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

Writing on a New Canvas: Widgets, Wallpapers, and Lock Screens

Nobody Puts Widgets in a Corner

A Clean Slate

System Apps

Reminders

Notes

Note Linking

PDFs

Other Notes Updates

Safari

Profiles

Single-Site Web Apps

More Safari Updates

Video Calling

Disappointments

Shortcuts

Stage Manager

Other System Features

Passwords, Security, and Privacy

Shared Passwords and Passkeys

Apple ID Passkeys

It’s Long Past Time for an Apple Passwords App

URL Tracking Parameters

Sensitive Content Warnings

But Wait, There’s More

Accessibility

Everything Else

Conclusion

Writing on a New Canvas: Widgets, Wallpapers, and Lock Screens

Nobody Puts Widgets in a Corner

A Clean Slate

System Apps

Reminders

Notes

Note Linking

PDFs

Other Notes Updates

Safari

Profiles

Single-Site Web Apps

More Safari Updates

Video Calling

Disappointments

Shortcuts

Stage Manager

Other System Features

Passwords, Security, and Privacy

Shared Passwords and Passkeys

Apple ID Passkeys

It’s Long Past Time for an Apple Passwords App

URL Tracking Parameters

Sensitive Content Warnings

But Wait, There’s More

Accessibility

Everything Else

Conclusion

Writing on a New Canvas: Widgets, Wallpapers, and Lock Screens

Nobody Puts Widgets in a Corner

A Clean Slate

System Apps

Reminders

Notes

Note Linking

PDFs

Other Notes Updates

Safari

Profiles

Single-Site Web Apps

More Safari Updates

Video Calling

Disappointments

Shortcuts

Stage Manager

Other System Features

Passwords, Security, and Privacy

Shared Passwords and Passkeys

Apple ID Passkeys

It’s Long Past Time for an Apple Passwords App

URL Tracking Parameters

Sensitive Content Warnings

But Wait, There’s More

Accessibility

Everything Else

Conclusion

Writing on a New Canvas: Widgets, Wallpapers, and Lock Screens

Nobody Puts Widgets in a Corner

A Clean Slate

System Apps

Reminders

Notes

Note Linking

PDFs

Other Notes Updates

Safari

Profiles

Single-Site Web Apps

More Safari Updates

Video Calling

Disappointments

Shortcuts

Stage Manager

Other System Features

Passwords, Security, and Privacy

Shared Passwords and Passkeys

Apple ID Passkeys

It’s Long Past Time for an Apple Passwords App

URL Tracking Parameters

Sensitive Content Warnings

But Wait, There’s More

Accessibility

Everything Else

Conclusion

Writing on a New Canvas: Widgets, Wallpapers, and Lock Screens

Nobody Puts Widgets in a Corner

A Clean Slate

System Apps

Reminders

Notes

Note Linking

PDFs

Other Notes Updates

Safari

Profiles

Single-Site Web Apps

More Safari Updates

Video Calling

Disappointments

Shortcuts

Stage Manager

Other System Features

Passwords, Security, and Privacy

Shared Passwords and Passkeys

Apple ID Passkeys

It’s Long Past Time for an Apple Passwords App

URL Tracking Parameters

Sensitive Content Warnings

But Wait, There’s More

Accessibility

Everything Else

Conclusion

Writing on a New Canvas: Widgets, Wallpapers, and Lock Screens

Nobody Puts Widgets in a Corner

A Clean Slate

System Apps

Reminders

Notes

Note Linking

PDFs

Other Notes Updates

Safari

Profiles

Single-Site Web Apps

More Safari Updates

Video Calling

Disappointments

Shortcuts

Stage Manager

Other System Features

Passwords, Security, and Privacy

Shared Passwords and Passkeys

Apple ID Passkeys

It’s Long Past Time for an Apple Passwords App

URL Tracking Parameters

Sensitive Content Warnings

But Wait, There’s More

Accessibility

Everything Else

Conclusion

Writing on a New Canvas: Widgets, Wallpapers, and Lock Screens

Nobody Puts Widgets in a Corner

A Clean Slate

System Apps

Reminders

Notes

Note Linking

PDFs

Other Notes Updates

Safari

Profiles

Single-Site Web Apps

More Safari Updates

Video Calling

Disappointments

Shortcuts

Stage Manager

Other System Features

Passwords, Security, and Privacy

Shared Passwords and Passkeys

Apple ID Passkeys

It’s Long Past Time for an Apple Passwords App

URL Tracking Parameters

Sensitive Content Warnings

But Wait, There’s More

Accessibility

Everything Else

Conclusion

Writing on a New Canvas: Widgets, Wallpapers, and Lock Screens

Nobody Puts Widgets in a Corner

A Clean Slate

System Apps

Reminders

Notes

Note Linking

PDFs

Other Notes Updates

Safari

Profiles

Single-Site Web Apps

More Safari Updates

Video Calling

Disappointments

Shortcuts

Stage Manager

Other System Features

Passwords, Security, and Privacy

Shared Passwords and Passkeys

Apple ID Passkeys

It’s Long Past Time for an Apple Passwords App

URL Tracking Parameters

Sensitive Content Warnings

But Wait, There’s More

Accessibility

Everything Else

Conclusion

Writing on a New Canvas: Widgets, Wallpapers, and Lock Screens

Nobody Puts Widgets in a Corner

A Clean Slate

System Apps

Reminders

Notes

Note Linking

PDFs

Other Notes Updates

Safari

Profiles

Single-Site Web Apps

More Safari Updates

Video Calling

Disappointments

Shortcuts

Stage Manager

Other System Features

Passwords, Security, and Privacy

Shared Passwords and Passkeys

Apple ID Passkeys

It’s Long Past Time for an Apple Passwords App

