Any tasks that aren’t
organized into sections will default to an ‘Others’ list to the far right of
your other lists.

Column view is another excellent affordance for managing long lists by
spreading them out horizontally, which is especially useful on a big
external display. Most to-dos are short, actionable descriptions that wind
up taking up a lot of vertical space. That works well enough on an iPhone
that’s typically used in portrait mode, but a big, widescreen column view is
a superior way to manage a big task list. With sections arrayed
horizontally, it’s simple to drag to-dos around within a list or between
them.

Another way you can use column view is as a Kanban-style status board,
moving items through the stages of a process. I experimented with this over
the summer during our Summer OS Preview Series, moving the stories we
planned from an idea stage through research, writing, and published phases.
I shared the list with Federico, which allowed each of us to update it and
keep track of where we stood with the series without coordinating with each
other directly. I don’t expect to use Reminders this way very often, but it
worked quite well for that sort of use case.

Grocery lists in Reminders.

The other part of the ‘sections’ story is a brand-new list type called
Groceries. When you set up a new list, you now have the option to designate
it as a Groceries list instead of a Standard or Smart List. Once set up,
when you add items to your list, Reminders will automatically sort them into
pre-defined sections. So bananas will end up in a Fruits and Vegetables
list, and ice cream will wind up in Frozen Foods. Because foods are
organized according to common store layouts, it makes shopping a lot more
efficient than one long list where everything is in the order that items
were added. Reminders can handle common non-food items, too. Also, if
something is miscategorized, you can drag it into another section, and
Reminders will learn your preferences. Reminders will also suggest moving an
item if it detects that you might have added it to the wrong section.

If you miscategorize an item, Reminders will offer to move it.

Auto-categorization is an obvious win for grocery lists that I’d love to see
expanded as an option for any list. Grocery items are a well-defined problem
set, but perhaps with a little sprinkling of AI magic, Reminders could learn
to put ‘Write macOS review’ in a Writing section I set up or ‘Figure out the
ChatGPT API’ in Research. Those are the kinds of applications of AI that
could help take even more of the tedium out of chores like managing a task
list that I’d appreciate. For now, though, I’m a big fan of the new
Groceries list type.

There are also features that I’d like to see from Reminders in the future,
including:

a.. The filter for including lists in a Smart List only lets you pick one
but should allow you to select as many as you’d like. An obvious example is
that I’d like to include several work-related lists as part of a Smart List
but exclude my Personal and Grocery task lists.
b.. You can move a task from one list to another with drag and drop, but
unlike the iOS and iPadOS versions of Reminders, you can’t switch a task’s
list by clicking on the task’s info button. It’s a small thing but an odd
inconsistency that trips me up.
c.. Column view should work with the Scheduled Tasks list. When I sit down
to plan my week or even just the next few days, I like to look at what past
me, thought future me could handle on those upcoming days. Then, I drag
tasks around to refine the workload for each day to come up with a more
realistic plan. It would be easy to view an entire week and then some on a
27” display and then drag tasks from day to day. For bonus points, include
the same morning, afternoon, and evening dividers found in the Today list,
so I can get even more granular with my planning, and add column view to the
Today list, too.
d.. Every standard Reminders list can be assigned a color, and I’d love
that color coding to carry over to the tasks themselves, making it easy to
identify the parent list a task belongs to in a mixed list like Today.
Reminders’ update for Sonoma is a bigger deal than the one short paragraph
it got on Apple’s macOS Sonoma preview page would suggest. The app has
evolved a lot in recent years from a rudimentary tool to one that scales
gracefully from simple grocery lists to more complex project planning. It’s
a trend that’s emerged with more than one of Apple’s system apps across all
of its platforms and one I hope continues to spread to all corners of macOS.

Notes

Note Linking
The macOS update to Notes this year includes an important cross-over theme
with Reminders. Both implemented new features that make navigating the app
much nicer for anyone who uses it to store a lot of information. For
Reminders, that meant implementing a column view, which lets you take a long
list of tasks that’s been divided into sections and display multiple lists
horizontally, taking advantage of wide screens. In Notes, the story is a
little different. Instead of a different view, Notes obviates the need for
long notes entirely by allowing users to link them together in a web of
related content.

For anyone who is familiar with wiki-style links or has used an app like
Obsidian that allows you to link documents together, this kind of linking is
old news. However, it’s a big deal for a mainstream tool like Notes. And, of
course, Apple has put its own spin on inter-note links.

Using internal links in Notes to create a table of contents leading to other
notes.

What’s different from some linking systems you might know is that Notes’
links are one-way links. That means you can create a note, link it to
another, and when you follow the link, you won’t see a link back to the
original note. What is known as back-linking is a very nerdy feature that
some people love, but I suspect that most people will be fine with the way
Apple has implemented linking. For everyone else who tries inter-note
linking for the first time and finds Apple’s implementation too limiting,
there are plenty of third-party apps that support backlinks. For them, I
expect Notes’ linking implementation will serve as an introduction that will
actually spur more interest in apps like Obsidian, Logseq, and Roam.

>> shortcut.">
Linking a note with the >> shortcut.

To create a link in Notes, all you need to do is type the familiar ⌘K
keyboard shortcut that’s used in multiple places throughout macOS and many
third-party apps. That opens a window where you can type or paste a URL or
start typing the name of a note. As you type the name of a note, a dozen
suggestions appear and update as you type. Alternatively, you can type the
shortcut » to immediately pull up a list of recent notes to link. Pick one,
name it something different than the title of the note if you’d like, and
click ‘Ok.’ That’s it. Alternatively, you can highlight some text and follow
the same steps to directly link a note to that text. It really couldn’t be
easier.

What I love about linking notes is it lets you break up a topic into chunks,
so you’re not facing a huge wall of text. Notes’ existing formatting tools
do a nice job of organizing the contents of a note, but linking to related
content is often better. This is especially good for reference material
because it makes it easier to skip around to the parts you need instead of
endlessly scrolling past information you don’t.

PDFs
Sonoma supports reading and marking up PDFs in Notes.

Even if creating webs of notes isn’t your thing, I think a lot of MacStories
readers will be happy to see what the Notes team has done with PDFs.
Everyone deals with PDFs at least now and then, and for some people, that’s
one of the main sources of information with which they work. That’s true of
anyone working in an academic or another research field, lawyers, and many
others.

You could already add PDFs to Notes, but they were just file attachments. To
do any markup or editing, you had to open them up in Preview or another app.
Most people won’t need that anymore because Notes’ new PDF integration,
which allows you to read and mark up PDFs inline, is so good.

When you drag a PDF into Notes, it’s laid out horizontally. It’s a great
design for a couple of reasons. The first is the practicality of working
inside a note that includes a PDF. By lining the pages up horizontally,
there’s room for you to take notes above or below the PDF. A lot of apps
offer a vertical scrolling option as if the PDF were a webpage, which is
fine, but with a document that’s been paginated like a PDF, I prefer moving
through it like a book.

Navigating a PDF using the thumbnails above the PDF.

Navigating a long PDF is easy. You can scroll the document from left to
right or use the ‘Show Thumbnails’ button at the top of the PDF and skim
through those even faster. Right-clicking a thumbnail also reveals options
to copy, rotate, or delete it and insert a blank page or file. You can also
adjust the size of the PDF at the top of your note, using the drop-down menu
next to the PDF’s filename and selecting ‘View As,’ which provides small,
medium, and large options. Small is just a file thumbnail without previews
of individual pages of your document, but medium and large display every
page of the PDF, with medium offering more room for taking notes.

