macOS Catalina: The MacStories Review

Ironically, Apple chose to name this year’s update to macOS after an island. Since the iPhone and iOS took off, macOS has sometimes felt like an island isolated from the rest of the company’s OSes, but the goal articulated by the company at WWDC this year was quite the opposite. Apple clearly telegraphed that change is coming to the Mac and it’s designed to bridge the user experiences between each of its platforms.

To developers, that message came in the form of Catalyst and SwiftUI. Catalyst, which was previewed as an unnamed ‘Sneak Peek’ in 2018, is meant to make it easier for iPadOS developers to bring their apps to the Mac. SwiftUI has a similar longer-term goal of unifying and streamlining how developers build the interfaces for their apps across a range of devices, for everything from the Apple Watch to the Mac.

The efforts to draw macOS in closer with Apple’s other operating systems run deeper than just developer tools though. macOS may have been the foundation on which iOS was built, but in the years that followed iOS’s introduction, the two OSes grew apart. Identically-named apps were developed on different schedules, which meant they rarely included the same features. Also, system-level functionality like System Preferences, which serves the same purpose as iOS’s Settings app, was unfamiliar, making Mac adoption unnecessarily hard for newcomers. Catalina is an attempt to address those kinds of inconsistent user experiences.

With Catalina, Apple has taken clear, though not always successful, steps to bridge the divide between the Mac and iOS. App functionality has been realigned, System Preferences has been rearranged, and new features have been added to make it easier to move from one platform to the other.

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As with other transitional periods in the Mac’s history, this one isn’t going to be easy. However, because the change is driven by a fundamental change in computing, it’s also necessary. We live in a new climate where computing is now dominated by mobile devices. For many people, a smartphone is all the computing power they need day-to-day. That doesn’t mean there’s no longer a place for the Mac, but it’s clearly what’s driving the changes in Catalina.

Apple could have chosen to ignore the shift of the ground beneath its feet and merely maintained macOS, making the kind of small incremental changes we’ve become accustomed to in recent years. However, not adapting is as deliberate a choice as change is, and it carries just as much or more uncertainty for the Mac as a platform because it risks irrelevance.

The Mac isn’t in crisis, but it isn’t healthy either. Waiting until the Mac is on life support isn’t viable. Instead, Apple has opted to reimagine the Mac in the context of today’s computing landscape before its survival is threatened. The solution is to tie macOS more closely to iOS and iPadOS, making it an integrated point on the continuum of Apple’s devices that respects the hardware differences of the platform but isn’t different simply for the sake of difference.

Transitions are inherently messy, and so is Catalina in places. It’s a work in process that represents the first steps down a new path, not the destination itself. The destination isn’t clear yet, but Catalina’s purpose is: it’s a bridge, not an island.

But wait, there’s more

Catalina Review eBook Plus iOS and iPadOS 13 Review Perks

By subscribing to Club MacStories, you’ll gain exclusive access to the eBook version of this review plus the many perks related to Federico’s iOS and iPadOS 13 review that was published last month:

New today:

macOS Catalina Review eBook. Available today, the eBook version is the best way to read this review offline using any EPUB reader. The book is fully interactive with all of the images and links you’ll find on MacStories, and it looks great in Apple’s Books app. The eBook version can be downloaded in the members-only Downloads area here.

Additional Perks Released with Federico’s iOS and iPadOS review:

iOS and iPadOS 13 Review eBook. In the Downloads area you’ll find the eBook version of iOS and iPadOS 13: The MacStories Review by Federico, which we published last month.

Exclusive wallpapers. For the very first time, we’re also offering Club MacStories members a set of free mobile (iPhone and iPad) and desktop (5K) wallpapers. They come in red, gold, and black, plus two colorful gradient versions. They’re absolutely stunning.

MacStories Shortcuts Icons. The MacStories Shortcuts Icons are a collection of 300 custom icons for shortcuts added to your Home screen, designed by the MacStories team. As a Club MacStories member, you’ll be able to buy MacStories Shortcuts Icons at 33% off. For more details on your discount and how to buy the icons, visit the MacStories Shortcuts Icons FAQ page.

