macOS Ventura: The MacStories Review

macOS Ventura is a hard release to pin down. I’ve been running it for months, and it’s been running well for all my everyday work and personal tasks. Features like Continuity Camera, iCloud Shared Photo Library, and the many system app updates have, on the whole, been stable, worked as advertised, and helped me do more with my Mac. So, from an everyday workflow standpoint, Ventura is an excellent release that delivers on the promise of an OS that moves in step with Apple’s other OSes and erases artificial barriers to users coming from iOS and iPadOS. And yet, I worry about the clouds on the horizon.

The release of Ventura is just one moment in time along macOS’s evolutionary path, but it’s an important one. Each fall release is a marker laid down by Apple that says something about where the Mac has been and where it’s going.

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The story of macOS Ventura didn’t begin at WWDC in June. As I wrote in last year’s macOS Monterey review, it started five years ago:

For the past few years, no narrative thread has been more important to the Mac and its operating system than their realignment within Apple’s product lineup. It’s a fundamental transformation of both hardware and software that has taken shape over years, beginning publicly with Craig Federighi’s WWDC Sneak Peek in 2018.

Before Mac Catalyst, there was Craig Federighi’s 2018 Sneak Peek.

Last year’s release of Monterey went a long way toward validating what came before with Catalina and Big Sur:

Monterey is one of the most tangible, user-facing payoffs of the past three years of transition. More than ever before, Apple is advancing system apps across all of its platforms at the same time. Finally, everything is everywhere.

Ventura is, in many ways, a continuation of Monterey’s storyline. Apple has delivered a second year of parallel development across its system apps, with the notable exception of Shortcuts, which I’ll cover later. That’s a big win for Mac users who, in previous years, waited multiple releases for apps like Maps and Books to catch up with their iOS and iPadOS counterparts.

The familiar interface and feature set across multiple platforms are one of the biggest and most tangible achievements of the past few years.

So, with Monterey’s success of moving system apps forward in unison across all OSes looking more like a trend than a one-off novelty, what are the clouds I’m seeing on the horizon? There are three:

Stage Manager: Stage Manager is in far better technical shape on the Mac than on the iPad. In fact, I’ve been using it every day since WWDC and will continue to do so. There’s lots of room for improvement, which I’ll cover below, but my concern extends beyond the Mac-specific issues to what the feature’s problems on the iPad mean for Mac users long-term, which is something I covered last month for Club MacStories members and will expand on below.

Shortcuts: Shortcuts was in rough shape when it launched on the Mac last year. The app is in a much better place today, although bugs continue to be a problem. More concerning to me, though, is the lack of new system-level actions on the Mac. A lot of resources undoubtedly went into stabilizing Shortcuts on the Mac over the past year, which is understandable, but unfortunately, those efforts seem to have been at the expense of introducing new system-level actions or maintaining parity with new actions on iOS and iPadOS.

System Settings: So much of the design work we saw introduced with Big Sur was so carefully considered to harmonize macOS with iPadOS while retaining its Mac nature that System Settings is a shock to, well, the system. System Preferences was long overdue for a refresh, but System Settings isn’t the redesign we needed. Instead, it’s a clear example of why you can’t just graft iOS or iPadOS design onto macOS and call it quits.

Although each of the items above concerns me, it’s equally important to put them in context. For most users, macOS is in a very good place. My day-to-day work on the Mac isn’t affected by whether the iPadOS version of Stage Manager is buggy. I may feel constrained by the lack of some actions in Shortcuts on my Mac, but at the same time, I’ve got Shortcuts on the Mac, something I’d hoped for for years. And Systems Settings are, after all, just settings that may not be great to look at, but they still work.

However, while the issues with Ventura may not be immediate, they’re still important because they threaten the viability of the Mac in the midst of its hardware renaissance. I want to see the Mac continue to grow and flourish, and I’m convinced more than ever that aligning it and the iPad is one of the ways to accomplish that. Unfortunately, Ventura doesn’t move that ball forward in a meaningful way.

With Apple firing on all cylinders when it comes to hardware, now is no time to let macOS stall. Source: Apple.

By tying the two together, Apple has set the stage for a healthier third-party app ecosystem that benefits both platforms by making it more economical for developers to create apps for both. I’m sent a lot of apps to try, and I can tell you that this is absolutely happening already. The vast majority of the apps I’m sent today aren’t Mac-only or iPad-only – they’re universal apps that work on both and usually the iPhone and Apple Watch too.

However, the work and the story that started with Federighi’s Sneak Peek aren’t finished. For the Mac and iPad to thrive, now is not the time for Apple to take its foot off the gas. Yet, that’s what Ventura feels like after several years of foundational changes to macOS. It’s not a bad update. There’s a lot to like among the system apps and other changes, but I can’t shake the nagging sense that Apple has taken its eye off the long-term vision for macOS with Ventura. That won’t affect your day-to-day use of the OS, but it’s certainly something worth keeping a close eye on as Ventura is updated and WWDC rolls around again next summer.

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Table of Contents

Stage Manager

Continuity and Collaboration

Continuity Camera

Desk View

FaceTime Handoff

Collaboration

System Apps

Messages

Mail

Notes

Reminders

Safari

Home

Photos

Clock and Weather

Shortcuts

Other System Apps

System Features

System Settings

Spotlight

Everything Else

Focus

The New Share Menu

Security

Dictation

Gaming

Sidecar Reference Mode with an iPad Pro

Accessibility

Compatibility

Future on Hold

Stage Manager

Continuity and Collaboration

Continuity Camera

Desk View

FaceTime Handoff

Collaboration

System Apps

Messages

Mail

Notes

Reminders

Safari

Home

Photos

Clock and Weather

Shortcuts

Other System Apps

System Features

System Settings

Spotlight

Everything Else

Focus

The New Share Menu

Security

Dictation

Gaming

Sidecar Reference Mode with an iPad Pro

Accessibility

Compatibility

Future on Hold

Stage Manager

Continuity and Collaboration

Continuity Camera

Desk View

FaceTime Handoff

Collaboration

System Apps

Messages

Mail

Notes

Reminders

Safari

Home

Photos

Clock and Weather

Shortcuts

Other System Apps

System Features

System Settings

Spotlight

Everything Else

Focus

The New Share Menu

Security

Dictation

Gaming

Sidecar Reference Mode with an iPad Pro

Accessibility

Compatibility

Future on Hold

Stage Manager

Continuity and Collaboration

Continuity Camera

Desk View

FaceTime Handoff

Collaboration

System Apps

Messages

Mail

Notes

Reminders

Safari

Home

Photos

Clock and Weather

Shortcuts

Other System Apps

System Features

System Settings

Spotlight

Everything Else

Focus

The New Share Menu

Security

Dictation

Gaming

Sidecar Reference Mode with an iPad Pro

Accessibility

Compatibility

Future on Hold

Stage Manager

Continuity and Collaboration

Continuity Camera

Desk View

FaceTime Handoff

Collaboration

System Apps

Messages

Mail

Notes

Reminders

Safari

Home

Photos

Clock and Weather

Shortcuts

Other System Apps

System Features

System Settings

Spotlight

Everything Else

Focus

The New Share Menu

Security

Dictation

Gaming

Sidecar Reference Mode with an iPad Pro

Accessibility

Compatibility

Future on Hold

Stage Manager

Continuity and Collaboration

Continuity Camera

Desk View

FaceTime Handoff

Collaboration

System Apps

Messages

Mail

Notes

Reminders

Safari

Home

Photos

Clock and Weather

Shortcuts

Other System Apps

System Features

System Settings

Spotlight

Everything Else

Focus

The New Share Menu

Security

Dictation

Gaming

Sidecar Reference Mode with an iPad Pro

Accessibility

Compatibility

Future on Hold

Stage Manager

Continuity and Collaboration

Continuity Camera

Desk View

FaceTime Handoff

Collaboration

System Apps

Messages

Mail

Notes

Reminders

Safari

Home

Photos

Clock and Weather

Shortcuts

Other System Apps

System Features

System Settings

Spotlight

Everything Else

Focus

The New Share Menu

Security

Dictation

Gaming

Sidecar Reference Mode with an iPad Pro

Accessibility

Compatibility

Future on Hold

Stage Manager

Continuity and Collaboration

Continuity Camera

Desk View

FaceTime Handoff

Collaboration

System Apps

Messages

Mail

Notes

Reminders

Safari

Home

Photos

Clock and Weather

Shortcuts

Other System Apps

System Features

System Settings

Spotlight

Everything Else

Focus

The New Share Menu

Security

Dictation

Gaming

Sidecar Reference Mode with an iPad Pro

Accessibility

Compatibility

Future on Hold

Stage Manager

Continuity and Collaboration

Continuity Camera

Desk View

FaceTime Handoff

Collaboration

System Apps

Messages

Mail

Notes

Reminders

Safari

Home

Photos

Clock and Weather

Shortcuts

Other System Apps

System Features

System Settings

Spotlight

Everything Else

Focus

The New Share Menu

Security

Dictation

Gaming

Sidecar Reference Mode with an iPad Pro

Accessibility

Compatibility

Future on Hold

Stage Manager

It’s too hard to set up, but once I have, Stage Manager eliminates clutter for me, which I love.

First off, I love Stage Manager, Apple’s new mode for managing apps on your Mac’s desktop. But it’s not an unconditional, all-in sort of love. It’s complicated.

When Stage Manager is set up and running the way I want, it’s fantastic. The trouble is the ‘set up’ part. The feature is simply too laborious to set up, and some of its interactions are an over-caffeinated mess. However, if you’re like me and would rather have someone (or something) else deal with the mess that is your Mac’s desktop, you might end up loving Stage Manager despite its flaws too.

Stage Manager is activated in Control Center or System Settings.

Stage Manager is designed to eliminate clutter and make it easier to find your open windows. The feature isn’t turned on by default though. Instead, Stage Manager is a mode that can be activated from Control Center or from the Desktop & Dock section of System Settings.

Stage Manager launches each app onto its own stage.

Once activated, any app you open will launch onto its own stage with every other window you’ve got open tucked out of sight. To the left, you’ll see a strip of recently opened apps and sets of apps. The number of items in the strip depends on the size of your display. For example, my M1 MacBook Air has just four items in the strip, while my Studio Display has six. Clicking on one of the strip thumbnails switches that app or set of apps to the active stage. Alternatively, you can drag items out of the strip onto the current stage or click on one while holding down Shift to add it to the current stage. The strip can also be hidden by dragging a window over it, but it will reappear as your pointer approaches the left edge of your screen.

