Like every month of July, the new macOS offers us a first glimpse of its capabilities over a first public beta. If precautions are to be taken, here are six new features that make macOS Ventura worth the detour.
During WWDC, as usual, Apple announced the first developer betas of all its operating systems. The Cupertino giant also promised that the first public betas would arrive in July, as is the case every year.
The first public beta of macOS Ventura is now available by registering your Mac at beta.apple.com. We switched to the new OS last June, and after these few weeks of use, here are the six functions – and there are many others – which have made our daily life easier, which have caught our attention, and which could well be so many reasons to adopt macOS.
Obviously, before you throw yourself headlong into this beta, we can only advise you to make a backup of your sensitive data, whether in the Cloud, via Time Machine or a key, at your convenience. Then, it is important that you bear in mind that a beta is software under development. You could therefore encounter annoying bugs, see certain applications crash regularly or even not run – which is rarer, fortunately. It is therefore recommended that you do not install it on a production machine that you really need to be operational.
If you’re still up for it, here are the new features we think are worth taking the plunge.
Spotlight, always more
Former lover of Quicksilver on Mac OS X, the rise of Spotlight can only rejoice. After a simple shortcut (Cmd Space, in case it escaped you, but we doubt it), there are always more functions. You can ask him to perform quick calculations, convert units, look up Brad Pitt’s Wikipedia page, etc. Spotlight also allows you of course to launch applications.
In macOS Ventura, Spotlight is entitled to a new, more detailed and clearer interface. Perfect for finding the last documents created or the last photos taken, the macOS service also allows you to preview documents by selecting them from its interface. You save valuable time searching for files, frankly speaking, it’s a real success.
Stage Manager, to organize everything that is not full screen
Frankly speaking, we didn’t think we’d use it on macOS. As much as Stage Manager upsets and streamlines usage on iPadOS, which really needs it, it seemed to us that our work processes, our organization of application windows did not need a little extra something on macOS.
Let’s face it right away, we were wrong.
Especially since unlike the iPad, it is easy to make Spaces cohabit with full-screen applications and a work area managed by Stage Manager. While everyone will find their own approach and way of using it, we appreciate juxtaposing full-screen applications when we need to focus on just one or two tasks, while Stage Manager allows us to dynamically organize the “small” windows, such as Finder, Messages, or Pixelmator.
Being able to click outside the displayed window to access the desktop is particularly practical for accessing a file that would be placed there. We just wish dragging and dropping onto a window kept in the side dock was a little faster.
Edit a sent message in Messages
Sometimes, on Messages, in the middle of a verbal jousting on social determinism in Bourdieu’s work, your words exceed your thoughts… Or, you simply made a typo, and it’s infuriating. From now on, it is possible to correct a message after it has been sent, and even after it has been received or read.
This function, available on macOS Ventura, iPadOS and iOS 16, could well change your life a few times. Obviously, a message that has been corrected will be marked as modified, so that you cannot say everything and its opposite. Finally, from our experience, it would seem that your interlocutor also has to have a device running iOS 16 or macOS Ventura for the message to be modified on his side as well… Hopefully your contacts will quickly switch to the latest Apple OS.
FaceTime Handoff: from iPhone to Mac, in one click
If you’re a heavy FaceTime user, rejoice: you won’t have to keep juggling your phone in front of your Mac once you get to your office or home. It is now possible to easily “swap” a call from your iPhone to your Mac.
When you approach your computer, a button appears in the Finder bar. You can then switch your conversation from iPhone to Mac with a single click. It will be much more comfortable, if not of such good quality, since Mac webcams cannot compete with the front cameras of recent iPhones.
Groups of shared tabs, because there are always a thousand and one sites to share
Are you preparing for a weekend, a purchase or accumulating articles to read or read that you want to share with loved ones? Shared tab groups might just change your life.
Group the different sites into a group, then just decide who you want to share it with. You will then see in real time who is on which site. Useful for discussing a stage during your next road trip or an article on a subject that particularly interests you.
A priori anecdotal, this function really simplifies exchanges and avoids having to send too many emails or messages.
System Settings: we are lost, but we find ourselves there
On a daily basis, you can spend a lot of time in the System Settings, whether to validate the installation of a program, control notifications, etc. macOS Ventura has done a major cleaning. No more big icons, now is the time for a sidebar that looks like it came straight from iOS.
Frankly speaking, we are a little lost at first, but between the search engine which makes it easy to find a setting and the interface which is rather clear and well organized, we end up finding our little ones.