Advanced Shortcuts, MacStories Unplugged, Extras eBook. If you haven’t checked them out yet, Federico created a series of advanced shortcuts that take advantage of the new Shortcuts features for iOS 13, which are available in MacStories Weekly, Issue 192, which you can find here. We also published two episodes of our Club-only podcast, MacStories Unplugged, with episodes that take a look behind the scenes of the iOS and iPadOS 13 review and round up some of our favorite iOS and iPadOS 13 apps. Finally, we published an eBook that is a companion to Federico’s iOS and iPadOS 13 review and compiles the nine iOS 13 preview stories published by the MacStories team over the summer.

You can unlock all of these perks with a Club MacStories subscription, starting at $5/month. And in doing so, you’ll also get access to the complete archive of Club MacStories with over four years worth of exclusive content.

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System and Security

Apple’s realignment of the Mac is apparent throughout Catalina, including in the update’s system-level changes. From new security features to the new Apple Account and Screen Time sections of System Preferences, Catalina has borrowed ideas from iOS and iPadOS. Overall, the changes succeed in creating a more welcoming, familiar environment and make it easier for users to move back and forth between Apple’s mobile and desktop systems. At the same time though, the update imposes new constraints that will be irritating to long-time Mac users, and justifiably so.

Has Apple struck the right balance? It’s hard to say. Catalina’s system updates strike me as changes designed to better-align the experiences of users coming to the Mac from iOS, and on that score, it succeeds. To seasoned Mac users though, some of the changes will feel like roadblocks. However, on balance, I think the mix of security enhancements, familiar but new-to-the-Mac features like Screen Time, and all-new features like Sidecar achieve the intended goal.

Testing Notes and Compatibility

Before diving more deeply into the details though, it’s worth explaining how I tested Catalina for the past few months.

I started my testing of Catalina on my 13-inch 2016 MacBook Pro by booting from an external Samsung T3 SSD, which is fast enough, but far from the fastest external SSDs available. Other than the hassle of having an SSD hanging off of my MacBook Pro, the setup was perfectly useable for day-to-day work.

In August, I switched over to my 2018 Mac mini with a 3.2GHz 6-core Intel Core i7, 32GB of RAM, and an internal SSD. Although the betas were still fairly rough at the time, the first thing I noticed was how snappy my system felt. The difference was significant enough to be noticeable, but so many factors, including the difference of moving from using a 2016 laptop to a current-generation mini, have an effect on the perceived speed, making it’s impossible to conclude that Catalina itself is faster.

In the weeks since then, I’ve grown used to what initially felt like a speed increase. That’s not terribly surprising and is something I’ve experienced every time I’ve upgraded to a newer, more powerful Mac. However, it’s nonetheless notable that I haven’t experienced a perceptible slowdown in the performance of macOS in my daily computing even in the earliest days of the betas.

Although I’ve been running Catalina on two relatively new and powerful Macs, the update will run on Macs introduced as far back as 2012. Here’s the complete list of compatible Macs:

MacBook (Early 2015 or later)

MacBook Air (Mid 2012 or later)

MacBook Pro (Mid 2012 or later)

Mac mini (Late 2012 or later)

iMac (Late 2012 or later)

iMac Pro (2017)

Mac Pro (Late 2013 or later)

I’m glad to see older Macs supported, as has been the case with other recent macOS updates. Although I haven’t tested any older Macs, I wouldn’t expect Catalina to magically breathe new life into them. However, if you have an older Mac, it’s good to know you can enjoy the latest macOS features.

32-Bit Apps Are No Longer Supported

The era of 64-bit-only Mac apps has arrived, a transition that iOS devices made with iOS 11 and survived. Catalina can only run 64-bit apps, which means that older 32-bit apps you may have installed years ago will no longer run on your Mac. Although Apple communicated that this transition was coming quite a while ago, there will undoubtedly be users who update only to find that an app they use doesn’t work on Catalina. There are simply too many older, unmaintained 32-bit apps for it not to be an issue for some users.