The stack on the left is a pile of Safari windows.

Stage Manager also includes the concept of a pile, which is a stack of multiple windows of the same app in the strip, which aren’t necessarily part of the same stage. Yes, this gets a little confusing, but bear with me. It’s a little hard to see, especially in dark mode, but if multiple windows of the same app are open at once, they’ll be stacked up in the strip. That’s a pile.

Click on the Safari icon, and the pile expands to reveal the four windows I have open.

You can drag the top window off of the pile onto your current stage or click on the app’s icon in the strip to reveal thumbnails of all of that app’s open windows, which lets you drag any of them onto the stage. If multiple windows are open on your current stage, you can also drag them back to the strip or use the ‘Remove Window from Set’ command in the Window menu to return it to the strip. If just one window is open on the stage, though, you can only return it to the strip by clicking on one of the apps or sets of apps in the strip. That’s because Ventura doesn’t have a concept of an empty stage.

Because Pixelmator Pro is behind Finder in the last strip workspace, it can’t be dragged onto the current stage.

You would think you’d be able to drag any app out of a mixed set of apps and onto the stage, but you can’t. Even if you click on an app’s icon in a mixed set, you can only drag the top app in the pile onto the stage. If the same app is paired as a set with any other app in the strip, only the top app can be dragged onto the stage.

Apple took the first step to automate desktop cleanup with Stacks in Mojave, grouping documents by type into neat stacks that can be expanded with a single click. Stage Manager goes a step further by completely hiding the documents on your desktop by default when an app or set of apps is onscreen. To make them reappear, all you need to do is click on the desktop, which whisks your apps away to the stage and reveals your desktop along with any documents you’ve saved there. You can turn the feature off in the Desktop & Dock section of System Settings, but I don’t know why you would, given how easy it is to access them by clicking on the desktop or using the Finder.

There aren’t a lot of Stage Manager settings, but ‘Show windows from an application’ is one worth exploring.

There’s one other Stage Manager setting worth mentioning. It’s called ‘Show windows from an application’ and can be set to show windows ‘All at Once’ or ‘One at a Time.’ A good example of what these options do is the difference they make when opening Mail messages. If the ‘One at a Time’ option is chosen, double-clicking a message will open it in its own window on the stage and whisk the window with your mailboxes to the strip. If ‘All at Once’ is selected, opening the Mail message will open it in front of the window containing your mailboxes, so they remain on the stage together.

Opening a Mail message with ‘All at Once’ enabled.

Opening a Mail message with ‘One at a Time’ enabled.

For an app like Safari, the ‘One at a Time’ setting opens new windows on the stage, moving any window of that app that is already open and any others to the strip. So, if I have Notes and a Safari window open, opening a new Safari window moves both Notes and the first Safari window to the recent apps strip leaving only the new Safari window open on the stage. In contrast, opening a new Safari window with the ‘All at Once’ option enabled just opens the new window onto the same stage as the existing window without sending anything to the strip.

I quickly turned on ‘All at Once’ and never looked back because I found the alternative distracting and confusing. As I’ll explain below, Stage Manager already sends things to the strip more often than I’d like and doesn’t provide enough ways to add apps to the current stage. That problem is only exacerbated by turning ‘One at a Time’ on, so I don’t recommend using that option.

Despite its sometimes confusing design, one of the benefits of Stage Manager over features like Spaces is that it’s more immediate. Whereas Spaces suffered from being out of sight and, therefore, out of mind, Stage Manager’s strip on the left side of the screen keeps your app sets front-of-mind and makes it easy to switch between them. That’s a win as far as I’m concerned, but it comes with some very big caveats.

Having a separate workspace in the strip for compositing screenshots that’s separate from the one where I’m writing helps minimize distractions.

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 that and shift-clicking on apps in the strip 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. That’s too limited even for the iPad, but it’s an improvement over the Mac.

I’m not suggesting that you should be able to drag apps out of the Mac’s dock or elsewhere to create Stage Manager app sets. Dragging app icons around on the Mac already has an expected behavior that I don’t think should be changed. However, there are other options worth considering. One is adding a modifier key to a drag operation that changes the default drag behavior to open an app on an existing stage.

Similarly, Stage Manager is in desperate need of keyboard shortcuts, a right-click menu, and Shortcuts support. A keyboard shortcut for toggling Stage Manager mode on and off is a bare minimum. There should also be keyboard shortcuts for opening a selected app in the current stage, for example, and a right-click menu option for doing the same. That would go a long way toward eliminating the dance required to create a set of apps where one or more aren’t already in the strip. Better yet, Spotlight Search should offer a quick action that allows users to search for an app and then open it in the current stage.

Another shortcoming of Stage Manager is the lack of Shortcuts support. Shortcuts has actions for opening apps and positioning windows, but no way to build or tear down sets of apps on a stage. Imagine the kind of morning work routine you could create with Shortcuts if it supported Stage Manager. You sit down at your desk in the morning, type a keyboard shortcut, and bam, Shortcuts populates your current stage and the strip all at once, starting you off with a clean slate and eliminating whatever mess you left on your Mac the day before.

Even better would be if you could run that same shortcut on a schedule, but that would require personal automations or some other sort of system-wide shortcut scheduling action on the Mac, which doesn’t exist in Shortcuts. But that’s a conversation for later. The point is it needs to be easier to create app sets, and the lack of customization is a missed opportunity.

The Stage Manager Dance.

Instead, we’re stuck with what I call the Stage Manager Dance. Suppose that as I write this paragraph in Obsidian, I want to refer to some research I saved in Apple Notes. It’s been a while since I last opened Apple Notes, so it’s not in Stage Manager’s strip. On the iPad, I could drag Notes onto my stage alongside Obsidian from the dock or run a Spotlight Search and drag it to the stage from there. That’s not as handy as a keyboard shortcut or shortcut, but it’s something.

In contrast, on the Mac, my only choice is to open Notes, which will shuffle Obsidian off to the strip, creating a new Notes-only stage. Then I have to drag Obsidian from the strip or Shift-click on it to add it to the stage alongside Notes. That may not sound awful when I describe it, but if you’re in the middle of writing, it’s a distraction to have windows zooming to the sidebar and onto the stage and having to abandon the keyboard to drag the app you were already working in from the strip with your mouse or trackpad. Multiply that by however many apps you use each day, and I guarantee that you’ll find it tedious.

The situation is worse with apps that use an Open dialog.

A related problem is with any app that uses a separate dialog to open documents. Numbers, Pages, and Keynote are all good examples. Once again, let’s imagine I’m writing in Obsidian. I’m preparing a sponsor post for MacStories and have to look up a bit of information about the sponsor that’s in a spreadsheet. This is something I do every week. When I click on Numbers in my dock, The Open dialog appears, and Obsidian disappears into the strip as I described above.

Open dialogs create an extra layer of annoyance though. Once I select the spreadsheet I want, the dialog closes. With the dialog closed, there’s no longer anything on the stage, and Ventura doesn’t do empty stages. So, Stage Manager returns Obsidian to the stage for the split second between the time the Open dialog closes and my Numbers spreadsheet opens. It’s a frenetic, hyperactive mess that makes me wonder if anyone at Apple is using Stage Manager in any of these very ordinary, everyday scenarios.

This is not power user stuff, and these are Apple’s core productivity apps causing the Stage Manager dance, not some third-party app that needs a compatibility update. Was this overlooked? Did the Stage Manager mess on iPadOS leave Ventura neglected? I don’t know the answer to those questions, but I sure hope Apple tones down the jumpiness of the Stage Manager UI.

The fate of Stage Manager on the iPad will affect the Mac, too.

That brings me to my final big picture concern about Stage Manager. One of those three clouds forming on the horizon that I mentioned at the outset of this review. Over the past few years, we’ve seen macOS and iPadOS become more closely aligned. In that time, Apple has made it easier for iPad developers to bring their apps to the Mac, updated the design language on both platforms to make moving between them easier for users, and gotten every version of most system apps on the same update schedule. That’s gone a long way to expanding the number of apps available on the Mac and making the Mac and iPad more familiar for users who have one device and want to try the other.

However, what the Mac and iPad haven’t had before Stage Manager is a common way to interact with apps; a windowing system that respects the unique nature of each device but also reduces the friction of moving between them. I think Stage Manager has the potential to be that, but my concern is that it’s coming in awful hot and late for a marquee feature. The trouble with that is I don’t think many iPad users will give Stage Manager a second chance if it’s buggy and confusing. That’s because, like the Mac, there are other ways to run apps, making it easy to ignore Stage Manager.

That would be a shame because I know from my experience this summer that when Stage Manager works on the iPad, it’s easier to move between it and the Mac because you’re not switching interaction models. The benefits run even deeper though. I spent long stretches this summer with my 12.9” iPad Pro in a Twelve South HoverBar Duo stand next to my Mac Studio. This is something I’ve done for a while, relying on the iPad Pro for monitoring Home Screen widgets and the occasional ancillary app.

However, with Stage Manager running on my Mac and iPad Pro at the same time, I’ve found the same setup far more useful. That’s because instead of relying on Home Screen widgets with which I can’t interact, I can have up to four apps running at once that I can interact with using Universal Control. It’s a fantastic setup for offloading Mail, Twitter, Discord, Messages, and other communication apps that I monitor throughout the day to a secondary display where the apps are still interactive.

So at the end of the day, I’ve had to take a hard look at Stage Manager and ask myself if I love the feature or the idea of it. It’s impossible to completely separate the two, but on balance, I sincerely love the feature despite its flaws. I don’t think I could have stuck with it day in and day out for almost five months otherwise. Still, I can’t pretend that Stage Manager’s issues aren’t a constant source of friction and frustration, too, which is why I hope we see updates to the feature before next fall.

I don’t expect the Stage Manager calculus to add up the same way for everyone, but fortunately, if it’s not for you, none of macOS’s other window management systems have been taken away. Still, I hope most users are curious enough to give Stage Manager a fair shake because it’s such a simple, clever way to clear away the clutter on your desktop and to work on a Mac and iPad at the same time if that’s your thing.

As for Stage Manager on the iPad and what it means to Mac users, there’s definitely cause for concern if you buy into the theory that the Mac and iPad are stronger on parallel tracks than going their own directions, which I do. From the Mac’s perspective, the past few years of harmonizing the two platforms have already brought a wealth of new apps to the Mac. I’m sent hundreds of apps every year, and in very short order, the Universal Mac/iPad apps have far outstripped the Mac-only apps. That’s breathed new life into the Mac App Store, which needed it.