Small…

Medium…

…and large views of the same PDF.

There are a couple of ways to mark up a PDF, too. If you want to highlight
text, you can right-click on it and choose ‘Highlight.’ However, if you want
to do more than that, you’re going to have to go to the drop-down menu next
to the PDF’s filename and pick ‘Markup’ or ‘Open Attachment.’ Markup will be
the better option in most circumstances because it opens your PDF in what is
essentially a stripped-down version of Preview with similar annotation
tools. Most importantly, though, the Markup option saves the changes you
make back to the version of your PDF that’s attached to your note. If you
choose to ‘Open Attachment’ instead, it will open in Preview, and any
changes will be saved to a new copy of your document elsewhere on your Mac.

Marking up a PDF.

The one thing I don’t like about the Markup interface is that you have to
scroll through your PDF vertically. Which kind of scrolling you prefer is a
matter of personal taste, but I think horizontal scrolling in Markup mode
should at least be an option so it’s consistent with navigating your
document in Notes.

In the future, I’d also like to see the ability to link highlighted text to
notes. If you’re working on a long document and taking notes above or below
it, you can reference page numbers if your document has them, but that’s a
pain, and documents like presentations often don’t have page numbers at all.
If you could create a link when you add the highlighting that could be
pasted into your notes, that would make PDFs more navigable, a lot like
Apple’s done with its excellent inter-note linking, but between the notes
you type and the reference materials you’re reading.

Other Notes Updates
Notes can be moved to Pages.

There are a few other changes to notes worth mentioning. First, you can move
a document from the Notes app into Pages. This is accomplished with the
‘Open in Pages’ option that’s new to the Notes Share button. Once your note
is in Pages, you’ll have access to that app’s wider variety of formatting
and other features, but your changes won’t sync back to Notes. Nor can you
send Pages documents to Notes. This is a one-way process designed to let you
expand a note into a full-blown word-processing document when you need more
features than Notes offers.

A block quote and code in a monospaced font.

Second, there are new formatting options in Notes this year. There’s a
monospaced font that has a unique background. If you’ve ever tried to store
snippets of code in Notes and been tripped up by its rich text causing
problems when you paste your snippets into a plain text editor, you’ll
appreciate this feature. Now, you can store those snippets and easily move
them out of Notes and into a code editor. There’s also a block quote format,
which will be handy for anyone doing research.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

There was a time when PDFs were a big deal to me. That’s because when you’re
a lawyer and are sent a 500+ page PDF to read and analyze, you’re going to
want an efficient way to navigate the document, highlight the parts that are
important, and take notes on what you read. These days, my obsessions are
RSS, read-later services, and bookmarking apps. However, I remember what
those PDF days were like, and I appreciate how far Apple has come with its
PDF integration in Notes, which, along with the new formatting options and
internal linking, makes Notes a much more robust and realistic alternative
to students and anyone else looking for a place to pull together their
research notes and PDFs.

Safari

As someone who is perpetually on the web, all day, every day, I love how
much attention Safari has received in Apple’s OS updates over the past few
years. The redesign a couple of years ago made for a rocky beta season, but
I appreciate that the Safari team continues to push Apple’s browser forward
and listened to the feedback from users.

This year’s update to Safari isn’t as extensive, nor thankfully, as
controversial. However, competition for Mac users’ web browsing time has
been on the upswing with new browsers like Arc being released after a long,
invitation-only beta period, as well as SigmaOS, Kagi’s Orion, Vivaldi, and
others.

One of the things driving innovation in browsers is that, more than ever,
the browser has effectively become the operating system for lots of people.
Between Google’s suite of web apps, Figma, Notion, Slack, Discord, and many,
many others, people want and need more from their browsers than ever before.

Profiles
Profiles in Safari.

For many people, both their work and personal lives flow through a web
browser. The ability to log into web apps on a Mac, whether it’s a computer
that your job gave you or your own machine, is simultaneously convenient and
messy. It may be convenient to log into a service and deal with something at
work from your home, but it can be messy, making it hard to separate your
work and personal life as you log into and out of services you use for both.

Safari’s Sonoma update addresses this sort of situation with a new profiles
feature. It’s a similar approach used by other browsers that allow you to
create separate personas for different areas of your life. The easiest
example is the one above, where you want to separate your work and personal
lives, but it can be handy for students who want a profile for each area of
their studies or a freelancer who wants a different profile for each client
for whom they work. The circumstances vary, but the use case is always the
same. If there’s a task, project, or area of your life where you want to
separate the sites you visit and the services you use, profiles is the
answer.

Setting up a profile.

Apple’s Safari profiles are pretty simple but powerful if you work in
multiple modes. There’s a new tab in the app’s Settings where you set them
up. The first time you open the tab, you’ll be prompted to set up profiles,
which allows you to name each profile, assign it an icon and color, and
specify whether you want to start a new bookmarks folder for the profile or
use an existing one.

A newly-created Personal profile.

Adding a profile puts a new button in Safari’s toolbar, which allows you
open a new window for one of your profiles, but can also be done using Focus
modes. The button is tied to the button that opens and closes Safari’s
sidebar, meaning that if you want to rearrange your toolbar, the sidebar
button and profiles button move together and cannot be separated.

That seems to be because Apple has chosen to tie profiles closely to Tab
Groups. If you click on the profiles button, you’ll see a list of the Tab
Groups associated with that profile. There are also options in the drop-down
list to create an empty Tab Group or a new window for any of your profiles.
In addition to helping you manage separate logins and Tab Groups for each
profile, your browsing histories, cookies, extensions, and favorites are
separated.

Profiles isn’t a feature that I’m going to use because I don’t have the need
or the desire to segregate my web browsing between areas of my life,
projects, or anything else. That said, there’s a lot to like about the
feature for anyone who wants or needs that sort of separation. Not only do
profiles offer the convenience of logging in to the same service with
different credentials on separate profiles, but it’s a way to clean up messy
collections of favorites and Tab Groups and prevent your browser extensions
from taking over Safari’s toolbar by only associating them with the profile
to which they correspond. So, if you’ve always wanted to cordon off
different parts of your online life, it’s worth giving profiles a look.

Single-Site Web Apps
Raindrop.io as a Safari web app.

The other tentpole feature of Safari in Sonoma is single-site web apps.
There are several third-party developers that offer single-site web app
solutions, such as Unite, Coherence, which is made by the same developer as
Unite, and Fluid. Some of these tools are built using WebKit, the framework
that powers Safari, and others use Chromium, the underpinnings of Google’s
Chrome browser.

The benefit of a single-site browser is that it allows you to take a web
service and treat it like a standalone app. Tools like Slack and Discord are
good candidates for single-site web apps, as are social media services like
Instagram, but just about any web-based site or service works. Of course,
the same sites and services can be used in a Safari tab, saved as favorites,
pinned, or added to a Tab Group, but a single-site web app gets them out of
Safari, decluttering your browser tabs.

Creating a web app also opens up automation options like using Shortcuts’
Open App action to launch your web app. You can set different notification
settings for each web app you create in System Settings. Plus, your web apps
will show up as separate apps in Mission Control, Stage Manager, and when
you ⌘-Tab through your open apps.

Creating a single-site web app is incredibly easy.