That said, I didn’t have a problem with a single app on my Mac when I updated. Granted, I test apps for a living, which means I keep them up-to-date, and I move on to new apps frequently, but of the dozens of apps on my Mac, not a single one caused a problem. I’m sure that won’t be true for everyone, but I also wouldn’t let the transition to 64-bit prevent you from updating.

Mojave’s System Report.

Instead of taking my word or anyone else’s for it though, before you install Catalina, click on the Apple logo in the top-left corner of your screen and select ‘About this Mac.’ Next, click the System Report button. Select Applications under the Software section. Find the column marked ‘64-bit (Intel)’ and click the header to sort by that column, which makes it easier to go through just the 32-bit apps. Alternatively, you can run a free app from St. Clair Software called Go64, which scans your system for 32-bit apps.

You will probably see some 32-bit apps in your System Report, but that doesn’t mean they’re show-stoppers. Armed with a little knowledge, it’s far easier to make an informed decision than take blind advice from someone else. If you do find a critical 32-bit app on your Mac that you can’t live without, one way to upgrade to Catalina but still run the app is to run it in a virtual machine using an app like Parallels Desktop.

Catalina’s Read-Only System Volume, App Notarization, DriverKit, and Restore from Snapshot

Apple has spent several macOS releases tightening the security of the operating system, and this year is no different.

One of the pillars of this year’s update is a dedicated, read-only volume used just for Catalina. By separating system files from your data, you cannot accidentally delete or overwrite an important system file. Just as important though, neither can third-party apps, unintentionally or maliciously.

Beginning with Catalina, Apple is also requiring developers to submit their apps to a notarization process if they are sold outside the Mac App Store. The process works with macOS’s Gatekeeper functionality to protect users from malicious and otherwise harmful apps. Throughout the Catalina beta period, developers experienced problems with the notarization process, so Apple has temporarily eased some of the requirements, which won’t be enforced until January 2020. It’s good to see Apple modify some of the notarization requirements but not eliminate them. The increased protection that notarization affords users is a welcome change but shouldn’t become an undue burden on developers.

DriverKit is Apple’s new development framework that obviates the need for third-party peripheral makers to install kernel extensions, which expose critical parts of macOS. By running in user space like other apps, DriverKit reduces the potential harm that drivers can cause, and provides a way for them to be uninstalled when their host apps are removed from your Mac.

Also, Catalina takes a snapshot of your current installation right before you install new apps on your Mac. That way, if you run into any problems during the installation, you can roll back your system to the state it was in right before you installed the new app.

App Privacy Permissions

Examples of some of the many permissions requested when you first launch apps in Catalina.

Apple now requires apps to ask your permission to use more parts of your Mac’s system than ever before. This year, Speech Recognition, Input Monitoring, File and Folder, and Screen Recording were all added to the list of functions that apps must ask permission to enable. That’s a good thing but doesn’t mean that it’s not annoying, especially for experienced users.

In my testing, I’ve found that most apps need at least a couple of permissions. It’s very common to be asked if an app can access the Documents or Desktop folders, for instance. In fact, all apps that use them need to ask your permission to access Documents, Downloads, Desktop, or iCloud Drive folders and removable storage the first time they are launched. Add to that permissions that must be requested before sending notifications and using other system features and hardware, and it’s not surprising so many alerts pop up in the first days after Catalina is installed.

It’s not a great experience, but it’s also temporary. Within a few days of using Catalina, the number of alerts drops quickly. Of course there are occasional reminders as you open infrequently-used apps later, but the overall experience does improve with time.

Everyone’s tolerance for these sorts of alerts is different, and perhaps mine is high, but what I find fascinating is that the same sort of warnings on iOS and iPadOS don’t cause the same level of reaction in many of the same people I’ve heard complain about them on the Mac. I suspect the difference is that iOS and iPadOS have always worked that way, whereas the Mac hasn’t.