If Stage Manager fails to capture the imagination of iPad users, it’s not going to be a death blow to the Mac’s future. The changes implemented by Catalina, Big Sur, and Monterey weren’t perfect either, but where those issues were around the edges, Stage Manager’s problems feel more fundamental because they go to the heart of user interaction. That’s troubling, which is why I’ll be keeping a close eye on Stage Manager on the Mac and iPad. However, I’m also optimistic because it’s still early days for Stage Manager, so there’s time to polish it on both platforms.

Continuity and Collaboration

The global pandemic has reshaped the way many of us work and connect with friends and family. Last year, a point update to Monterey and Apple’s other OSes saw the introduction of SharePlay, a way for people to connect over FaceTime to share movies, music, and other experiences together.

With macOS Ventura and Apple’s other OSes, Apple is expanding sharing and collaboration into new areas and across devices. Monterey’s focus was primarily on sharing media in system apps with friends and family. With Ventura, Apple is adding Continuity Camera, a built-in way to use your iPhone as a webcam, and new sharing and collaboration tools that work with both system and third-party apps. What started as a way to stay in touch during lockdowns has evolved into a suite of tools that also encompass work and serve as a new thread that strengthens the ties between the iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

Continuity Camera

This is not your father’s Continuity Camera.

Continuity Camera is a name that may be familiar to readers as a feature introduced in macOS Mojave that lets you take a photo or scan a document with an iPhone or iPad from your Mac. That functionality is still available in many apps, but the name Continuity Camera has been repurposed to refer to the new ability to use your iPhone’s rear-facing camera as a webcam with FaceTime and other video calling apps once they are updated to support the feature.

You can switch to your iPhone as a webcam automatically if it’s horizontal and stationary or use the Video menu to switch manually.

FaceTime is a good example of how Continuity Camera works. When you start a video call, your iPhone will show up as a video and audio source in the Video menu of the app if it’s an iPhone XR or newer. If the Automatic Camera Selection option in FaceTime’s Video menu is enabled, when you open the app, you’ll automatically be switched to your iPhone’s rear-facing camera as long as it’s stationary and positioned horizontally. You’ve also got the option of selecting your iPhone camera and its microphone manually from FaceTime’s Video menu. Continuity Camera works wirelessly or wired to your Mac too.

Managing Continuity Camera from the iPhone.

On the iPhone side of things, the video connection is made whether your iPhone is locked or not. Once connected, a screen appears with buttons to pause the video being broadcast from your iPhone or disconnect it. You can also turn Continuity Camera off entirely in the iOS Settings app under General → AirPlay & Handoff.

Studio Light is a new FaceTime filter available only when using Continuity Camera.

Continuity Camera adds a new video filter option in Control Center too. With my Studio Display’s webcam, I can use Center Stage to keep me in the frame of the video I’m broadcasting, and I can enable Portrait mode to blur the background behind me. However, with my iPhone connected as my FaceTime camera, I can also enable Studio Light, which brightens the lighting on my face and dims the background, which looks nice, especially if you’re in a dimly lit room.

In my testing, Continuity Camera’s video is noticeably better than my built-in FaceTime camera. My iPhone 14 Pro Max also handles the effects like Portrait mode better, reducing edge blurriness. The results are exactly what you’d expect from the iPhone’s superior camera.

Apple is working with third-party partners like Belkin to offer iPhone MagSafe-compatible mounts that will make it easy to perch your iPhone, so it peeks over the top of your laptop for video calls. I tested a pre-production version of a mount from Belkin for my macOS Ventura preview, and it worked well, except when my M1 MacBook Air’s screen was tilted back too far, which tended to drag the screen open further.

Continuity Camera has worked well since the beginning of the beta period whenever I’ve tried it. It’s an impressive integration of hardware and software that makes for a seamless, simple experience that’s easier to use than any similar third-party app I’ve tried, but it’s not for me. The FaceTime cameras built into my Studio Display and MacBook Air are good enough. I’m sure there are other people who feel the same way, but I also know from readers that there are a lot of people who care a lot about having the highest quality video for calls. Continuity Camera will be a big step up for them in image quality and make setting up their iPhone as a webcam simpler.

Continuity Camera will also make life easier for anyone who uses a Mac that doesn’t have a FaceTime camera. Instead of dangling a third-party camera off of your display or using a third-party app that needs to be set up on your iPhone and Mac, Mac mini, Mac Studio, and Mac Pro users will be able to switch to their iPhone’s camera automatically.

Desk View

Testing Desk View

Desk View is a special standalone app available only when using your iPhone as your webcam. The feature takes advantage of the iPhone’s wide-angle lens to let you broadcast whatever is in front of you on your desk along with your face. Because it’s a separate, standalone app, it should be easy to share the video feed of your desktop in videoconferencing apps that offer window sharing.

Once your iPhone is connected, Desk View can be enabled from Control Center. Before your desk is shown, a box appears onscreen with zoom controls to help you dial in the view of your desktop. These adjustment controls weren’t in early betas and are a nice addition because it gives you a chance to ensure the camera is centered on what you want to share on your desk. In early betas, it was far too easy to wind up with a shot of your chest or lap instead.

However, the reality is that it’s not easy to set up a good-looking Desk View. The camera needs to be far from the view it’s sharing, which makes controlling a laptop challenging, and objects appear distorted, especially at the edges of the scene. Apple is doing a lot to correct for distortion, and the feature has a magical feel that makes for a great demo, but I expect most people will find Desk View too hard to set up and use to be worth it in most situations.

FaceTime Handoff

Handoff is Apple’s umbrella term for features that let you transfer an activity from one device to another, and with Ventura, FaceTime is being added to that list of activities. If you’re logged into the same Apple ID on the devices with which you want to use the feature and WiFi and Bluetooth are enabled, all you need to do is approach your Mac, and a banner will appear offering to switch your call to your Mac. Once you switch to your Mac, a banner will show up on your iPhone or iPad, offering to switch the call back if you want.

I’m not a heavy FaceTime video call user, but I expect this feature will come in handy for anyone who has ever picked up a call while away from home or even in another room but needs to look something up on their Mac. For a lot of people, that process has probably involved putting their iPhone down on their desk while they type on the Mac, leaving the person on the other end of the call with a view of their ceiling. With Handoff, your face-to-face call can continue uninterrupted while you look for what you need.

Collaboration

Managing a shared note.

Collaboration isn’t entirely new to macOS, but with Ventura, shared documents and the conversations surrounding them are more closely tied together. Apple announced at WWDC that Finder, Pages, Keynote, Notes, Numbers, Reminders, and Safari will all work with Ventura’s new collaboration tools and that the feature will be available to third-party developers too. At launch, you can only use the new collaboration tool with Notes, Reminders, and the Finder, but I expect updates for Pages, Numbers, and Keynote that incorporate the feature to be out soon.

Collaboration is built into Ventura’s new share menu. Click on the share button in an app like Notes or in Finder, and at the top of the share menu, there will be a new drop-down that lets you choose between Collaborate and Send Copy. Collaboration can also be initiated from a FaceTime call with the participants on the call being suggested as collaborators too.

Tracking changes via highlights on the left and who made them on the right.

If you choose Collaborate, both you and the person you share your document with will be able to make changes. You’ll get alerts about the changes, which appear at the top of the Messages app. You’ll also see the profile picture of whomever you shared with at the top of the document you shared. Clicking on the profile picture reveals options to return to the point in the Messages thread where the document was shared for further context, or to start an audio or video FaceTime call. Clicking on a person’s profile also provides information about the latest edits, a button to view the changes, buttons to show or hide editing activity and highlights, and settings to manage sharing.

Clicking on the profile picture of someone you’ve shared with opens your Messages thread with them with the shared document highlighted.

One bug that has persisted is that Messages insists on alerting me to my own changes along with those with whom I’ve shared, which isn’t something it should do.

I don’t need alerts about changes I made myself.

As someone who already used Messages for a lot of our collaborative work at MacStories, I’m intrigued by Apple’s new collaboration features. It makes a lot of sense to me to have an easy way to communicate with collaborators via Messages or FaceTime and get notifications of changes to documents.

However, at the same time, I don’t expect to use the new collaboration features much. That’s not to say they won’t be valuable for others, but there just aren’t that many documents or other materials that I create jointly with someone else on the MacStories team. I share drafts and final products, but that’s about it. Still, I’m looking forward to experimenting with the feature more.

System Apps

Every year brings a long list of changes to macOS system apps. As important as new features like Stage Manager and updated ones like Spotlight are to how people use their Macs, system apps help define what they’re used for day in and day out.

We’re in the midst of an exciting new era for Mac system apps. With Monterey and now Ventura, Mac system apps are advancing in tandem with their iOS and iPadOS counterparts, with very few exceptions. Even better, Apple has made significant strides in modernizing a subset of its system apps, including Reminders, Notes, and Mail, with deeper feature sets and greater flexibility that makes the apps fit into the daily workflows of more of the company’s customers.

Messages

Editing an iMessage.

Messages has become a lot more than just Apple’s take on text messaging. For me, it’s how I communicate with my family and friends, coordinate MacStories projects with Federico, and this year, managed to sell my house and move 750 miles away in just two months. The app touches nearly everything I do in some way, which is true for a lot of other users too.

Yet, Messages hasn’t always kept up with its competition. With macOS Ventura, that’s begun to change. I’ve already covered the collaboration features of Messages that will improve the app’s use in work settings. However, this year’s macOS update also addresses shortcomings in its core messaging functionality.

The unedited version of your message is always available to your friends, so they can make fun of your typos.

For the first time, messages can be edited, but with a catch. You need to edit your message within 15 minutes. If you make changes in time, your message thread will be tidier, but your typo is still preserved. Edited messages are labeled with a small blue ‘Edited’ label just below the message. Click on the label, and a slightly dimmed log of each edit is revealed above the final version of the message for you or your recipient to view.

Unsending a message using the right-click menu.

Messages can also be unsent within the same 15-minute window, but it’s not perfect. If someone you’re messaging with isn’t using iMessage or has a device that hasn’t been updated to Apple’s latest OSes, they’ll be able to see the message, which is explained in the label that is added to your conversation after you undo sending a message.

Messages that you’ve deleted can be recovered within 30 days too. This feature is separate from Undo Send. If you undo the sending of a message, it’s not recoverable and disappears from all of your devices and your recipient’s devices if they are using iMessage and have updated their OS to the latest version.