The process for setting up a single-site web app is simple and closely
resembles the process of creating a Dock-based shortcut. In Shortcuts, there’s
a File menu item that allows you to add your shortcuts to the Dock, where
they’re treated like standalone apps. The same ‘Add to Dock…’ item has been
added to Safari too. Pick it, and you have the option to edit the name of
your web app, its URL, and its icon. Most sites will get the name and URL
correct but need you to add an icon like this web app for The Verge:

You’ll have to supply your own icon for some web apps you create.

I’ve been very happy with the web apps I’ve set up for services like:

a.. Mailchimp
b.. Grammarly
c.. Instagram
d.. Raindrop.io
e.. Discord
f.. Matter
g.. Tailscale
h.. Feedly
I also have web apps for many of our internal MacStories tools, like the
interface for publishing to Club MacStories and AppStories and our image
uploader.

I’ve noticed a couple services work better than their dedicated apps or
websites, too. For example, Discord opens much faster than its app
counterpart, and I haven’t noticed any limitations in the part of the
service that I use. Mailchimp seems to use less memory than it does in a
browser tab. That can be hard to judge even after consulting Activity
Monitor with multiple Safari threads running simultaneously, but I’ve
definitely seen fewer memory warnings than I tend to when I’m using
Mailchimp in the browser, and so far, it’s worked just as well.

I’ve set up more web apps than I expected I would and still need to find a
few icons for some of them.

One of the byproducts of testing a long list of services as single-site
browser apps is realizing just how much of my computing life has moved to
web-based apps and services. That’s true for a lot of people and is why we’ve
seen a crop of new browsers being developed. So, I’m glad to see Apple
leaning into the trend with a new way to experience web apps. I won’t be
sticking with single-site apps for all of the services I’ve tested, but I
prefer the experience to using them in Safari tabs, whether as part of Tab
Groups or pinned in a browser window. Maybe that dates me as an app-first
person, but it’s also because so much of my browsing is about reading and
research that adding services to them mix means they often get lost, so the
separation is welcome.

However, the long list of single-site apps I’ve created also makes me a
little sad. Some of the services I’ve turned into web apps have their own
apps, but they aren’t very good, which is why I resorted to a single-site
browser app. Others like Mailchimp, Matter, and Instagram could be better as
native apps, but I don’t hold out hope that any of them ever will be. I don’t
believe everything needs to be a native app, but I do think an entire
generation of apps and services are being launched with subpar user
experiences in the name of cross-platform expediency. If the economics of a
dedicated Mac app aren’t there, I’d rather have a web-based tool running as
a single-site web app than nothing at all, but that doesn’t make it the best
solution or the one I prefer.

More Safari Updates
It’s a little hard to tell, but the tabs on the end are both selected.

There are a bunch of other smaller additions to Safari, too, including
changes to Passwords, which I’ll save for later in this review. As someone
with far too many tabs open most days, another great addition this year is
the ability to select multiple tabs. Once selected by ⌘-clicking on multiple
tabs or Shift-clicking to select a range of tabs, you can right-click any of
them for options to:

a.. Pin Tabs
b.. Duplicate Tabs
c.. Close Tabs
d.. Close Other Tabs
e.. Move Tabs to New Window
f.. Move to Tab Group
Close Tabs, Close Other Tabs, and Move Tabs to New Window all require at
least one unselected tab to appear. The options are self-explanatory and
handy for quickly cleaning up a messy Safari window. I’ve also found that
moving multiple tabs into a new window is a good way to use Safari
extensions that work with multiple tabs, and I would love to see more
developers consider supporting that option where it makes sense.

What I don’t like about the new multi-tab selection feature in Safari is
that it doesn’t work with the share menu. You’d expect that if you select
three tabs and use the share button to send an iMessage to someone, it would
send all three URLs to the recipient, but it only sends the first one that
was selected. Likewise, there’s no way to use multiple tab selections in
Shortcuts. So, while multi-tab selection is a welcome addition to Safari, I
hope its utility is extended in later updates.

Favicons in the Favorites Bar.

Another change is that Safari’s favorites bar can display favicons in macOS
Sonoma. It’s a small change, but one that I know a lot of people have wanted
for a while. Favicons can be turned on by right-clicking on the favorites
bar and selecting ‘Show Icons.’ If you rename a favorite using an emoji in
the name, the favicon will be replaced by the emoji, too. I’m not a heavy
user of the favorites bar, and at first, I found having favicons turned on
in the favorites bar visually confusing with tabs just below it, but over
time, I’ve become used to it, and the update one that I’m sure anyone who is
used to identifying sites by their favicons will appreciate.

There are new Safari privacy features in Sonoma, too. If you open private
windows and tabs, they will lock along with your Mac when it’s not in use.
That way, even if you unlock your Mac, your private windows and tabs will
remain locked until you provide your password. Extensions that access your
browsing are turned off by default when you open a private window, requiring
you to grant each access before they can access the sites you visit. With
Sonoma, many of the tracking parameters added to links sent by email and
text message will be automatically stripped from their URLs by Mail and
Messages, too. Apple says Safari’s ability to block known trackers from
loading pages or identifying you has been enhanced.

Video Calling

It’s hard to look at the collaboration and video conferencing features added
to Apple’s OSes during the past couple of years and not think about the
pandemic. The experience of so many people working from home in 2020 and
2021, Apple employees included, undoubtedly shaped the direction that these
OS features have taken. Of course, it would have been nice for some of these
features to have debuted a few years ago, but the reality is that video
conferencing and online collaboration were part of many people’s work and
personal lives before the pandemic and continue to be. The pandemic merely
accelerated the trend. Today, video calls are part of nearly everyone’s
lives, whether you work from home, have colleagues spread around the globe,
or just want to catch up with friends and families who live elsewhere.

Video calls started on the iPhone with FaceTime. It’s hard to believe that
FaceTime was introduced in 2010 on iOS and debuted on the Mac the following
year. What started as a very consumer-oriented app has evolved in the wake
of COVID to become a much deeper set of tools encompassing work use cases
and embracing cross-platform support via the web. With Sonoma, that
evolution continues with improvements to screen sharing, making
presentations, expressing yourself during video calls, and controlling your
camera.

There are a few new video conferencing features designed to make sharing
easier in Sonoma. The simplest new feature, and one that I expect people
will appreciate the most, is that when you start a video call and share a
window or the whole screen, you can click on the video icon in the menu bar
to see what you’re sharing. Before, you had to go to Control Center. It’s a
small change but will relieve a lot of anxiety about what’s being shared
because it’s so easy to check. It also happens to be a system-level feature,
so it’s available in apps like Zoom and Webex, as well as FaceTime.

Sonoma’s video menu bar item previews what you’re sharing and make it easy
to swap in new content.

Sharing windows and your screen is easier, too. There are three sharing
options accessed by clicking on the button in the Video menu with the icon
of a person superimposed over a screen. Clicking that button changes the
Video menu’s interface from a preview of yourself on the call to a sharing
UI from which you can choose to share your entire screen, a single window,
or an app that will include all open windows for that app. After clicking
one of those options, you can confirm what you want to share by navigating
to the app and selecting the button that appears, which will immediately
display the window you’re sharing in the Video menu. Alternatively, you can
hover over the green stoplight button of any window to share it or its app
with someone. If you’re already sharing a window or app, you can swap in a
new one through both means or add multiple windows or apps, too.

Collaboration is incorporated into the new Video menu too.