The difference with the Mac is that it has allowed you and your apps unfettered access to its system for so long that the change to a heavily permission-based approach is an unexpected shock. Why could you edit a text file in your Documents folder last week without giving macOS permission, but now you can’t? My only advice is to be prepared for the alerts and rest assured that they won’t pop up with the same frequency long-term. Grant the permissions that make sense and get on with your work.

Apple ID Account Information

Another idea brought over from iOS and iPadOS is that your Apple ID information is now right at the top of the System Preferences window. There you’ll see your profile picture just like you would in the iOS Settings app. From here, you’ve got access to all of your Apple ID and, if set up, Family Sharing information.

From Apple ID, you can manage passwords, payment and shipping information, the apps that can use iCloud, the devices connected to your account, and related items. Family Sharing covers shared purchases, location sharing with family members, iCloud storage use, Screen Time settings, and your shared subscriptions like Apple Music, Apple TV channels, Apple Arcade, and Apple News+.

The approach is very much like the experience in the Settings app on iOS, where the same features and settings can be accessed simply by tapping your profile picture in the app. It’s a welcome consolidation of disparate Apple ID and Family Sharing settings presented in a familiar manner that should make it far simpler for users to find what they’re looking for on the Mac.

Apple Watch Authentication

The Apple Watch can authorize more password-protected actions in Catalina.

The more I can use my Apple Watch to authenticate things, the better. Over the summer, I set up my Mac so I can access it remotely from an iOS device using Secure ShellFish. As a result, I added a very long, complex password to my Mac, which isn’t a lot of fun to type.

Unlocking Safari passwords with the Apple Watch.

With Mojave, my Watch could unlock my Mac, which was nice, but if I wanted to look up a password in Keychain or change some of the settings in System Preferences, for example, I had to type my painfully long password or copy it from 1Password, which wasn’t terrible, but still slowed me down. Now, with an Apple Watch running watchOS 6 and a Mac running Catalina, you can enter those passwords by double-pressing the side button on your Apple Watch, which helpfully displays what app on your Mac is making the request.

Other System Preferences Changes

Every year there are tweaks to System Preferences. I’ve already covered the new Apple ID and Family Sharing settings that are accessible from the top row of the System Preferences window, but there have been other changes and also a rearrangement of some sections.

Catalina’s Auto option allows light and dark mode to be tied to your Night Shift settings.

Mojave introduced dark mode to the Mac last year, allowing users to toggle between the two appearance options in the General section of System Preferences. With Catalina, there’s a third choice now. Instead of manually switching between light and dark modes, users can now pick the ‘Auto’ feature, which causes your Mac to switch from light to dark mode according to any Night Shift schedule you’ve set up in the Displays section.

As in the past, Catalina also introduces new desktop wallpapers. As you would expect, this year’s wallpapers feature Catalina Island in California. Apple has added one dynamic wallpaper that shifts from day to night over the course of the day, and nine static wallpapers, two of which are based on the dynamic wallpaper and seven of which are different views of the island.

Game Controller Support

Like iOS, iPadOS, and tvOS, Catalina supports Sony’s PS4 DualShock controller and Microsoft’s Xbox One S controller.

Earlier this summer, I covered iOS, iPadOS, tvOS, and macOS game controller support. The complete details can be found in that story. Despite the lack of availability of Apple Arcade during most of the Catalina beta, I was able to test connecting PS4 DualShock and Xbox One S controllers to my Mac and am happy to report that it’s as simple there as on Apple’s other platforms and will be familiar to anyone who has paired a Bluetooth device with a Mac before.

Sidecar and Window Management

Earlier this summer, I published an in-depth preview of Sidecar on MacStories, so I won’t repeat that here, but it’s worth reiterating that Sidecar is as much an iOS feature as it is a Mac feature. With it, not only can you extend your Mac’s screen with any iPad hardware you already own, but you can also work in Mac apps on the iPad, moving back and forth between those and iOS apps with a swipe. It’s the sort of functionality that is hard to grasp the potential of until you try it for yourself, and something I think I’ll regularly be using in the future.