There’s not a lot to go by when you’re recovering deleted messages.

Deleted messages are different. If you delete a message, it’s only deleted on the device from which you delete it, and it doesn’t affect the message on your recipient’s device. Still, if you delete a message by accident or have second thoughts about saving it, you can recover it on the device from which it was sent within 30 days.

To recover a deleted message, go to the Recently Deleted option under the View menu in Messages, select the message thread with deleted messages and click the Recover button. Alternatively, you can delete the message permanently with the Delete button.

The trouble with this feature is that you can’t preview the deleted messages that you’re recovering, and you can only recover all the messages in a thread. There’s no way to pick and choose the messages you want to get back. Still, it’s good to have a way to recover important messages, even if it might require you to recover more than necessary to retrieve what you’re after.

You can right-click on a message thread to mark it as unread as a way to remind yourself to respond to it later too.

Shared with You surfaces shared links in apps like Matter, which puts them at the top of your reading queue.

Click on the profile picture of the person who shared the link with you, and you’re taken back to the point in your Messages conversation where it was shared.

Messages for the Mac adds third-party Shared with You support. The new feature will allow developers to create a dedicated section in their apps to display links to content that others have shared with you. A good example is the recent update to read-later app Matter, which surfaces shared articles from friends at the top of your queue and runs on Apple silicon Macs in compatibility mode.

You can join a SharePlay session from Messages for Mac but not start playback.

Once playback has started, you can manage a SharePlay session from the menu bar.

SharePlay support is available in Messages on the Mac too, but it’s more limited than on the iPhone or iPad. Apple expanded SharePlay this year, too, on iOS and iPad to let you start sharing via iMessage instead of a FaceTime call. Macs can join a SharePlay session but can’t initiate them or start media playback, which makes the feature confusing to use on the Mac.

The Music app lets you know how many people are listening.

Here’s what I mean. If you’re at your Mac and you receive a SharePlay invitation via iMessage to listen to a song in Music, you can click the Join button, but nothing happens. That’s because playback has to start from an iPhone or iPad. If you grab your iPhone, join the session, and start playback, suddenly music is playing over your iPhone’s speakers and on your Mac, probably not what you wanted when you clicked Join on your Mac. The ‘fix’ is to immediately leave the SharePlay session on your iPhone. Music will continue to play on your Mac, and you can control the session from the menu bar the same way you could if you had only joined on your iPhone, pausing playback or skipping to other songs, for example. It’s not a great experience.

Finally, Memojis have been updated with new sticker poses, can be used as contact profile pictures, and have more hairstyles, headwear, and noses, plus neutral lip colors.

Mail

Mail.

I’m glad to report that Messages isn’t the only communication tool to get a big update in Ventura. Mail has too.

When the summer began, I was using Mimestream to manage my email on the Mac. It’s an excellent Gmail client, but it’s Mac-only, which left me bouncing among a variety of other email apps on my iPhone and iPad, which wasn’t ideal.

I switched to Apple Mail on all my devices when I started using Ventura. I wanted to give Mail’s new features a workout for this review, but I was more excited than usual to dive in this year because, with Ventura, Mail has added a core set of ‘modern’ email features that third-party apps have had for a long time:

Improved search

Alerts for missing recipients and attachments

Scheduled Send

Undo send

Remind Me

Follow Up

Rich links

When Apple announced these features at WWDC, it was as if the Mail team had read my mind. It’s not a comprehensive list of every advanced feature you can find in third-party apps, but they’re the ones that I, and I expect a lot of other people, use most. The implementation of the features isn’t perfect, depending on how you use email, but overall, Ventura’s updates to Mail are fantastic.

It’s fair to wonder why an update to Mail matters when there are lots of alternatives that do what Mail does and more already. That’s an easy one, as far as I’m concerned. Few categories have seen promising new apps fall by the wayside more than email apps. There is a multitude of reasons for the failures, but the consequence is that the quality of the default email app that Apple and other platform owners like Microsoft and Google make is more important than most of the apps they ship with their OSes.

That’s why it was hard to watch as Mail sat with few updates for years as other apps adopted new ways of managing our inboxes. What Apple has delivered with Ventura is an excellent balance of quality-of-life features that have become table stakes for third-party email clients without venturing into the kind of jargon-heavy territory of apps that promise to make you smarter, more focused, and somehow magically better at your job.

Mail’s new features offer sensible solutions to common problems.

Instead, Mail’s new features offer sensible solutions to common problems. That starts with search. We all get lots of email, and filing it away into an intricate system of folders is more trouble than it’s worth for many of us, myself included. Search was a weak spot in Mail, but with Ventura, that’s been addressed. The help comes from the moment you click into the search field, and contacts, recent searches, subjects, and attachments are offered as suggestions, refining your search results as you type. Search is more forgiving, too, accounting for spelling variations, typos, and synonyms. Mail’s search is also fast. I used to occasionally resort to Gmail’s web interface to find messages, but I haven’t done that at all since installing Ventura.

Search starts as soon as you click into the search field, revealing recent searches.

Start typing, and Mail finds senders, recipients, attachments, and more.

I’m a big fan of Scheduled Send, which offers to send your message later at suggested times or one you pick yourself. It’s great for those times when a message doesn’t need to be delivered immediately, but you don’t want to get into a back-and-forth with someone at the moment. Instead, I schedule those kinds of messages to be sent later, which lets me deal with them now, so I don’t have to remember to hit the send button later.

Remind Me and Follow Up address two common problems with email. Remind Me resurfaces messages at a predefined or user-chosen time in the future, helping you ensure that messages that are important but you can’t deal with now don’t get lost. Follow Up resurfaces messages where Mail detects you’ve asked for a response but haven’t gotten one. By floating those messages back to the top of your inbox, Mail obviates the need to make them part of your task management system, which I’m sure a lot of users will appreciate. Personally, though, I find messages reappearing in my inbox a little jarring, which is why I still link messages with a task in Reminders instead.

You’re required to say ‘Follow Up’ in your best Prompt voice here.

Ventura’s update to Mail is a good one, but it’s not without issues and omissions. The first problem is that Remind Me only works from your inbox. If you use a service like Sanebox that deposits some of your messages in folders outside your inbox, or you simply want to set a reminder on something you’ve already filed away, you’ll be disappointed because you can’t. You’ll see the Remind Me option if you right-click on a message in a folder, but all of the options will be grayed out.

Behold, Mail’s four shortcuts actions.

Mail’s Shortcuts support is anemic too. This is true in every Apple OS but especially with Ventura, which didn’t get the same handful of actions that were added to iOS and iPadOS this year. I understand that this is a difficult problem because one message can be wildly different than another, combining attachments, plain text, HTML, and more into one package, but it’s an area that I hope the Shortcuts team is working to solve. Email remains a pillar of the way so many people communicate, and the volume of messages, low signal-to-noise ratio, and difficulty of processing it make it an area that is ripe for automation.

I’d also like to see Mail integrated better with Reminders and Notes. It’s possible to link to Mail messages using AppleScript, but most users aren’t going to go to that trouble. Drag and drop works, too, but with so many of the tasks and so much of the reference material we receive coming via email, better ways to link messages to tasks and notes are something I’d like to see in macOS next year.

Overall, though, Mail’s Ventura update is stellar. There will be people who need something more, especially in the case of shared company inboxes where collaboration tools are necessary or inline communication about a message with colleagues is needed. However, for the vast majority of people, Apple has added a set of features that will meet their needs. Combined with better search performance, Mail is worth revisiting if you haven’t used it in a while.

Notes

Last year, Notes added Smart Folders, which are collections of notes based on filters. A similar feature was introduced in Reminders last year with smart lists. However, as I pointed out in my Monterey review, Smart Folders didn’t go nearly as far as smart lists, which was a little disappointing.

That’s changed with Ventura. What started last year with Smart Folders based on tags has grown into a total of 11 metadata filters for building complex Smart Folders. Notes now offers filters based on:

Tags

Creation date

Edited date

Sharing status

In-note mentions

Checklists

Attachments

Folders

Quick notes

Pinned notes

Locked notes

Add to that a set of options for each metadata filter that is appropriate to each data type, plus the ability to filter by ‘any’ or ‘all’ filters, and it’s far easier to manage large collections of notes than ever before.

Notes adds a long list of Smart Folder filters.

Another addition to Notes that makes it easier to find notes is that the sidebar is now organized by modification date. Beneath the Pinned Notes section, you’ll find sections like Today, Yesterday, Previous 7 Days, Previous 30 days, and then monthly, followed by annual sections. It’s a nice visual touch that breaks up a long sidebar list of notes. However, if you prefer a more compact notes list, you can turn off Group By Date in Notes’ View menu. Notes also has a new dedicated Shared section in the Folder sidebar that makes zeroing in on that type of note faster.

The new ways to organize and view Notes are an excellent addition to the app. Still, I think more can be done to help people navigate their growing collections of notes. Folders filled with long lists of notes get unwieldy quickly. Tags and Smart Folders help a lot with that, but I’d like to be able to link to individual notes, folders, and Smart Folders internally within a note as a quick way to navigate between related notes. There are a lot of modern note-taking apps that do this, and while I think its utility is sometimes overstated, the ability to create notes that act as tables of contents for reference materials or link to multiple related topics in a sprawling project would go a long way to making Notes a more useful project management and research tool.

Notes is a bright spot among system apps that have added new actions to Shortcuts.

Notes has made substantial strides with Shortcuts automation too. Unlike the Mac version of Mail, which didn’t get the new Shortcuts actions that were added to iOS and iPadOS, the list of available actions for Notes in Ventura is long and matches what can be done on Apple’s other platforms, including actions to change the app’s settings, a category of action that is new to Shortcuts’ system apps this year.

The app has also added the ability to lock notes using your Apple ID instead of a unique note-only password, which will make accessing password-protected notes far easier for people with Touch ID Macs.

Notes is an app that I’ve dipped in and out of for years. I love its versatility, but it works better as a final destination of information than a waypoint. What I mean by that is that it’s far easier to add content to a note than get it back out again in the format I need. That’s generally why I’ve stuck to highly portable plain text notes in Obsidian and saving links there or in GoodLinks.

Still, the rich link previews, image and file handling, Quick Notes, collaboration, and Pencil support on the iPad are all drawing me back in, which is good timing because I feel like I’m overloading my other note-taking apps. I’ve reached the point where at least some of my notes need a new home, and Notes is it.