URL Tracking Parameters

Sensitive Content Warnings

But Wait, There’s More

Accessibility

Everything Else

Conclusion

Writing on a New Canvas: Widgets, Wallpapers, and Lock Screens

Nobody Puts Widgets in a Corner

A Clean Slate

System Apps

Reminders

Notes

Note Linking

PDFs

Other Notes Updates

Safari

Profiles

Single-Site Web Apps

More Safari Updates

Video Calling

Disappointments

Shortcuts

Stage Manager

Other System Features

Passwords, Security, and Privacy

Shared Passwords and Passkeys

Apple ID Passkeys

It’s Long Past Time for an Apple Passwords App

URL Tracking Parameters

Sensitive Content Warnings

But Wait, There’s More

Accessibility

Everything Else

Conclusion

Writing on a New Canvas: Widgets, Wallpapers, and Lock Screens

Nobody Puts Widgets in a Corner

A Clean Slate

System Apps

Reminders

Notes

Note Linking

PDFs

Other Notes Updates

Safari

Profiles

Single-Site Web Apps

More Safari Updates

Video Calling

Disappointments

Shortcuts

Stage Manager

Other System Features

Passwords, Security, and Privacy

Shared Passwords and Passkeys

Apple ID Passkeys

It’s Long Past Time for an Apple Passwords App

URL Tracking Parameters

Sensitive Content Warnings

But Wait, There’s More

Accessibility

Everything Else

Conclusion

Writing on a New Canvas: Widgets, Wallpapers, and Lock Screens

Nobody Puts Widgets in a Corner

A Clean Slate

System Apps

Reminders

Notes

Note Linking

PDFs

Other Notes Updates

Safari

Profiles

Single-Site Web Apps

More Safari Updates

Video Calling

Disappointments

Shortcuts

Stage Manager

Other System Features

Passwords, Security, and Privacy

Shared Passwords and Passkeys

Apple ID Passkeys

It’s Long Past Time for an Apple Passwords App

URL Tracking Parameters

Sensitive Content Warnings

But Wait, There’s More

Accessibility

Everything Else

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.

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:

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.

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.

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.

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.

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:

Mailchimp

Grammarly

Instagram

Raindrop.io

Discord

Matter

Tailscale

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:

Pin Tabs

Duplicate Tabs

Close Tabs

Close Other Tabs

Move Tabs to New Window

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

Presenter Overlay requires an Apple silicon Mac

Reactions require an Apple silicon Mac using a built-in camera or any Mac using Continuity Camera with an iPhone 12 or later

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

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

Center Stage using the iPhone’s main or Ultra-Wide camera requires an iPhone 11 or later

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:

Heart

Thumbs up

Thumbs down

Balloons

Rain

Confetti

Lasers

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:

Transcribe Audio for converting audio to text

Delete Alarms to remove alarms from the Clock app

Find Alarm has replaced Get All Alarms, allowing you to find fewer than all of your alarms using filtering criteria

New stopwatch actions

Show Passwords, which opens the Passwords section of System Settings

Start Time Machine Backup to begin or end a Time Machine backup

New network details are returned by the existing Get Network Details action

Get Details of Event Attendees has added a new ‘Type’ attribute

A new Find Message action for Mail, that includes multiple filters for locating messages

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:

Website security codes delivered via Mail autofill like they do when you receive a text message in the Messages app

Calendar includes a new permission that allows apps to add events but not read events on your calendars

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

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:

Voice Control phonetic spellings that suggest similar sounding words that are spelled differently

A Voice Control guide with tips on how to use the feature

The addition of VoiceOver to Xcode

Improvements to how Siri voices sound at higher speeds and an option to slow Siri’s speech

A single place to adjust the text size of several system apps individually or as a group

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:

Home logs door and window sensor, door locks, security system, and garage door activity and displays when electricity in your area is cleaner.

Books has added updated store pages for series of books.

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.

Pronouns can be added to Contacts.

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.

The Print Center app has a new, modern interface but no meaningful new features.

System Settings is a little easier to navigate thanks to a back button.

Maps allows users to specify a preferred EV charging network.

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.