Related to Sidecar is the new window management available from the green ‘stoplight button’ in the top left-hand corner of every Mac window. Not only can the button be used to move a window from your Mac to your iPad running Sidecar, but using it to enter Full Screen and Split View mode on the Mac is also far more intuitive now.

Full-screen and Split View controls are more discoverable in Catalina.

Before, clicking the green button put an app into Full Screen mode. To enter Split View, you had to hold down on the green button and drag the window to the left or right and then pick the second window for your Split View. The process is simpler now because hovering over the green button provides popover options to Enter Full Screen, Tile Window to Left of Screen, and Tile Window to Right of Screen. If you tile a window on one side or the other, you’re shown Mission Control on the other side so you can pick your second Split View app. I never could remember how to enter Split View, so I appreciate the drop-down menu a lot, although I don’t think it’s a feature I will use regularly.

Accessibility

The Voice Control functionality that Apple has added to the Mac and iOS this year is nothing short of remarkable. We were fortunate to have Steven Aquino cover all the details for us in a preview story on MacStories earlier this summer. In addition to explaining how Voice Control works and why it’s so much more powerful than in the past, Aquino spoke to Ian Mackay, who was featured by Apple in its video at WWDC that explained Voice Control. It’s a great story that provides a real-world sense of what the new features mean to those who use them.

Screen Time

As soon as I had Screen Time on iOS, I wanted it on the Mac too. Now I’m not so sure, and I think I get why the feature debuted on iOS before the Mac. The Mac poses some unique challenges compared to iOS that I don’t think are very well accounted for in its version of Screen Time.

Screen Time is a brand new System Preferences pane, not unlike on iOS where it’s a section of the Settings app. My biggest issue with Screen Time on the Mac is that it tracks open apps instead of time spent using apps. If you work with several apps open in different spaces throughout the day, they’ll record time whether you’re using them or not.

I barely touch some of the apps I have open every day, but they’re open for convenience or doing things in the background. Music is a prime example. I’ll set up a playlist, switch to my text editor, and start writing. In Screen Time, every minute Music is open is recorded even if I don’t switch to the app again until the playlist is finished. Screen Time even tracks the Finder, which you can’t quit. That’s accurate if what you’re tracking is your open apps, but it’s not the same thing as how much you’re using each app.

On iOS, Screen Time benefits from the fact that you can only have a couple of active apps at once. On the Mac, it’s not unusual for me to have a dozen apps open at once. Sure, I could close some of them, but if I’m at my desk for a while, it’s easier to keep them open and work in different Spaces to avoid distraction. I’ve almost always got a text editor, Safari, Music, Messages, Toggl, Tweetbot, GitHub Desktop, and Drafts open even if I’m not currently using them. If my Mac’s screen is unlocked for five hours, that means every one of those apps will log five hours of use, which isn’t very helpful if I was writing for three hours, messaging for 30 minutes, and away from my desk with my Mac awake for an hour and a half. I’d prefer if Screen Time on the Mac recorded only the time spent in the app that has the focus.

Paging through the graphs of notifications I receive has been one of the most useful additions to the Mac, allowing me to tweak what I let through and when I should consider turning on Do Not Disturb.

That said, there is still utility in having Screen Time built into Catalina. The app works as it does on iOS. Parents can set up limits from a Mac or iOS device, and because the feature works across OSes now, limits can be set for combined usage across all devices. Tracking is divided into App Usage, Notifications, and Pickups. I’ve already explained the limits of App Usage. Any apps you have open for extended periods of time without active use will still be recorded as usage time, which inflates usage statistics, but apps you open and close regularly will provide more meaningful data.