Also, flipping to an app that supports collaboration will trigger a
notification that it’s available to use on your call. When you return to the
Video menu’s sharing view, you’ll see the collaboration app at the bottom of
the sharing UI, which you can click to start collaborating.

What’s great about each of these sharing features is that they’re all
consolidated in the menu bar item, making it a one-stop destination for
setting up video calls. After using it for just a short time, visiting the
menu bar to make adjustments and set up new configurations becomes second
nature regardless of what conferencing service you use.

Testing Presenter Overlays with Keynote.

Once you’ve shared a window, app, or your whole screen, you can also choose
from two Presenter Overlays, which are Apple silicon-only features. If you
pick ‘Small’ in the Video menu, you’ll appear in a small onscreen circle
with a sky-blue background. Your image isn’t completely constrained to the
bounds of the circle, though. As you move outside the circle, your image
will quickly fade, but it’s a nice effect that adds depth and looks a little
like you’re popping out from a hole in someone’s screen as you present
something, helping to keep their attention. The other presenter option is
‘Large,’ which superimposes you in front of what you’re sharing with your
room in the background. In my testing, both options worked well.

Mac Compatibility
New Videoconferencing Features
a.. Presenter Overlay requires an Apple silicon Mac
b.. Reactions require an Apple silicon Mac using a built-in camera or any
Mac using Continuity Camera with an iPhone 12 or later
c.. The Studio Light effect is likewise limited to Apple silicon Macs
using a built-in camera or any Mac using Continuity Camera with an iPhone 12
or later
d.. The Portrait mode background blur effect requires the built-in camera
on an Apple silicon Mac or any Mac using Continuity with an iPhone XR or
later
e.. Center Stage using the iPhone’s main or Ultra-Wide camera requires an
iPhone 11 or later
f.. Zooming, recentering, and manually framing your video image requires a
Studio Display or an iPhone XR or later
From the Video menu, you can also toggle Center Stage, the Portrait and
Studio Light effects, and Reactions on and off. Both the Portrait and Studio
Light effect sections can be expanded to reveal sliders that regulate the
strength of each effect when using a Studio Display or iPhone camera via
Continuity Camera. The Studio Light effect is entirely new to macOS Sonoma,
and while Center Stage and Portrait mode aren’t, the greater user control
they offer is.

Adjusting the Studio Light effect (left) and panning and zooming my Studio
Display camera (right).

For anyone who has never liked Center Stage, Sonoma gives you more control
over the camera once you’ve turned off the effect. The controls are a little
hidden, though. Unlike the effects that gain a caret that can be clicked to
reveal slider controls, the camera controls only appear if you hover over
the preview of your video feed when Center Stage is turned off. When you do
that, you’ll see a magnification level that can be adjusted by dragging left
and right on the scale beneath the magnification label. You can also grab
elsewhere on the image to change the camera angle or click on a ‘Recenter’
button to put yourself back in the middle of the frame. Also, if you’re
using Continuity Camera with an iPhone 11 or later, you can switch Center
Stage between the Wide and Ultra Wide cameras.

I’ve never understood the backlash against the lack of control over Center
Stage and the other FaceTime video effects, but I don’t do a lot of video
calls, which is undoubtedly part of it. Nor do I care that I’m not
broadcasting myself in pore-popping 4K resolution, which is probably best
for everyone on the handful of video calls I do. Still, I know a lot of
people care deeply about this, or there wouldn’t be Mac utilities for using
DSLRs as webcams, so for all of you, I’m happy. I’m also glad that Apple
implemented these controls in a way that is discoverable but sufficiently
out of the way that I can ignore them.

As you can tell from his reactions, Federico is very enthusiastic about
whatever it was I said.

From the Video menu, you can also trigger the following reactions:

a.. Heart
b.. Thumbs up
c.. Thumbs down
d.. Balloons
e.. Rain
f.. Confetti
g.. Lasers
h.. Fireworks
Better yet, there are a series of hand gestures available to trigger each of
the eight available effects, some of which are similar to the effects
available in the Messages app. Early in the betas, I triggered an effect by
accident, but that hasn’t happened since, so the sensitivity seems about
right.

Fireworks.

As I said, I don’t do lots of video calls, but for someone like me, the new
video menu bar item is perfect. I’m not a video conferencing pro, so being
able to see a preview of what I’m sharing is ideal. The reactions are fun,
too, but the multiple easy ways to share windows, apps, and a full-screen
view of your Mac are what I think users will appreciate most whether they’re
working from home, holding meetings with far-flung offices around the world,
or just showing something off to a friend or family member.

Disappointments
Shortcuts
Shortcuts has barely changed this year.

There’s not a lot to say about Shortcuts this year. There wasn’t much to say
last year either, and that’s the biggest Shortcuts news and disappointment
of Sonoma. We were told that Shortcuts was the future of Mac automation, but
it hasn’t turned out that way. Yes, Shortcuts effectively replaced
Automator, which is still available, but little has happened to move
Shortcuts forward since its introduction on the Mac. Only Apple knows why
that is, but I suspect it’s a question of priorities.

App Intents is a framework from Apple’s Shortcuts team that’s an evolution
of what was originally called Siri Shortcuts, except that they’re no longer
limited to Siri. App Intents power App Shortcuts, Focus modes, widgets, Live
Activities, Spotlight Search on iOS and iPadOS, and the Shortcuts app
itself. That’s a massive expansion in a relatively short period of time that
has undoubtedly impacted the development of Shortcuts on the Mac.

Whether that expansion is why Shortcuts for Mac has barely budged in the
past two years, or there’s another reason doesn’t really matter. The result
is the same either way. There’s just not much to say about Shortcuts for Mac
again this year.

A few of the Shortcuts for Mac actions that could come in handy.

That said, there are a handful of new and updated Shortcuts actions
available on the Mac, including:

a.. Transcribe Audio for converting audio to text
b.. Delete Alarms to remove alarms from the Clock app
c.. Find Alarm has replaced Get All Alarms, allowing you to find fewer
than all of your alarms using filtering criteria
d.. New stopwatch actions
e.. Show Passwords, which opens the Passwords section of System Settings
f.. Start Time Machine Backup to begin or end a Time Machine backup
g.. New network details are returned by the existing Get Network Details
action
h.. Get Details of Event Attendees has added a new ‘Type’ attribute
i.. A new Find Message action for Mail, that includes multiple filters for
locating messages
j.. A new Print Center section of Shortcuts for the Mac that includes a
Print Documents action that I haven’t been able to get to work
The list of new Shortcuts actions on iOS and iPadOS 17 is longer, but not a
by a lot. Some of the actions added to iOS and iPadOS 17 are relevant to the
Mac, too, but aren’t part of Sonoma, resulting in the Mac version of
Shortcuts falling further behind than ever. On top of that, the Mac version
of Shortcuts still doesn’t support personal automations or App Shortcuts,
which were significantly expanded in iOS and iPadOS 17. Finally, the
Shortcuts app is the buggiest system app on the Mac by a wide margin.

At this point, Shortcuts for Mac is beginning to feel a lot like a modern
version of Automator – a neglected, dead-end tool that never fulfilled its
potential. Perhaps next year will be different, but I’m no longer optimistic
it will be.

Stage Manager
Stage Manager took a step backward with Sonoma.

Last year, the issues with Stage Manager on the iPad were so profound that
they made the Mac version of the feature feel like a breath of fresh air by
comparison. That didn’t mean there weren’t rough edges, but the feature was
good enough that I found myself sticking with it throughout the past year.
Unfortunately, instead of improving Stage Manager with macOS Sonoma, the
feature has taken a step backward.

