The general trend of macOS releases over the past few years has been to move closer and closer to the look and feel of iOS. The icon will be an iOS icon and its shape will also be an iOS shape, allowing you to use your iPhone as his webcam for his Mac and so on. This may come at the expense of other features (ask us what you think of the new Settings menu), but that’s (probably) the direction Apple is clearly heading in since Big Sur. Occasionally other fancy features (Stage Manager, Universal Controls, Quick Notes) are announced, but I write about them many times, but I never use them again.
Good news for Continuity fans. Basically, this is what’s happening with Sonoma. Ventura looked a lot like iOS, Sonoma looked similar more Like iOS. When I turned on his Mac Studio in the office after installing the developer beta, I momentarily wondered if my iPhone’s lock screen was hallucinating. It’s very nostalgic.
But in case that’s not enough iPhone flair, other The big update that comes with this public beta is the ability to place widgets on your desktop. Widget! It’s intelligently colored based on your desktop color and available in various Apple apps like Safari, Contacts, Podcasts, and more.
Now it’s clean. It also seems to me that this is one of his iOS handovers that doesn’t make much sense on a computer. Personally, I think the benefit of widgets on the iPhone is being able to glance at them when you don’t have time to open the actual app, like while shopping for groceries or waiting for the bus. The use case for having these on the computer desktop is not so clear to me. The opportunity to glance at your computer’s empty desktop while you’re doing other things is almost as uncommon. I think the main impact of having widgets on the desktop is that the Mac will become more like the iPhone. I hope that by the time Sonoma is fully released, 3rd party developers might find some fun and exciting use cases for his desktop widgets (but honestly I don’t really know ).
Once you get past the Continuity issues, you usually come to the part of macOS where Apple’s services struggle to keep up with their third-party competitors. Video conferencing is all the rage this year. A new video conferencing feature has been added to Sonoma. These seem to work with Zoom as well as FaceTime, at least. The one that seems most interesting to me is called Presenter Overlay and it does exactly what the title suggests. For example, if you give a colleague her Powerpoint presentation and you’re sharing your screen, you can use Presenter’s Overlay to overlay a video of his feed speaking on top of the presentation. Put your whole face and body in there or this is 100% what I do on all my video calls from now on – I can stick my face in a little bubble and move it around the screen in real time. .
New 3D reactions are also available, including hearts, balloons, and my favourite, thumbs down. Sorry colleagues, but I’m going to slam you all in 3D one day.
Another cool thing is that Safari now has profiles. This feature keeps the browser catching up to what Chrome has had for years. Similar to Chrome, each profile can have different bookmarks, history, tab groups, cookies, and favorites, which are synced across devices. However, unlike Chrome, Safari profiles can be labeled specifically for use cases such as work and personal. While I’m sure the primary use case for browser profiles is often different sets of bookmarks, I’m also intrigued by the fact that you can add specific focus to different profiles. If I was using focus (which I haven’t), I probably would.
There are several others. We’ll be testing the new game modes thoroughly once they’re finalized, and we hope they’ll make your game more playable on macOS. We’ve added new search filters to Messages, a high-performance mode to the Screen Sharing app, and a new language model to AutoCorrect. But the main difference in my experience after using Sonoma for a few days is that it looks a lot like iOS, even where it doesn’t make much sense. The journey to continuity continues. Download and participate in the Sonoma Public Beta.