Notifications work just as they do on iOS, providing a total number of notifications and breaking them down by application. The terminology is more than a little strained, but ‘Pickups’ in the context of a Mac seem to be related to waking a Mac from sleep. Which app Screen Time registers as the one ‘picked up’ is still a bit of a mystery though. In my tests, Screen Time often registers the Finder as the Pickup app even when I wake my Mac and my text editor has the focus.

Pickups in the context of Mac apps is a confusing concept.

Screen Time also permits users to set usage restrictions such as Downtime, during which all apps are unavailable for set hours every day or according to a day-of-the-week schedule. Users can also establish App Limits for limiting the use of whole categories of apps or individual ones. Apps can be designated as ‘Always Allowed,’ which makes them available regardless of other Downtime or App Limit settings too. Finally, Content and Privacy handles web, app, media, and other restrictions that can be applied.

After having access to Screen Time on iOS for a year, I don’t use it that often, though I do find it helpful to occasionally check which apps I’m wasting the most time in and whether my screen time is trending up or down. I’ve found that less useful than I’d hoped in Catalina because it doesn’t do a good job of tracking real usage by app. I can get an idea of the aggregate time I spend on my Mac each day since it only records time when my screen is awake and active, but except for the apps I open and close during the day, the time I spend in the apps that are open all day remains a mystery. I’m glad Apple has added Screen Time to the Mac, complete with the tools it provides parents who want to set limits for their kids, but it needs to be refined further before it will be something I use every day.

What’s Missing?

Dashboard from Mac OS X Mountain Lion. (Source: 512pixels.net)

Every macOS update seems to have a feature or two that Apple removes from its operating system. This year is no different. The most notable removal is Dashboard, the special widget view that came with widgets like weather, calculator, and a tile puzzle game. For a time, third-party developers made widgets too. Easy Envelope and Deliveries’ widgets were two of my favorites. However, the writing was on the wall for Dashboard when Apple introduced Today widgets in the Mac’s Notification Center. With Catalina, Dashboard is gone, but don’t worry, your Sticky Notes will be imported into the Stickies app, which is still kicking.

The other no-shows in Catalina are a couple of features that were announced at WWDC but haven’t shipped yet. Apple said at its developer conference that iCloud Drive would add shared folders and the ability to pin iCloud Drive files so that they were always available locally on your Mac. Screen Time was intended to include the ability to enable communication limits on Messages, FaceTime, and Phone too. As with iOS and iPadOS 13, those features did not make it to the initial Catalina release but may reappear in a later point update.

Security features and preference panes aren’t the sexiest parts of most macOS updates, but they’re part of the system that users encounter regularly. The myriad of new permissions requested by Catalina risks alert fatigue that causes users to click through them indiscriminately. However, that risk is mitigated by the fact that once you’ve used your core set of apps for a few days, the number of alerts diminishes to a more manageable level. Moreover, regardless of the annoyance of the alerts, the new permissions required by Catalina make macOS more secure, which is hard to argue against.

The remaining system-level changes are a combination of reaching parity with iOS and iPadOS and integrations that make the Mac play better with other Apple devices. Screen Time and the consolidation of Apple ID information are the best examples of new Catalina features that catch macOS up with iOS and iPadOS. Sidecar and Apple Watch authentication are device integrations that not only enhance the Mac experience but extend the utility of the iPad and Watch in ways that tie all of those devices together more tightly.

Apps

Nowhere is Apple’s work to align the user experience of the Mac, iPadOS, and iOS more apparent than in the changes made to Catalina’s built-in apps. Chief among those changes is the breakup of iTunes into parts by media type. As profound as splitting up iTunes after 18 years is though, it shouldn’t overshadow the extensive changes made across a wide swath of Catalina’s built-in apps. Those other changes are just as consequential both for their depth of new features, which will satisfy the needs of many users, and closer ties to their iOS and iPadOS counterparts. First, however, it’s time to pour one out for iTunes, which has served Mac users since before the iPod was even introduced.