Reminders

Reminders.

I’ve spent the entire summer using Reminders as my full-time task manager, and for the first time, I plan to stick with it past the release of Ventura. It’s not that there aren’t some rough edges; there are. However, the app has continued to evolve, making it more flexible than ever. The result is that I’ve finally been able to customize Reminders to fit better than ever with the way I work.

Above all else, customization is what’s made Reminders stick for me this year. That starts with the app’s group of built-in smart lists that dominate the top of the app’s sidebar. There’s a new system-provided smart list for Completed items if you want to see what you’ve accomplished. Like Apple’s other built-in smart lists, the Completed list can be toggled on or off from the View menu. However, for the first time with Ventura, you can now pin your own lists and smart lists to the top of the sidebar. I’m using the new pinning feature to include a smart list that extends the built-in Today list by showing me everything I’ve got coming due today and tomorrow.

Scheduled and Today break down tasks by preset time periods.

Another great feature is the way the Today smart list divides the day into morning, afternoon, and tonight. It’s a lightweight way to quickly organize your day by dragging tasks from one time of day to the other, visually balancing what you want to do and when. Combined with manual sorting of tasks, I can sit down and quickly move tasks around to balance my day. A similar approach is taken with the Scheduled smart list that breaks tasks down by day, week, month, and year.

By default, morning is 9:00 am, afternoon is 3:00 pm, and tonight is 6:00 pm. Unfortunately, though, these times cannot be changed to account for different schedules and preferences, which I’d like to see change. My daily schedule isn’t that unusual, but I’d immediately change the times chosen to 12:00 pm, 6:00 pm, and 9:00 pm because tasks appear as overdue once the designated default time passes. That means my morning tasks all switch to red at 9:00 am, three hours before I consider my morning finished, which I don’t like.

Using grouped smart lists to divide tasks by project.

Another excellent feature added this year is the new way Reminders displays grouped lists. Groups are essentially folders into which you can drop multiple standard lists and smart lists. For example, I’ve got a group that collects work lists and another for personal lists.

What I like most about groups, though, is that when you select a group, it’s organized by list. For my work projects group, that means I can scroll through each project list one after the other, with the boundaries between lists marked by the name of the list. That’s useful, but it’s also a feature that can be a lot more helpful when combined with smart lists.

One of the things I don’t like about Reminders is that there’s no concept of projects. Sure, I’ve created lists based on projects, but they aren’t different than any other list. The consequence is that when you’re in a smart list like Today, you can see the list each task is part of, but they aren’t color-coded to correspond to your project lists in any way. Nor is there a way to sort the Today view by list.

An example of the smart list I’m using for my Today group.

To compensate for that, I set up smart lists that collect all of the items due today from each of my core project lists and assigned them the same colors as my project lists. Then, I added each of those smart lists to a group called Today. Thanks to the new way groups are displayed in the Reminders window, I can now collapse that group in the sidebar and select the group anytime I want to see today’s tasks organized by project.

Combining the power of smart lists and Groups.

The trick I’m using with groups is made possible by the fact that Reminders has added a new list-based filter to smart lists. Selected lists can be included or excluded from a smart list and combined with multiple list filters and the ‘all’ option to combine items from multiple lists. However, the Lists filter is limited to standard lists. As a result, you cannot filter based on your smart lists as a way to nest a group of filters from one list inside another.

The option to include ‘all’ tasks in a smart list that match your filters is paired with the choice to match ‘any’ of your filters too. It’s a small change to the UI for building a smart list that can be easily overlooked, but just like it does with Notes, the new option opens up the ability to create more sophisticated smart lists.

Managing templates.

The other change to the UI for creating a new list is the choice to save a list as a reusable template. The example that you may have heard already is a packing list. If you’ve got a list of 20 things you want to take with you on any trip, create the list as you would any other, and then choose Save as Template from the File menu. Now, whenever you are ready to pack for a trip, you can return to the File menu, select View Templates, and pick and create a list based on your packing template. The advantage of templates is that the lists they generate are copies of your template, which allows you to modify the lists they create without affecting the underlying template.

Templates are shareable too. From the View Template window, click on the ‘More’ button next to the name of a template. Here, you’ll find the ability to generate an iCloud link to your template for sharing via Ventura’s new share menu. This is also where you can edit, rename, or delete your template, show the information about your template, and manage the sharing of any iCloud links you created.

I use templates in my writing, and repeating tasks are a staple of my Reminders lists, but so far, I haven’t found a place for list templates in my life. That said, if there’s something you repeatedly do that involves a lot of steps, one way to avoid clutter and long lists of subtasks in Reminders is to create templates and generate them only as needed.

Rich text is available in Reminders’ notes field.

Other Reminders features that are new this year include:

The ability to include rich text in the notes field of a task

An Option to include today’s tasks along with overdue tasks in Reminders’ badge count

Notifications when a task in a shared list has been completed or added.

My number one wish for Reminders going forward is for more control over how dates work in smart lists. The date filters in Reminders already have a lot of options, but one that is missing that I think a lot of users would appreciate is the ability to exclude the current date. Currently, there’s no good way to create a list of only those tasks that are due tomorrow. By default, tasks due ‘In the Next 1 Day’ includes incomplete tasks scheduled for today and tomorrow. I don’t think I’m alone in wanting to peek at what I’ve got coming up without also seeing what I’m working on today. Mixing both days together makes planning ahead harder than it should be, but for now, that’s what I’ve been doing.

With Ventura, Reminders has crossed a threshold where I think it’s a viable alternative for power users who need more flexibility and customization than has been made available in the past. It’s that flexibility to make changes, move tasks around, and add new ones with minimal effort that I appreciate most. A lot of my work is made up of recurring tasks that need to get done every week but not necessarily on a particular day. I’ve found that with Reminders, it’s been easy for me to make those day-to-day adjustments without a lot of trouble.

Also key to Reminders is how easy it is to add a new one. A great example is the updated Today smart list. I can click into the Morning, Afternoon, or Tonight sections and add a new task that is automatically assigned today’s date, a time, and my default task list. I can accomplish the same with future dates using the Scheduled list. What makes options like those powerful is that I don’t have to drill down into the app’s UI to set each option. Instead, the list, date, and time options are taken care of automatically, greatly simplifying and speeding up the process of adding new tasks. And ultimately, that’s what matters most because making lists isn’t the goal – completing the tasks is.

Safari

Sharing my Ventura Tab Group with Federico.

Ventura’s changes to Safari include substantial updates to Tab Groups, refinements to how browser extensions and settings work, and passkeys, which I’ll cover in the security section below.

Tab Groups, which debuted last year with macOS Monterey, have undergone changes that reflect their transformation from temporary places to park tabs to full-blown workspaces. Tab Groups were Monterey’s solution to the problem of too many tabs. I used to run into this issue a lot. I’d open a few tabs related to a project, get interrupted by something more urgent, and leave those tabs open until I could come back to the first task. The trouble is that as the day wore on, the tabs shrunk until I couldn’t tell one from another. I’d lose track of tabs or close them by accident, making it hard to get back to what I was doing.

With Tab Groups, Apple introduced a way to preserve a set of tabs for later without cluttering up your current browsing session. Unlike a group of bookmarks, the tabs in Tab Groups were dynamic in that if you closed one or navigated to another site, there wasn’t a way to get back to where you started, except by using the back button or your browsing history.

That model fits with the original conception of Tab Groups, but I know from readers that many people used Tab Groups a little differently. Instead of a temporary holding spot for active tabs, users began making Tab Groups for specific projects and areas of their lives, adding tabs they returned to every time they worked on a task. The trouble with using Tab Groups that way is it was too easy to navigate away from one of your core tabs, requiring the tabs to be set up repeatedly. With Ventura, Apple has added new tools to make using Tab Groups as web-based workspaces much better.

I’ve pinned three tabs in my Club MacStories Tab Group that I use every week to produce our newsletters.

First, you can now pin tabs to individual tab groups. Say you send out invoices for your business every Monday morning, and you always need to access your bank account and invoicing service. Now, you can pin those sites to a Tab Group specifically created for that task, so they’ll be available any time you open the group. From there, you can open other tabs specific to that day’s invoicing, and they’ll act just like any other tab.

My Ventura review tab group has its own set of favorites and a unique wallpaper to make it easy to spot visually.

Second, you can create a semi-custom start page for each Tab Group by assigning the group its own set of favorites and a unique wallpaper. I like this feature a lot, but I wish it went further. I’d like to customize all the start page options for each of my Tab Groups. If I’m working in a tab group dedicated to a story I’m writing, I want to shut off most of the start page options to avoid distraction but leave them on for when I return to my main set of tabs, for instance.

Still, these changes have significantly increased my use of Tab Groups. Whereas before, I stashed links in an Inbox group or a group related to a specific research topic, I’ve begun creating project-specific workspaces. So far, I’ve got one Tab Group set up for producing our podcasts and another dedicated to Club MacStories. Each has a few pinned tabs for sites I use every time I work on either project, plus a few favorites. The remaining tabs evolve over time and include things like apps I want to cover in the Club newsletter or links for AppStories show notes. After a new issue of a newsletter or episode of the podcast is published, I clean out the rotating list of tabs, starting fresh with just the pinned ones.

Sharing a Tab Group with Federico, who added the tab with the blue dot.

The other big change to Tab Groups this year ties into the collaboration features that have been sprinkled throughout Ventura. Tab groups can now be shared using the more button next to a tab group’s name in the sidebar. The profile pictures of the people you’ve shared a Tab Group with will appear in Safari’s toolbar. Tabs they view or add are indicated by a colored dot next to a tab. When multiple people are viewing a tab, their profile pictures appear on the right side of the tab. Using the collaboration button that appears in the toolbar after you’ve shared a Tab Group, you can start a FaceTime audio or video call or text participants using Messages.

In practice, I haven’t found Tab Group sharing to be nearly as useful as the other changes to the feature. One place I’ve considered using it is as a collaborative preparation space for AppStories episodes. That makes some sense at first blush, but the reality is that a shared, structured note with links works better for that. Instead, I think I’ll use it more for family projects. For instance, we’re in the process of buying a new house and need to buy some furniture, so I’m going to see how sharing a Tab Group with my wife works for that.

Tab Groups may have received the biggest change in Ventura, but there are some great quality-of-life improvements to Safari too. The first is that per-website settings sync across your devices. That way, if you set up a site to only open in Reader View on your iPad, the setting will carry over to your Mac and any other versions of Safari you use. Page zoom levels sync too.