Like last year, the main issue with Stage Manager on the Mac is that it’s
too hard to set up sets of apps. As I said in my Ventura review:

Once set up, sets of apps in the strip are easy to use. The problem is
that it’s too hard to create app sets in the first place. Creating sets of
apps is one of the few places where iPadOS’s version of Stage Manager
outshines the Mac. On both platforms, you can drag an app from the strip
onto the current stage to create a set of apps or windows from the same app.
The trouble is that Shift-clicking on apps in the strip and dragging and
dropping them are the only options for creating app sets on the Mac. In
contrast, you can drag apps from the dock or out of a Spotlight search to
create a set on the iPad.

The problem with Sonoma is that the ways to create sets of apps are just as
limited as Ventura, but the interactions are more confusing than before.
With Ventura, if you Shift-clicked on an app stack in the strip, the top one
would be added to the current stage. That’s changed in Sonoma.

Strangely, Shift-clicking a stack in the strip pulls apps from the bottom of
the stack to the stage and breaks up any remaining stack in the strip.

Now, the bottom app is pulled from the stack and added to the stage. Why? I’ve
given up trying to figure it out. Pulling from the bottom is
counterintuitive to the way I think of a stack, but it’s a practical issue,
too, because the strip only shows icons for the top three apps in a stack.
That means if you have four or more apps piled up and Shift-click on the
stack, you’re going to get a hidden app from the bottom of the stack.

The other thing that happens when you Shift-click on a stack is that any
other apps in the stack you select are separated into separate single-app
items in the strip. That means the price of peeling a single app off a stack
is pulling the rest of it completely apart, even though you might have
wanted to use the rest of those apps together on the stage again later.

Are you still with me? I know, right? It took me most of the summer to
figure out what’s going on with Stage Manager, and I’m still not sure I’ve
captured the entirety of the odd changes that have been made, but whether I
have or not, the impact is the same. Stage Manager is more confusing than
before, which is a step backward.

When I saw these changes in the early betas, I thought they were part of an
evolving interaction model for Stage Manager and hoped they’d be resolved,
but they weren’t. Instead, Shift-clicking on a stack of apps in the strip is
so confusing and messy that I’ve stopped using it as a way to build stacks
for the most part. Instead, I’ve been resorting to switching stacks,
removing individual apps from the stage that I want to use in another stack,
and then switching back to my first stack and adding to it. It’s a
cumbersome process that I hope changes because I’m still a fan of Stage
Manager as a concept, but these changes have really tested my patience this
summer.

In addition to window setup issues, Stage Manager is still in need of a
solution for the Open dialog dance where opening a document in an app like
Pages causes apps to jump on and off the stage, as the Open dialog closes
before the document opens. The feature is also in desperate need of keyboard
shortcuts, including a right-click menu for the strip, and Shortcuts
support, which is non-existent.

I find myself in a very strange place with Stage Manager. I’ve been using it
full-time on my Mac since the first Ventura beta. In contrast, the issues
with the feature on the iPad drove me away for the entirety of iPadOS 16.
Now, however, the tables have turned. I agree with Federico’s remaining
critiques of Stage Manager on the iPad, but with iPadOS 17, it’s finally a
useful feature that I enjoyed using all summer during the iPadOS beta. In
contrast, the overhead of setting up app sets and the added confusion
layered on by Sonoma has me rethinking my use of the feature on the Mac,
which is a shame because there’s value in having a Mac and iPad setup that
work similarly.

I still believe that the ideas for decluttering the Mac desktop that
underlies Stage Manager are sound, but unfortunately, Sonoma is a step in
the wrong direction. Hopefully, with the worst of the iPadOS issues behind
it, Apple can dedicate time to examining how people use Stage Manager on the
Mac and how it could be made to fit better with a wide range of use cases.

Other System Features
Passwords, Security, and Privacy

Passwords permeate our lives. With an ever-growing number of sites,
services, and apps to log into, people need help generating, managing, and
accessing them. There are excellent third-party apps that can help, but the
reality is that most people aren’t going to download a third-party app, and
even fewer are likely to pay for one. That’s why Apple’s work with passwords
is so important.

However, what makes that work impressive is the lengths to which the company
has gone to make good password practices easy for users. The password
updates to macOS Sonoma are fantastic examples, making it easier than ever
to share passwords and for users to begin adopting passkeys, a superior
method of authentication compared to traditional passwords.

Shared Passwords and Passkeys
Sharing passwords.

Shared passwords are the most significant new security feature of macOS
Sonoma. Apple’s work with passwords has come a long way in recent years, but
until now, password sharing was a one-off thing. However, with this year’s
Sonoma update, users will be able to share entire sets of passwords with
friends, family, and other trusted users. That’s a big deal because, in
prior OS versions, that limitation was one of the most common reasons why
many of our readers are still using a third-party password manager.

You can start sharing passwords with the button at the top of your list of
passwords.

The first time you open the Passwords tab of Safari on macOS or the Mac’s
System Settings, you’ll see a new option near the top of your list of
passwords that says ‘Share Passwords with Family.’ That message may lead you
to think that password sharing is limited to an iCloud Family Sharing group,
but it’s not. They can be shared with any trusted person regardless of
whether they are part of your iCloud Sharing group.

Notifying someone you’ve added to a password group is done using Messages.

The notification sent to anyone invited to a shared password group is
similar to other sharing notifications on Apple’s OSes.

I’ve begun setting up a shared password group for my family, but until
recently, that was limited to me and my son, who also ran the macOS Sonoma
beta over the summer. You’ll also discover during the setup process that
shared passwords will only be accessible from devices that are on the latest
OSes. That may be frustrating for whoever is the early OS adopter in their
family or other password-sharing group, but it’s a good reason to encourage
your family and other contacts to update their devices.

Shared passwords can only be used on devices with Apple’s latest OSes.

After adding someone, you can search through your passwords and select the
ones that you want to share. The final step is to notify the person you’re
sharing your passwords with that they’ve been shared. Later, if you want to
edit a group, you can reopen the group, where you’ll see an option to manage
its members. From here, you can add new members, remove people from a group,
or delete a group entirely. It’s worth noting, too, that if you delete a
group, your passwords aren’t deleted. Instead, they’re moved back into My
Passwords, which serves as your default password group.

A shared password group’s owner is the only person who can add more
participants.

As the creator of a shared password list, you have sole control of adding
and removing members of the group, but once part of a group, each member can
add and remove any of the passwords regardless of who added them originally.
Also, Passwords live in just one group at a time. For example, if I want to
share my Hulu password with my family, adding it to my Family password group
removes it from the ‘My Passwords’ section. If you want a password to live
in two places, you’ll need to create a second password entry as though it
were a brand-new password.

Shared passwords are indicated by a little two-person sharing icon.

You might wonder if passwords living in one location make it hard to find
them when you don’t recall which list they live in, but in practice, it
doesn’t. The main Passwords view includes a search field that searches all
of your passwords. The ones that are shared will appear in search results
with a little ‘two-person’ sharing icon indicating that it’s part of a
shared list. You can also search individual lists, so I haven’t found it any
more difficult to find passwords than in the past.