The Breakup of iTunes

The long-anticipated breakup of iTunes is finally upon us. Music, TV shows, movies, podcasts, and audiobooks have all been moved to separate apps. After years of complaints about iTunes feature creep and bloat, most people seem to have accepted that it was time to break up iTunes, but that doesn’t mean everyone is happy with the new Music app. The de-emphasis of purchasing music, removal of features, and UI changes have all been points of criticism during the beta period.

Personally, I love the new Music app but understand why the changes rub some users the wrong way. iTunes had an 18-year run on the Mac. A lot has changed in the way digital music is enjoyed in that time, but a lot of habits have been formed too, which makes the transition difficult.

Still, even though you won’t find an app called iTunes on your Mac anymore, the lion’s share of its functionality remains intact in one place or another. What’s changed is Apple’s focus, which is most evident in Music’s prioritization of streaming over purchasing music. Purchasing music on the iTunes Store is still possible, but it’s been deemphasized. Instead, Apple Music is front and center. Combined with separate apps handling podcasts, TV shows, movies, and audiobooks, there’s no mistaking that Music’s purpose is to serve first and foremost as a player for Apple Music.

The one-two punch of breaking up iTunes and deemphasizing purchased music is a lot for users to absorb and Apple to get right in one release, but on balance, I’m happy with the changes. Of course, there’s room for improvement and a few rough edges, but compared to using iTunes, Music and the other media apps Apple has introduced or updated are a delight.

Music

iTunes started life as a music player in January 2001 before there was an iPod or iTunes Store for purchasing music. The Music app is a return to those roots but reimagined for Apple’s music streaming service. Purchased music is still available, and you can even rip, mix, and burn CDs for when you need to drop a funk bomb, but that type of functionality has been tucked away out of sight in favor of streaming.

I spend a lot of my time working on a Mac while listening to music. However, until the Catalina beta, I found myself streaming music from an iOS device to the HomePod in my office more and more often. iTunes was too bloated and buggy. The app was slow to start, and when I clicked ‘Play’ on an album or playlist, it usually started by skipping the first song and going straight to the second. It was easier to use AirPlay from my iPhone instead.

That has changed with the new Music app, which is hands down the app I’ve used and enjoyed the most during the Catalina beta period. I’ve had far fewer problems than I ever had with iTunes. Music launches and loads the For You and Browse tabs faster than iTunes ever did, and playback is more reliable, though not perfect.

Still, it has taken a while to get used to Music. The layout of iTunes’ controls is deeply ingrained in my muscle memory that I still find myself looking in the wrong places for certain things. Over time though, I’ve mostly adjusted, and now I couldn’t imagine going back to iTunes.

Design

iTunes running in Mojave.

Music running in Catalina.

Navigation in Music has been simplified by moving everything to the left-hand sidebar. In iTunes, top-level navigation was laid out horizontally near the top of the app’s window. This meant that if you were in For You, Browse, or Radio, you didn’t have access to the albums, artists, genres, playlists, and other categories of music in your Library. Now, with everything in the sidebar, it’s possible to jump straight from playing an album in For You to a playlist you’ve made or saved in your Library, for example.

Moving navigational elements to the left sidebar frees up vertical space to display more music, which is further aided by a new responsive design. Before, the artwork in iTunes’ For You, Browse, and Radio tabs was static. Now, playlist, album, and radio station graphics are scaled dynamically as the app’s window is resized. As a result, Music is much more comfortable to use in a smaller window. That’s an excellent update for the many Mac users who use Music on a small laptop screen.

My testing over the summer bore out the advantage of the new dynamic artwork. Whereas I always used iTunes in a window that filled my screen, Music has felt comfortable in a smaller window on my 13-inch MacBook Pro’s display, allowing me to use the rest of my screen for other apps.

Another nice touch is that color has returned to Music’s sidebar. The monochrome icons in iTunes’ sidebar made it difficult to distinguish between different music categories. In contrast, the Apple Music tabs in the sidebar feature bright shades of red, orange, and pink, while the Library tabs range from bright blue to purple. Playlists remain monochrome, which is a shame because I’d like to see a better differentiation between Smart Playlists and others.

iTunes’ playback controls (top) and Music’s playback controls (bottom).