Sharing Safari extensions across devices.

Another nice touch is that Safari extensions now sync. Safari’s settings on all devices list all the extensions you’ve installed, no matter what device you downloaded them on. Once enabled on one device, the extension will be turned on everywhere else too.

The team that works on Safari more than any other in recent memory has done a terrific job of steering updates in ways that adapt to how real people use the browser. In the early betas of Monterey, Apple made a series of design changes to Safari that weren’t well received. The Safari team adjusted, landing on a design that evolved the browser in a better direction, taking the best parts of what was in those early betas and discarding or making others optional.

Ventura’s Tab Groups are another good example. Adding pinned tabs, Tab Group-level favorites, and custom start pages may seem like small changes individually, but together, the updates meet users where they were already working, transforming temporary holding pens meant to relieve tab overload into focused, task-oriented workspaces. It’s a great set of updates that I think a lot of people will find make their web browsing more productive.

Home

Home’s new compact tile UI.

Home got the big redesign it deserved with macOS Ventura but not the automation tools we need. The app hasn’t changed significantly since I covered it over the summer, so I’ll leave readers to check out that story for the details, but it’s worth revisiting Home’s role in the context of Ventura.

Home is an app that is undoubtedly used most on smaller-screen devices like the iPhone. In that context, the smaller tiles Apple has introduced with Home make a lot of sense. More can be fit onto an iPhone’s screen at once, eliminating much of the scrolling that used to be required. A larger version of the tiles is available, too, if you’ve got the space to support them or want to distinguish certain devices over others, but changes apply across all versions of Home, so there’s no way to compress things on an iPhone while also taking advantage of bigger screens where you can.

Home’s new device-type categories are great.

I also appreciate the better use of the Home tab, which has added accessories organized by room and a grid of any HomeKit cameras you own, and the fact that you can view accessories by type now too. As I concluded in my summer preview story:

Despite some minor design quirks, the overall effect of the changes to Home are positive. The UI is much better for managing a large collection of devices without a lot of scrolling or swiping between rooms. That’s a problem that has grown in recent years as people bought more and more HomeKit devices and one that will only get worse when Matter makes devices that weren’t previously compatible with HomeKit work with the Home app.

What remains disappointing about Home on the Mac is the lack of new ways to automate devices. On iOS and iPadOS, users can set up home automations in Shortcuts or the Home app. On the Mac, automations are only available in the Home app. It’s a small distinction, but one that shouldn’t exist and is likely to cause confusion among some users.

The bigger problem is the lack of significant new ways to automate accessories. Home’s automation tool has seen virtually no changes in recent years. The triggers are still limited to people arriving or leaving, a time of day occurring, an accessory being controlled, and a sensor sensing something. That’s a limited list that’s made all the worse by the fact that you can’t stack triggers to rely on ‘any’ or ‘all’ of them occurring the way you can with filters in Smart Folders in Notes or smart lists in Reminders. That’s a shame, especially with the new Matter standard’s release, which promises to allow users to control non-HomeKit devices from Home too.

Photos

Suggested photos that I took when Jennifer and I were out shopping for furniture.

Earlier this summer I took an in-depth look at iCloud Shared Photo Library. It’s easily one of my favorite new features of macOS Ventura. Since writing that story about six weeks ago, I’ve only grown to enjoy the feature more because it fits so seamlessly into my use of the Camera app and Photos.

Duplicate screenshots found by Photos.

That’s not to say iCloud Shared Photo Library is perfect. I’ve seen some duplicates in my combined library, but there are fewer than I expected. That’s undoubtedly because I’m the main photographer in our family, but the annoyance of the occasional duplicate has been minor in my case, especially since I’m not the fastidious type when it comes to organizing my photos.

Having set up my library to share photos of every member of our family as well as shots taken when we’re together, I’ve had to do very little to manage my library since. I’ll pop over to check out Photos’ suggestions for my shared library every couple of weeks or so, but that’s it. Usually, there are no more than a couple of photos I want to move to my shared library that the app missed for some reason.

My shared library is a lot nicer than my personal one that’s full of screenshots taken for MacStories.

For all the details about the way sharing works and the limitations on who you can share with, be sure to read my original story. None that has changed. Once you take the plunge and begin setting up a shared library, you’ll be walked through the process each step of the way with a detailed explanation of what each option means. It’s a terrific onboarding experience that should serve as a model for other system apps that implicate privacy issues.

iCloud Shared Photo Libraries aren’t the only changes coming to Photos for the Mac in Ventura. The duplicate detection that I mentioned above is a new section in the left sidebar of the app. As you scroll through the duplicates the app has found, the app helpfully displays the size of each file so you can avoid deleting the smaller version of any duplicates.

Ventura’s new system-wide photo picker.

Also, Photos for Ventura:

Locks hidden and recently deleted photos behind your Mac’s login password by default now, requiring you to enter your password or use Touch ID to access either category of images

Allows edits made to one image to be copied and pasted onto another

Introduces a brand new system-wide photo picker that includes a search field making it easier to select photos from any app that supports it

Adds an alphabetical sort option for the people in your People album

Adds new Memories for This Day in History and children playing

Makes Apple Music tracks available for Memories and allows them and Featured Photos to be turned off in the Photos app and its widget

The same feature that lets you lift the subject from a photo on iOS and iPadOS is available in Ventura too. Just right-click on an image and select ‘Copy Subject.’ Just like Apple’s other OSes, Ventura does a remarkable job of pulling the subject of a photo from its background, especially where the edges of the subject are clearly defined.

Live Text works with video now. You haven’t lived until you’ve seen Jam Garden.

Finally, Live Text, which debuted with macOS Monterey and recognizes text in photos, has been extended to video. The feature also supports quick actions such as dialing a phone number, tracking a package, locating an address on a map, converting currencies, or translating languages.

Clock and Weather

There’s not a lot to say about the brand-new Clock and Weather apps except that it’s good to have them for consistency across platforms. If you’re in the habit of using the Clock app on the iPad, it’s largely the same on the Mac. As for the Weather app, it’s a multi-column, tile-based version of the iPhone app that is similar to what was introduced on iPadOS this year.

Clock

With Clock, you can create a customized set of clocks for cities around the world, set alarms and timers, or use a stopwatch. I’ve never been a heavy user of the Clock app on any platform, but I’m nonetheless glad to see the addition because it means I’ve got access to timers and alarms via Siri as well as the same set of five Shortcuts actions available on the iPhone and iPad. I don’t use the Clock Shortcuts actions a lot, but having them on the Mac means not having to switch to the iPhone or iPad when I’m building a shortcut where I need them.

Weather

The top of the Weather app’s window shows the location, temperature, and current conditions overlayed on an animated background of those conditions. Beneath that are tiles with many more details about the current and forecast weather. Tap on a tile, and a view opens up with even more details. Weather data was already part of Siri and Shortcuts on the Mac, but if you rely on the Weather app on any other devices you own, it’s nice to have it on the Mac now too.

Shortcuts

I’ve got some good news and some bad news for you about Shortcuts on the Mac. First, the good news: Shortcuts is in much better shape than it was this time last year. Now for the bad news: There are virtually no Shortcuts updates to be found in macOS Ventura. That’s disappointing but not unexpected, given how much time was undoubtedly taken during the past year to fix the bugs with which the first version shipped.

Apps like BetterTouchTool have picked up where Shortcuts has come up…short.

If there’s a silver lining, it’s that third-party developers have filled the gap. As I wrote in the macOS Monterey review last year, the extent of their support of Shortcuts for Mac was unclear. Some developers of existing automation tools were diving in head first, while others seemed to be sitting back to see what happened. But in relative short order not only did long-time favorite Mac automation apps like BetterTouchTool, Hazel, and Keyboard Maestro support Shortcuts but so did launcher apps like Alfred, LaunchBar, and Raycast. When you add the long list of developers who got their start on the iPad and had actions ready and waiting in the wings for the Mac versions of their apps, there was plenty to keep Shortcuts fans busy in 2022.

However, as much as I’ve enjoyed exploring what developers have done with Shortcuts on the Mac, I’ve kept a close eye on the app itself and especially its system integrations. One of my chief criticisms of Shortcuts on the Mac was its lack of support for the Mac’s share menu. Shortcuts shipped with a long list of ways to access shortcuts, many of which aren’t possible on iOS or iPadOS, but the lack of share menu support was still surprising given how important it is on those other platforms.

Shortcuts is available in the Share menu.

I’m happy to report that in Ventura, Shortcuts now has a spot in Apple’s redesigned share menu. Select it, and a window appears with a list of all your shortcuts that support the share sheet. I’m pleased that this is now possible because it means fewer of the shortcuts I run that way on iOS and iPadOS need to be converted to work another way on the Mac.

The share menu opens a list of every shortcut in your library with sharing enabled.

When it comes to actions that integrate with macOS system functionality, though, there’s not really anything to cover this year. Monterey went a long way with system integration by turning the most popular Automator actions into Shortcuts actions, but even then, the system-level actions felt like a good start, not the finish line. The functionality of macOS runs deep, and the surface has only just been scratched by the actions built into Shortcuts so far.

Instead, I’m reminded of something I said in my Monterey review about Shortcuts’ scripting support:

I’m of two minds about the scripting support in Shortcuts. On balance, I’m glad it’s there because of the power and flexibility it provides users. However, one of my longstanding complaints about Automator is that every time I’ve used it in the past, I’ve quickly hit a wall where the solution was to use Automator to run a script that could do what Automator couldn’t. Too often, that made Automator feel like a script launcher instead of a powerful automation tool in its own right, which I hope doesn’t happen with Shortcuts for Mac.

Unfortunately, I’ve had that familiar Automator feeling too often over the last year. I’ve resorted to AppleScript a lot on the Mac, but overall, the scripts tend to be shorter and for very discrete bits of functionality, but discrete bits of system functionality are exactly what Shortcuts actions should be providing. So while I’m grateful for the option to use scripting to accomplish tasks that Shortcuts can’t on its own, the catalog of system-level Shortcuts actions needs to grow if Shortcuts is really the future of Mac automation.

The catalog of system-level Shortcuts actions needs to grow if Shortcuts is really the future of Mac automation.

What’s more, Apple’s system apps haven’t kept pace with the Shortcuts actions that they’ve introduced on the iPhone and iPad. There are exceptions, of course. For example, the Notes team deserves a lot of credit for introducing a long list of thoughtful Shortcuts actions on every platform.