Passwords are easy to move, too. When you open a password’s detail view, you
see a ‘Group’ field that can be used to move a password to any of your
groups. You can even set up a new group from the drop-down menu.
Alternatively, you can access the same menu by right-clicking on a password
on macOS Sonoma. Another way to move passwords is from the ‘plus’ button.
The context menu it displays has a ‘Move Passwords to Group’ option that
displays all of your passwords in other groups so you can move them into the
current group.

Federico accepting my shared password invitation and adding a new password
to the shared group from his iPhone.

One quirk of moving passwords is that only the group owner can move them. I
call it a quirk because any member of a group can delete a password,
eliminating access to it for everyone, including the person who set up the
list. Moving a password out of a shared group would have the same effect as
deletion on other members, yet it’s not possible. It’s an odd limitation but
enough of an edge case that I don’t expect it will be a problem in most
circumstances.

In my testing, creating lists of shared passwords was easy, and I expect it
will be more than enough to meet the needs of many families, roommates, and
other groups of trusted contacts. It may also be enough for some small
businesses, but in setting up a shared list of passwords with Federico, I
immediately missed the categories of passwords that I’ve set up in
1Password. Apple’s shared passwords don’t include the ability to set
permission levels or attach documents either, which is possible with
third-party password managers. You can work around these limitations using
separate lists and password-protected notes in the Notes app, but that’s
more cumbersome than a third-party app if those features are important to
you.

Until very recently, my use of password groups has been limited because not
all of my devices have been on the latest OSes, and few of the people in my
life are running betas. Still, I plan to move the handful of shared
passwords my family shares to Apple’s system. Apple’s system may not be the
best solution for shared MacStories passwords, but for my family, I expect
it will be far easier to use Apple’s solution than convincing family members
to download and learn a third-party app.

Apple ID Passkeys
The latest OSes automatically generate a passkey for your Apple ID.

macOS Sonoma automatically generates a passkey for your Apple ID. Passkeys,
which are based on a cross-platform web standard, are a way to replace
traditional passwords with the biometric authentication methods on your
devices. For the Mac, that means the Touch ID sensor. Your passkeys sync
across all of your Apple devices using iCloud Keychain, allowing you to use
those biometric authentication methods to sign in with your Apple ID on
every device you own.

Passkeys have been available for icloud.com and apple.com sites to anyone
running macOS Sonoma since shortly after WWDC, so I’ve been using my Apple
ID passkey all summer. The best part about passkeys is that when they’re
enabled, you quickly forget about them because they’re available on all of
your devices and use the same authentication methods you’re already used to
for unlocking your devices, but they’re more secure than passwords. It will
be years before most apps and websites support passkeys, but I’ve already
seen them implemented for a handful of websites I use, like CVS, the
pharmacy my family uses, Nintendo, Shop by Shopify, and Tailscale.

It’s Long Past Time for an Apple Passwords App
Passwords should be freed from the clutter of the System Settings app and
Safari’s Settings.

When you look at where Apple’s support for managing passwords is today, the
question we and others have been asking for the past few years at MacStories
is more relevant than ever:

Why isn’t there a separate system app for passwords?

Apple is doing a better job than ever surfacing passwords system-wide, but
users still need to dig through Settings too often.

System Settings on the Mac need a makeover that goes deeper than the type of
design refresh we saw in macOS Ventura. There’s too much in System Settings,
and removing passwords and making them part of a standalone app would be a
great way to reduce System Settings’ complexity.

Bigger picture, passwords have never fit well in settings anyway. To my
mind, a password app is more like a specialized note-taking app than it is a
settings app. Managing passwords doesn’t have a direct impact on the
operating system in the same way changing from light mode to dark mode or
silencing notifications does. With the password features of Apple’s OSes so
competitive with standalone password apps now, I hope we see them rolled
into a separate app in next year’s OS updates.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Year after year, Apple has improved the way passwords are managed on our
devices, and this year is no different. Shared passwords will make sharing
among family members and other trusted groups significantly easier to manage
than before. The generation of Apple ID passkeys should help push passkey
adoption forward, too, once users see how convenient they are and start to
wonder why more sites and services don’t support them yet. I’d love to see
Apple’s password features rolled into their own app, but that doesn’t take
away from the great work that’s been done to make generating, managing, and
accessing passwords easier than ever across every Apple OS.

URL Tracking Parameters
You’ve undoubtedly come across tracking parameters on the web. They’re the
part of a URL that follows a question mark and can be used for a wide
variety of types of tracking, from something as innocuous as identifying
that a URL was opened from an RSS feed to identifying a specific person who
was sent a URL by text message or email and then tracking them as they visit
other websites.

Tracking parameters that track individuals across sites are stripped from
URLs sent via Mail and Messages and those opened in a private Safari window.
My understanding is that this feature won’t strip a parameter that, for
example, tells the sender of an email newsletter that someone opened their
newsletter, but it would do so if the parameter was designed to identify
that you opened the newsletter and track you across other sites. Removing
these parameters doesn’t break the URLs. It simply protects your privacy.
Tracking parameters have a place on the web, but they’re misused like a lot
of web technologies, so I’m glad to see Apple is cracking down on uses that
identify individuals.

Sensitive Content Warnings
Communications Safety, which allowed parents to blur sensitive photos sent
or received by their kids with Messages, has been expanded to videos. The
feature has also been expanded from Messages to the system photo picker.

Adults have the option to receive sensitive content warnings in Messages
now, too. When turned on, you’ll be prompted to pick whether you want to see
a photo or video that has been flagged as containing nudity. You’ll also
have the option to block the contact. Apple has made its on-device Sensitive
Content Analysis available as a framework to developers so they can add it
to their apps, too.

But Wait, There’s More
There are other security and privacy features sprinkled throughout macOS
Sonoma. A few more worth mentioning are:

a.. Website security codes delivered via Mail autofill like they do when
you receive a text message in the Messages app
b.. Calendar includes a new permission that allows apps to add events but
not read events on your calendars
c.. The Photos permission alert to allow apps to access your photo library
has been updated to tell users how many photos they’ll be giving an app
access to if they allow full access
d.. The addition of new privacy labeling options for developers so they
can explain to users the privacy practices of any third-party SDKs that
their apps use
Accessibility
If you cover the tech world long enough, it’s very easy to react cynically
to announcements by companies about topics like accessibility. Too many
companies talk a good game but are short on follow-through. What’s different
about Apple is that it has the track record to back up its words.

This year is no different. As Apple’s hardware evolves, it poses new
accessibility challenges but also opportunities. A great example of what
hardware advances are enabling is the fact that some Apple silicon Macs can
now be paired with Made for iPhone hearing devices for Mac users with
hearing disabilities.

Live Speech lets you type what you want to say, which is then read aloud.

Speech is a big part of Apple’s accessibility story this year, too. Like the
iPhone and iPad, Live Speech is available as part of macOS Sonoma. The
feature allows users to type what they want to say and have it spoken out
loud on FaceTime calls or in person.

To set up a Personal Voice, head to the Accessibility section of System
Settings.

For Mac users who are at risk of losing their ability to speak, Personal
Voice is also available. The feature can be found in the Accessibility
section of System Settings under ‘Speech.’ The first thing you’ll be asked
to do is authenticate yourself with Touch ID or your system password. After
reading about 150 phrases aloud, which you’re told will take about 15
minutes, your Mac will generate a personal voice for you securely and
locally. It takes a while, but then, you’ll be able to use your Personal
Voice for Live Speech alongside the system voices built into macOS.


There are other new accessibility features throughout macOS this year,
including:

a.. Voice Control phonetic spellings that suggest similar sounding words
that are spelled differently
b.. A Voice Control guide with tips on how to use the feature
c.. The addition of VoiceOver to Xcode
d.. Improvements to how Siri voices sound at higher speeds and an option
to slow Siri’s speech
e.. A single place to adjust the text size of several system apps
individually or as a group
f.. The ability to set automations to pause automatically
There’s always more that can be done to make computers more accessible to an
even wider audience, but Sonoma is an excellent example of how Apple has
continued to work to make its products more accessible with every new OS
release, which I love.

Everything Else
This is always one of my favorite sections to write because there are always
dozens of interesting changes to a new version of macOS that don’t merit
their own section but are nonetheless important. They’re also the kind of
thing you can try to impress your friends with. I say ‘try’ because, let’s
face it, OS trivia is only going to impress a very specific crowd. Still,
there are a lot more handy new features in macOS Sonoma that are worth
covering, so let’s get to it.

Autocompletion, Autocorrection, and Dictation. As someone who types all day,
I appreciate Apple’s improved autocompletion and autocorrection feature more
than just about any other change this year. The feature is the very
definition of one that saves you a very small amount of time but so often
that it builds up quickly over time.

Autocomplete’s suggested text appears in a slightly lighter shade of gray
than the text you’ve typed.

The new autocompletion is so well done that apps that don’t support it feel
like something is missing. The feature, which suggests word completion and
even multiple words at times, is available in any standard macOS text field.
When you see an autocompletion suggestion appear in light gray, just tap the
Space Bar, Tab key, or Return to accept the suggestion.

Unfortunately, the feature doesn’t work in Safari and, by extension, its new
web apps, or apps built on other technologies like Electron. That means, for
instance, that I get suggestions in a native Mac app like iA Writer but not
Obsidian. It also means you won’t get autocomplete in apps like Notion,
Discord, or Slack either. Those are big apps used by a lot of people that
aren’t likely to switch to native technologies for autocompletion, but it’s
one more reason to appreciate and gravitate toward native Mac apps.

Clicking on a word that is autocorrected gives you the option to go back to
what you typed.

Also, the English, French, and Spanish keyboards are all using a new
transformer model that is more accurate for autocorrect, and it’s far
superior to the old version. Corrections are made as you type, and the
corrected word is temporarily underlined in the app’s accent color. Click on
the word, and a popup will appear to let you change the text to what you
originally typed.

Tapping the Magic Keyboard’s globe key brings up a contextual emoji picker.

Another nice touch is that when you tap the globe key on an Apple keyboard,
an inline emoji picker will appear with emoji suggestions based on the
message you’re writing. If you don’t want the suggested emoji, just click on
the drop-down arrow to open the full macOS Character Viewer. The cursor also
transforms to show you when you’ve turned on Caps Lock with a similar inline
indicator.

Dictation has been improved, too. When activated, the line you’re dictating
has an accent color glow around it to indicate you’re in dictation mode.
Stop speaking, and a dictation icon appears above the cursor so you know you’re
in that mode. However, you can seamlessly wrest control from the microphone
simply by starting to type. When you stop typing, the microphone icon will
reappear, and you can resume dictation. The same thing allows you to move
around in a document with a pointing device, dictating edits. When you’re
finished, tap the Escape key or the Apple Magic Keyboard’s dedicated
Dictation key to cancel dictation. Unlike autocorrect and autocompletion,
dictation works system-wide, including in Safari and non-native apps, which
is great.

Touch typing is so ingrained in me that I don’t see myself switching to
dictation for writing. However, I plan to experiment with it more over the
course of the next several months for note-taking.

Mail. Apple Mail received an extensive update last year with macOS Ventura.
This year’s update is far more modest, with just a handful of changes.

If Sonoma detects that you’ve received a travel-related email, like a hotel
reservation, it will float that message to the top of your inbox as your
travel date approaches. I haven’t been on a trip that included travel emails
since WWDC, but in concept, I like the idea of being able to find my flight
information more easily, but we’ll have to see how well it works in
practice.

Just like iOS and iPadOS 17, Sonoma can clean up emailed password
verification codes.

I’m more excited about the fact that when you receive a password
verification email, Apple Mail will offer to auto-fill the code that arrives
in your email inbox and delete it automatically. The feature is limited to
Apple Mail, and most of my email accounts are Gmail accounts, but for those
times when codes arrive in my iCloud account, I appreciate the helping hand
to keep the mess out of my inbox.

A perennial problem I think a lot of people have with email is that once you
download an attachment, it’s separated from the context of the message that
came with it. This happens to me a lot. Someone sends me a file, I download
it, and when I find the file later and have forgotten who it was from or why
it was sent, I wind up back in Mail, trying to find the original message.

The Finder’s right-click menu provides new contextual options for files
downloaded from Mail.

With Sonoma, you can right-click on a downloaded file, and you’ll see a
couple of options. First, you’ll see a ‘Show in Mail’ option that will take
you back to the original message. Second, there will be a ‘Reply to [Name of
Sender]’ option, which makes it dead simple to compose a reply to someone
after reviewing an attachment without navigating back to your Mail inbox,
which I love.

Mail is also adding support for sending large emoji in messages. It’s not a
big addition, but this was already possible on iOS and iPadOS, and parity
between the platforms for this sort of thing makes a lot of sense.

Messages. Messages should be more fun on the Mac. Yes, I do my ‘serious’
work on the Mac, but I also spend the day chatting with friends and family
in Messages, and I’m bummed that stickers are barely implemented there
compared to iOS and and iPadOS 17. I can access stickers I create on my
iPhone or iPad and add them to messages, but I can’t make stickers on the
Mac, and the effects you can add to them look flat and bland, which I’m sure
is a technical limitation, but still.

Filtering Messages’ search results.

That said, the new ‘swipe to reply’ gesture is a nice, quick way to respond
to someone, and I appreciate that there are more ways to filter search
results. For example, in the screenshot above, it’s simple to quickly filter
to find all messages to Federico that include links and mention Tim Cook. We
run a lot of MacStories’ business over iMessage, and having better search
filtering has been a huge help already. The ability to quickly jump to the
beginning of a series of unread messages in a busy thread using the new
Catch-Up button is handy, too.

You can stop an audio message and pick up again where you left off before
sending it.

Audio messages are more versatile, too. You can start a message, pause it,
and then resume recording. Plus, you can play back messages at twice the
speed or view a transcription of the messages you receive with Sonoma.

The biggest win, though, is that Messages will offer to delete those text
messages you get with one-time password codes. I’ve been using this feature
all summer on all my devices, and it’s made a big difference, decluttering
my Messages inbox and greatly improving the signal-to-noise ratio.

Game Mode. It’s not like there’s absolutely no fun happening on macOS
Sonoma. Apple continues to work on the Mac as a videogame platform. The Mac
may not be going toe-to-toe with Windows PCs yet, but I appreciate that
Apple continues to improve macOS for gamers and developers.

Game Mode is an automatic Apple silicon Mac mode that gives running games
priority over CPU and GPU operations. Apple has also doubled the sampling
rates for Bluetooth controllers and lowered the audio latency of AirPods,
which should improve the gameplay experience across the board.

Game Mode works automatically.

In typical Apple fashion, Game Mode isn’t something you turn on. It’s
enabled as soon as you start a game. I don’t have two comparable systems to
test the impact of Game Mode in practice, but I appreciate the effort to
provide a better Mac gaming experience.