Not all system app actions made it from iOS and iPadOS to macOS.

The same isn’t true for other system apps. For instance, Mail for Mac added Set Mail Focus Filter as an action in Shortcuts for Mac, but iOS and iPadOS also added Open Mailbox and Search in Mail. Reminders added Open Smart List and Search Reminders in iOS and iPadOS 16, but none of those are included in macOS. Safari added actions related to Tab Groups, bookmarks, and Reading List that are available on the iPhone and iPad but not the Mac. There are other examples, but I think you get the point – few new system app Shortcuts actions made it to the Mac.

As our pal Reggie likes to ask, “So what?” The ‘so what’ goes to the core of what I covered at the very outset of this review. Apple’s system apps have entered a new era where the in-app features of their Mac counterparts no longer lag behind the iPhone versions. That’s a big advantage for people who use multiple Apple devices.

Shortcuts, however, has become an immediate outlier. That’s tough for anyone building shortcuts. You can use the new iOS and iPadOS 16 actions, but those shortcuts won’t work on the Mac. So, while Shortcuts for iOS and iPadOS is opening new avenues of automation, Shortcuts for Mac is creating roadblocks. I understand how difficult the past year has probably been for the engineers working on Shortcuts, and I’m not surprised by where we are with Ventura, but I can’t help but be disappointed too.

I used to work on my Mac with my iPhone or iPad nearby to handle running the shortcuts that are so deeply woven into the workflows at MacStories. With Shortcuts for Mac, I thought those days were over. Unfortunately, as we push those shortcuts forward with the latest actions on iOS and iPadOS, I find myself back in the familiar and unwelcome position of falling back to my iPhone and iPad to run them. It’s just easier than maintaining a second set of Mac-only shortcuts.

Shortcuts’ omissions on the Mac don’t end with actions. Also missing are App Shortcuts, the single-action starter shortcuts introduced with iOS 16. App Shortcuts have a lot of potential as entry points for new users who are new to automation, that is, as long as they don’t use a Mac. I’m also a fan of the way iOS and iPadOS now break long lists of actions into related groups in the action library. That would go a long way to making it easier to navigate large collections of actions on the Mac, too, so hopefully, it’s something we’ll see added in the future.

That’s the most I’ve ever written about what’s missing from a release of macOS, but that’s because Shortcuts is important, not just to me personally, but to macOS. The trouble is that it’s still playing catch-up on the Mac. That’s not great for what’s supposed to be the future of automation on the Mac. The app’s potential is obvious from what was released with Monterey. There are things that can be done with Shortcuts on the Mac, especially with its rich support among third-party developers, that aren’t, and may never, be possible on the iPhone or iPad. Yet it still feels like Shortcuts has barely left the gates since last fall.

That’s frustrating for me, but my greater concern is that the message being delivered to a broader audience is that Shortcuts isn’t for the masses. It’s for people with more time than sense. Tinkerers. Hobbyists. Nerds.

It’s okay for Shortcuts to be all those things, but it’s been sold by Apple, quite rightly in my view, as a tool that can scale from simple automations to ones that rival native apps. That’s the vision, but unfortunately, it’s not the reality – yet. I’m still optimistic Shortcuts will get to where it’s as natural for a Mac user to open as Notes, but there’s still a long way to go.

Other System Apps

That lonely star in Music is all it got in Ventura.

Other system apps received minor updates:

There’s a new button on Music’s artist pages to mark them as favorites. When new music is available from your favorite artists, you’ll receive notifications from the Music app. Apple also says the feature improves music recommendations, but I haven’t noticed a difference.

The Stocks app lists earnings dates that can be added to your calendar. You can also set up multiple stock watch lists to organize the companies you follow into groups. Stocks’ medium and large Home Screen widgets now include two columns to fit more ticker symbols on each widget.

News lets you pick your favorite teams for a customized My Sports feed. Plus, up to eight publications you follow can be added to a dedicated Favorites section in the sidebar. Where available, local news sections have been expanded and has gained a dedicated section in the sidebar too.

Maps has added multi-stop routes, which I’ve found has been a big help when I’m out running errands because I’m still leaning my way around the new neighborhood to which we recently moved. Maps also displays transit fares, so you’ll know ahead of time how much a public transit trip will cost.

There’s not much more to say about each of these miscellaneous system app changes except that the lack of Music changes is disappointing because it’s least reliable on the Mac and is in need of a redesign that improves discovery.

System Features

Every year, macOS sees updates and refinements to system features, and this year is no different. As usual, there is a variety of new system-level changes in Ventura, including a replacement for System Preferences, which is now called System Settings, updates to Spotlight, new security and privacy enhancements, accessibility, and more.

System Settings

We needed an update to System Preferences, but System Settings isn’t it.

System Preferences had to go. The destination for tweaking your Mac’s settings was showing its age and had outgrown its design. What Apple came up with is System Settings, a design that’s reminiscent of the settings app on the iPhone and iPad. And while I agree that System Preferences needed a major overhaul and that approaching the problem of settings across all of Apple’s platforms in a unified way makes sense, System Settings is not the answer. The design is confusing and buggy, and but for excellent built-in search, too hard to use.

There are a lot of layers to the problems with System Settings, and I’m not going to bore you with the minute details. Apple is clearly aware of its shortcomings. Over the course of the betas, many of the early bugs have been addressed, so I expect the list of remaining issues will continue to dwindle with subsequent updates. So, instead of cataloging bugs, let’s look at the structural problems that would remain even if visual glitches and other UI oddities were eliminated entirely.

System Settings improved over the summer, but a tall narrow window that can’t be resized horizontally is hard to use.

The first problem with System Settings is that it’s based on the iOS and iPadOS Settings app, seemingly without regard to how the Mac’s settings should be handled differently. For example, one of the limitations of System Preferences is that it was a static window that couldn’t be resized. Without the ability to resize System Preferences, some of its sections required too much clicking to drill down to what you were looking for. System Settings’ solution is a window that can be expanded vertically and scrolls like the Settings app on iOS and iPadOS, but can’t be resized horizontally. The result is a window that feels pasted into the Mac’s UI directly from the iPhone, which is completely out of place on the Mac.

I understand why expanding System Settings horizontally isn’t a great option. The use of left-aligned setting descriptions and right-aligned toggles and other controls would be hard to track visually if the window was stretched out too far horizontally, but that’s a reason not to use a design that’s so closely tied to iOS and iPadOS in the first place, not an excuse to prevent standard window resizing.

The other major issue with System Settings is one it shares with the Settings app on iOS and iPadOS: the organization of the settings themselves. I’ve never thought Settings on iOS or iPadOS were well organized, so grafting that onto the Mac just extends that problem to yet another platform. I get that reorganizing Settings breaks muscle memory for users, which I’m sure Apple would prefer to avoid, but the muscle memory of System Preferences was already going to be broken with this redesign. So why not fix Settings on the iPhone and iPad too?

When I look at Settings on the iPhone and iPad, I see options organized in a way that may have made sense when they were first introduced, but with the introduction of subsequent features, they don’t anymore. That system and its confusing structure have been brought over to the Mac in the name of familiarity without applying a critical eye to why Settings is organized the way it is on iOS and iPadOS in the first place and whether that structure makes sense on the Mac.

Focusing on just the first few sections of Settings on the iPad and Mac, you can see the resemblance.

If you compare Settings on an iPhone or iPad side-by-side with the Mac’s new System Settings, you can see the family resemblance. Both start with iCloud settings at the top of the sidebar, followed by connectivity settings like WiFi and Bluetooth. Next is a group that includes common settings like General, Control Center, and Accessibility, but after that, the parallels between the systems diverge, and the similarities between the settings fall apart. The result is consistency that’s consistently confusing.

The result is consistency that’s consistently confusing.

Although it doesn’t excuse bad design, search works well in System Settings and is what I suggest readers turn to instead of hunting through the sidebar for the settings you need. I was already accustomed to relying on search with System Preferences, and I expect many of our readers were too, so unless and until the organization and design of System Settings receives an overhaul, that’s how I plan to use System Settings.

So, as you probably can gather, I’m not a fan of System Settings. I expect better from Apple, but by the same token, search works well, and it’s just System Settings. You’ll find yourself going to System Settings, and you’ll probably be frustrated when you can’t find what you want. However, that’s not much different than the System Preferences experience, which didn’t wreck the overall experience of using a Mac. System Settings is that same old frustration dressed up in a different design, which is disappointing.

With so many unrelated parameters that can be tweaked on all of Apple’s platforms, I recognize that settings apps are a hard design problem and applaud Apple for bringing some consistency across platforms. I don’t have the answer for how to fix the underlying organizational issues with all of its settings apps, but I hope that Apple continues to iterate on settings across all of its devices. It’s not the sexiest app around, but it’s one everybody uses, so it deserves more attention.

Spotlight

Rich information is available for musicians and other categories of searches.

Spotlight continues to grow and evolve with each iteration of macOS into something that is far deeper than just an app launcher. I’ll admit that I don’t use Spotlight much. I was using apps like LaunchBar and Alfred before Spotlight was even available. I use Raycast now, and I don’t plan to switch to Spotlight, but I’ve started to hit F4 to activate it more often because it’s added some unique features I want to use alongside Raycast.

Using Quick Look to preview information about the Empire State Building from Maps.

A good example is Spotlight’s image search, which takes advantage of Live Text. It’s perfect for things like receipts you may have snapped a photo of and want to find again. Quick Look is integrated into Spotlight, too, so you can navigate through your Spotlight results previewing images to find exactly what you want. For instance, a quick search for ‘Parcel’ immediately found more than a dozen screenshots in Finder and Photos with the word ‘Parcel’ somewhere in the image. Of course, along with those image results, Spotlight found the app, its website, several email messages about the app’s TestFlight betas, and Mac App Store results, along with other suggested websites and the definition of the word.

Spotlight does more with sports teams now, too.

The other new feature of Spotlight that is promising but isn’t working to the extent originally announced is Spotlight’s quick actions. Type the name of a shortcut into the Spotlight text field, select it, hit Return, and the shortcut will run. Quick actions can also be used to enable or disable Focus modes and start a timer by searching for ‘Clock.’ However, Apple has also said quick actions can be used to recognize songs with Shazam, which doesn’t work for me.

I haven’t had a lot of luck with Spotlight quick actions, but turning on Focus modes works.

Based on the interface for invoking Focus modes and timers, quick actions appear to be the Mac equivalent of App Shortcuts on iOS and iPadOS. Both use Shortcuts iconography and UI elements in the case of timers. However, this is the only evidence of App Shortcuts in Ventura. As I discussed in the Shortcuts section, App Shortcuts aren’t available from Shortcuts’ sidebar, and none of the App Shortcuts I’ve tried from third-party developers with universal apps work in Ventura. Quick actions give me some hope that App Shortcuts will make it to the Mac eventually, but for now, they’re not available in Shortcuts, and there’s not a lot that can be accomplished with Spotlight quick actions.

Spotlight’s design is much more like the iPad and iPhone’s.

Spotlight has been redesigned this year to more closely resemble the versions found in iOS and iPadOS, a nice touch to make transitioning between platforms easier. Spotlight has also gained rich search results for certain search terms. Apple is leveraging its deep library of metadata for media, plus Maps data, the web, and local data to create rich results for musicians, TV shows, movies, actors, sports teams, businesses, and contacts. The information that each category returns varies, but it’s a rich collection of images, videos, scores for sports teams, discographies for music artists, social accounts, and services where media can be accessed.

For Spotlight users, the changes in Ventura are all excellent evolutions of the tool, but what intrigues me the most is quick actions, the least developed of Spotlight’s new features. The ability to trigger what are effectively App Shortcuts on iOS and iPadOS from the Mac’s keyboard has an enormous amount of potential.

I’d love to see quick actions extended to third-party apps too. Imagine controlling your task manager, calendar app, or text editor via Spotlight keyboard commands. Some actions could be useful system-wide, like displaying today’s calendar appointments, but I’d love to see a scoped version of Spotlight adopted inside individual apps. If you’ve ever used an app like Obsidian, Agenda, or the latest iteration of Spark, you’ll know what I’m talking about. Instead of having to memorize dozens of keyboard shortcuts, a hotkey combination summons a text field similar to Spotlight’s for dynamically searching for available commands. Standardizing that interaction model across apps using a Spotlight API available to third-party developers would make Spotlight much more relevant in today’s productivity app environment.

Everything Else

Focus

Focus modes have been greatly expanded and refined.

Just like iOS and iPadOS, Focus modes have been refined in Ventura. There are a lot of new options in the Focus section of System Settings. One of the biggest time savers is that you can now use either Allow or Silence lists when deciding which apps and people can break through your Focus modes. Whereas in Monterey, everyone and every app were blocked and had to be added back one by one as exceptions, now you can start from the other perspective allowing everyone and all apps to deliver notifications unless you specifically block them. More than anything else, this one change has made it much easier to set up a wider variety of different Focus modes.

Focus filters are another big addition this year that are available for some of Apple’s system apps as well as third-party apps that adopt Apple’s new Focus filter APIs. Filters are an interesting refinement because instead of filtering out notifications from people or apps, they filter out content from apps. For example, you could set up a Work focus that hides messages from your personal Mail inbox during work hours. You could do something similar with Calendars, hiding those that aren’t relevant to your current context.

One of the few third-party apps that I’ve seen use this during the Ventura beta period was GoodLinks, the app for saving links for later, which lets you filter the links visible in the app based on how they’re tagged.

My weekend Focus mode runs on a schedule from Friday afternoon through Sunday.

Another nice addition to Focus modes is the ability to schedule them to be turned on and off at multiple times during the day and week.

I’m a big fan of the changes to Focus modes. That said, I’ve found more use for them with my iPhone, where I can also use them to change my Lock Screen and Home Screens. Still, it’s nice to have the option to silence certain apps, people, and app content at certain times of the day, regardless of the device I’m using.

The New Share Menu

Apple replaced the Share menu, and I don’t like it. It’s a popover element now with smaller text and share suggestions along the top. The design feels out of place in many Mac apps and even worse if you access it from a right-click menu, but the functionality has suffered too. Before, you could assign keyboard shortcuts to Share menu items, which isn’t possible anymore. It’s not a huge deal, but like System Settings, it’s also not an upgrade.

Security

Passkeys. Source: Apple.

Ventura debuts a new security feature called passkeys, which is designed to do away with passwords using industry standards developed by the FIDO Alliance and the World Wide Web Consortium. Passkeys are based on biometric authentication like Touch ID and Face ID across all of Apple’s platforms and synced via iCloud Keychain. Because passwords aren’t stored on a website or server somewhere, passkeys are a far more secure method of logging into a website or app. Instead, passkeys are stored locally and are unique to each website and app, reducing phishing risks significantly too.

Another nice touch added this year is that the passwords suggested by Safari can be edited. This will come in handy for sites with odd rules about permissible characters in passwords. If a randomly generated password is rejected, instead of picking something less secure off the top of your head, you’ll now be able to go in and tweak the suggested password to match a site’s rules.

On portable Macs, you’ll be asked to authorize interaction with USB-C devices by default, starting with Ventura. Also, Ventura introduces a new Rapid Security Response option that installs security updates without rebooting your Mac.

Dictation

Dictation in macOS just keeps getting better. It’s not a feature I use often, but now that punctuation is inserted automatically as you speak and emoji can be added, too, I’m considering using dictation for notes and outlines as a way of giving my hands a rest now and then.

Gaming

Videogames got a lot of stage time at WWDC this year because Apple introduced Metal 3, the latest version of its graphics framework for game developers. At the conference, Apple showed off No Man’s Sky and Resident Evil Village running on a Mac.

Those games aren’t out yet, and I haven’t tried any others that take advantage of Metal 3, so I don’t have any opinions to share about the extent to which the new framework will improve the experience of gaming on the Mac. However, I hope to have more to share soon because Capcom announced last week that Resident Evil Village is debuting on the Mac App Store on Friday.

Sidecar Reference Mode with an iPad Pro

It’s a very niche feature, which I haven’t had a need to use myself, but the 12.9” iPad Pro can be used as a reference monitor for M1 and M2 Macs when it’s in Sidecar mode, something which photographers and filmmakers should find useful.

Accessibility

Live transcription of a story from Platformer read by the read-later app Matter.

Perhaps the most technically impressive accessibility feature added to the Mac this year is a beta feature that generates real-time captions for FaceTime, complete with speaker attribution, and for other audio and video apps. Users can also type to speak responses during a phone or FaceTime call. Voice Control can be used to hang up calls now, too, and includes a spelling mode to spell out names and words not in its dictionary.

Playing background sounds.

Ventura can play background sounds like rain to help drown out other noise and help focus users. The update can also combine the inputs from multiple game controllers to allow one player to help another with a videogame. VoiceOver can now correct common formatting errors in email messages and documents and includes 20 new languages and additional voices for it and Spoken Content too.

Compatibility

macOS Ventura is compatible with the following Macs:

2022 Mac Studio

2017 MacBook and later

2018 Mac mini and later

2019 Mac Pro and later

2017 MacBook Pro and later

2018 MacBook Air and later

2017 iMac Pro and later

2017 iMac and later

Also, the following features only work with Macs that have an M1 or M2 SoC:

Real-time captioning of FaceTime calls

Dictation’s support for emoji

Using an iPad Pro in Sidecar reference mode

Future on Hold

On the whole, Ventura has been a pleasure to use all summer and into this fall. I installed the first developer beta in June, put my Mac Studio into Stage Manager mode and never looked back. As I’ve explained, Stage Manager’s stages need to be easier to create, but that doesn’t change how much I like flipping back and forth between a few sets of apps once they’re set up. I’m also a big fan of iCloud Shared Photo Libraries, the new smart features of Notes and Reminders, Mail’s new capabilities, and the new Tab Group features in Safari.

Still, something is amiss with Ventura. It’s not the sort of thing that is going to spoil your day-to-day use of the Mac. I’ve had no trouble with that sort of thing. Instead, it’s a feeling I never shook through eleven beta releases.

macOS has come a long way from 2018’s Mac Catalyst Sneak Peek. Some aspects of the strategy set in motion at that year’s WWDC have already been accomplished, and that’s where Ventura shines. It’s great to finally see Mac system apps updated across all Apple platforms at once, and the influx of excellent third-party apps we’ve seen in the past couple of years is wonderful.

Ventura gets a lot of the parts right but doesn’t project the same confident focus about macOS’s future as earlier releases.

However, what was set in motion in 2018 and even earlier in 2017 with Apple’s acquisition of Workflow hasn’t been finished. One of the remaining barriers between moving between the Mac and iPad is the difference in their interaction models. Stage Manager could be the bridge between the two OSes, but in its current state, I’m afraid most people will try Stage Manager once and then never again.

Then, there’s Shortcuts. It doesn’t feel great to be here criticizing Shortcuts two years running. I suppose I’m hard on Shortcuts because it’s so important to the work I do, but I also take at face value Apple’s claim that it’s the future of automation on the Mac. However, Shortcuts won’t be the future of automation unless it can get beyond the functionality of Automator. In one sense, it already has in that third-party developers have adopted Shortcuts more eagerly than they ever did with Automator, keeping Shortcuts and my optimism for the app afloat this past year. Still, deeper system-level action support that takes Shortcuts beyond its roots in past automation schemes is imperative to back up Apple’s bold claims.

Finally, System Settings as inconsequential as it is in some ways, is troubling not because it ruins the macOS experience, but because it’s a rare lapse in Apple’s usual thoughtful design. System Settings doesn’t improve on System Preferences. It’s just a poor substitute for something that was flawed itself. It’s a hard design problem to solve, but just a couple of years ago, Apple was rolling out new macOS and iPadOS designs that brought the two platforms much closer together without compromising the unique identities of either device. System Settings is the exact opposite, which is why it bothers me.

That’s why it feels like Ventura has put macOS’s future on hold. Is that an echo of the pandemic affecting this year’s release, Apple pulling up and relaxing before reaching the finish line, the result of reallocating engineering talent to other projects, or something else? I don’t know the reason. I just know that the focus that was so evident in Big Sur, Catalina, and Monterey isn’t there in Ventura. It’s not that those prior releases were perfect by any means, but they had a coherence and purpose that transcended their components, whereas Ventura gets a lot of the parts right but doesn’t project the same confident focus about macOS’s future as earlier releases.

That’s why Ventura is so hard to pin down. The day-to-day experience has been solid. After all, it’s built on the successes of those earlier releases. However, because Ventura’s misses are so fundamental to the direction of macOS, they’re something worth keeping an eye on. They may only be clouds on the horizon today, but they could just as easily become nasty storms next year unless Apple continues to build and improve on the foundation it started in 2018.