For developers, Apple has released and continued to iterate on its Game
Porting Toolkit. The tool allows developers to run PC games on a Mac using a
compatibility layer that works like Proton does on the Steam Deck. That way,
they can identify bottlenecks in their games that need to be worked on to
port them to the Mac. It’s good to see this sort of effort by Apple to make
it easier for developers to test their games on Macs because its systems are
different from others, and the Mac user base is still relatively small.

Photos. Like iOS and iPadOS 17, Photos can identify dog and cat breeds, as
well as food and symbols using the expanded Visual Look Up feature. In my
testing, the results were mixed. The app also supports pet albums, which,
along with any other album, can be added to the Photos widget for the first
time.

Photos knows dogs.

Editing refinements have been included in Sonoma, too. Photos allows for
intelligent copy and pasting of edits between images that match the white
balance and exposure between the photos. Memories, which are generated by
the app, are more editable, too, allowing for photos and videos to be added
and rearranged within the Memory.

Photos has also added sharing via an iCloud link and a Sync Now button for
those times when iCloud sync has been paused, and you don’t want to wait.

Enhanced AutoFill. Other time savers include the enhancements to AutoFill.
On the Mac, you can right-click on a text field and pick AutoFill to see
options to pick a contact stored in your Contacts app or a password, which
opens a mini version of the System Settings and Safari password interface.
After you select the password or contact you want, AutoFill pastes it into
your document.

Autofill works in any text field the same way it does in a Safari password
field.


The final step is to pick the information you want to share.

Screen Sharing. Screen Sharing is now a proper Mac app with a proper
interface in macOS Sonoma. I’ve been experimenting with Tailscale for the
past month, and the new Screen Sharing interface in Sonoma has replaced my
use of third-party VNC clients on the Mac. The app lets you save connections
to other Macs and organize them into groups, making it easy to reconnect
without looking up a Mac’s IP address or knowing its local network name. I
only connect to a couple of Macs in my home, so my screen-sharing needs are
simple, but I’ve been very happy with the update.

The new Screen Sharing app.

Apple silicon Macs can also be able to take advantage of a new
high-performance screen-sharing mode that’s more responsive for working
remotely over a high-bandwidth connection. The feature allows you to view a
remote Mac’s screen at the resolution of the Mac you’re using to access it,
avoiding scaling issues that can impact the quality of the image delivered
from the remote computer. High-performance mode also supports HDR if your
remote Mac has an HDR screen. This isn’t something I’ve had the occasion to
do, so I haven’t tested it, but it should be a big win for anyone working
remotely on resource-intensive projects.

Motion and other sensor data is logged to the security section of Home tab
in the Home app.

In addition to the foregoing, macOS Sonoma includes a laundry list of other
miscellaneous features:

a.. Home logs door and window sensor, door locks, security system, and
garage door activity and displays when electricity in your area is cleaner.
b.. Books has added updated store pages for series of books.
c.. Freeform has improved diagramming, has been added as a share menu
option in other apps, the ability to guide collaborators around your board,
and Quick View support for 3D objects.
d.. Clock supports multiple timers, timer labels, presets, and a recent
timers view.
e.. Pronouns can be added to Contacts.
f.. AirTags can be shared with up to five people, a great option for
things like a shared set of car keys. Sharing prevents an AirTag from
alerting the person it’s shared with that they are being followed by a tag
if they use the shared item.
g.. The Print Center app has a new, modern interface but no meaningful new
features.
h.. System Settings is a little easier to navigate thanks to a back
button.
i.. Maps allows users to specify a preferred EV charging network.
j.. Sonoma drops support for the 2017 MacBook Pro, 2017 iMac, and 2017
12-inch MacBook.
Books includes new options for tracking series.

Several features announced at WWDC aren’t ready yet and will be released
later. For a complete rundown on what’s coming later, be sure to check out
the story we published on MacStories.

Conclusion

As I wrap up this review at my desk with an iPad Pro on one side using
Universal Control and my iPhone on the other in StandBy mode, I’m struck by
how well these three devices work in concert as well as individually. That’s
no small feat, and it highlights how well-integrated Apple’s systems are
now.

A big part of that integration is widgets. Apps vary from system to system
based on screen size and device capabilities, but widgets are the same
system-wide. They’re the glue that links an iPhone to an iPad to a Mac. They
provide continuity across devices, allowing you to spread your work out
across any number of them. Yet, at the same time, widgets work just as well
on a single device.

…desktop widgets are a critical link in a mixed device environment…

That wasn’t really true before Sonoma. Sure, we’ve had widgets on the Mac
for a while, but I’ve yet to meet someone who used them a lot before Sonoma
because they were hidden away behind the menu bar’s clock. Desktop widgets
won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, and you may prefer to stick with widgets on
an iPhone or iPad as you work at your Mac, but with Sonoma, desktop widgets
are a critical link in a mixed device environment that recognizes that for
many people, the Mac isn’t their only work tool. I’ve never worked solely on
a Mac, which is why I’m such a big fan of widgets on the desktop.

I’m also struck by how far apps like Reminders and Notes have come from
their origins. There was a time when Reminders was a barebones checklist
tool, and Notes didn’t support formatting. Now, they’re both worthy
competitors to some of the best alternatives available from third-party
developers. What’s more, they scale elegantly from their original, simple
use cases to more complex ones, which is a testament to their thoughtful,
considered design.

Widgets everywhere.

Safari single-site web apps complete the Sonoma triumvirate of my favorite
features. I’m sure it’s a product of when I began using computers more than
anything else, but I can’t help it. I prefer native apps to web apps.
However, in my hierarchy of computing needs, I prefer the best tool for a
job over anything else, and increasingly, in recent years, that’s a web app.
Still, I’ve never enjoyed working in browser tabs, whether they’re at the
top, on the side, or part of a special-purpose profile. There are
third-party apps with more bells and whistles, but over the past few months
with Sonoma, I’ve found that Safari web apps have been the perfect
lightweight solution to the internal MacStories web tools we use, as well as
a laundry list of third-party services. I’d still prefer native apps that
take advantage of macOS-specific features like the share menu and Shortcuts,
but I’m glad Apple has embraced the reality of web apps and given me and
other users a practical solution.

Those are my personal favorites among the many Sonoma updates, but the best
part is that there’s something in this release for everyone, from
significant improvements to video calling to gaming to password management.
It’s a grab bag of utility that’s only marred this year by the neglect of
Shortcuts and Stage Manager, both of which got off to a good start when they
debuted but have felt stuck in first gear ever since then.

On balance, though, there’s never been a better time to be a Mac user who
also uses other Apple devices. It wasn’t that long ago that the Mac seemed
like an also-ran platform without much of a future. Computing has changed.
Mobile is dominant, and web apps are a growing segment of the app landscape.
There’s still plenty of room for the great native Mac app experiences we’ve
enjoyed for years, but with Sonoma, Apple has shown it can adapt. Bringing
the Mac further into the fold of its other OSes with the help of widgets and
giving users a better way to use web apps. Paired with Apple silicon, it’s
an exciting, dynamic time on the Mac again, and I can’t wait to see what the
future holds.


https://feed.feedburster.com/macstoriesnet/redirect?url=https://www.macstories.net/stories/macos-sonoma-the-macstories-review/



David Goldfield
Assistive Technology Specialist




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