It’s worth noting that the playback controls and other information at the top of the window have been rearranged too. Curiously, the forward navigational button has been eliminated from Music entirely, making backtracking through your music browsing the only option. It’s a perplexing change that I don’t like, even though I’m admittedly more likely to want to back up while browsing than skip forward again. Also, if you click the ‘Up Next’ button you can access your playback history for the songs you previously played.

iTunes’ Upcoming and Lyrics popovers have been replaced with slide-in panels.

Artwork, track, album, and the three-dot menu button have moved to the left side of the top of Music’s window, playback controls are now in the center, and volume and AirPlay controls are on the right side. The Upcoming, History, and Lyrics popover window from iTunes has been replaced with a panel that slides in from the right edge of Music’s window. Also, Lyrics has a separate button in Music that triggers the same slide-in panel, making the feature more discoverable. Unfortunately, Music on the Mac doesn’t have the same time-synced lyrics found in iOS and iPadOS 13 and tvOS 13.

Album and playlist pages have changed too. A big play button no longer appears when you hover over an album or playlist’s artwork. Instead, there are more conspicuous Play and Shuffle buttons directly beneath the title and artist information.

Music’s album and playlist pages have been updated too.

Editorial content has moved too. In iTunes, editorial content was excerpted beneath the album art along the left side of the window. Now, editorial content appears immediately beneath the new Play and Shuffle buttons, which is closer, though not quite identical to how editorial content is treated in the iOS version of the app. Although the text is smaller, it’s more directly in users’ line of sight, which makes it more noticeable, and it can be expanded with a click of the ‘More’ link.

Features

As I mentioned at the top, the core functionality of iTunes has migrated to Music and elsewhere in Catalina. Some features have, however, been eliminated entirely.

The most notable removal is probably column browser, a feature that has been in iTunes for what seems like forever. From Song view, column browser allowed you to drill down from a list of every song in your iTunes Library by Genre, Artist, Album, Composers, and Groupings. For anyone who lived in Song view, column browser was a fast way to get to particular songs or albums.

Music’s search functionality has been extended with Recent, Recently Viewed, and Trending sections.

I’ll admit that I haven’t used column browser in years and won’t miss it. I find most of the music I want to play by browsing the For You and Browse tabs in Music. If I’m looking for a specific artist, album, or song, I use search, which has been enhanced in Music with Recent, Recently Viewed, and Trending sections that appear when you first click into the Search field in the sidebar. I rarely scroll through my Library anymore, which I suppose is a byproduct of having fully transitioned to streaming my music from Apple Music.

That said, I understand how hard it would be to adjust to Music if column browser was the primary way you browsed your music collection. The functionality hasn’t been completely eliminated though. In its place, there’s a new View menu item called Show Filter Field, which can be used much the same way as the column browser but uses substantially less space. Type a term in any of the Library’s categories, and the Filter Field will narrow the results to the text you type. The Filter Field doesn’t let you browse exactly the same way the column browser did, but I’ve found it an effective way to get to a particular artist, album, or song quickly, which was also the point of the column browser.

Using Show Filter Field to see just how many versions of REM’s Country Feedback I’ve got.

Although much of the legacy functionality of iTunes has been preserved in Music, the elimination of Column Browser reflects a general shift away from a personally-curated library of music. Music still includes a Library that has all the music you’ve purchased, but your Library is listed after Apple Music’s For You, Browse, and Radio tabs in the sidebar.

In perhaps the clearest sign that the days of purchasing music from Apple are numbered, the iTunes Store tab has been hidden by default. The Store is still available in the General section of Preferences alongside ‘Star ratings’ and ‘Songs list checkboxes,’ two other legacy iTunes features. Store results can still be accessed in search results, but Apple Music results are the default here too.

More than anything, I’m surprised more wasn’t stripped from iTunes than column browser. You can still rip music from CDs and burn owned music to CDs. Genius playlists can still be created, although Genius Mixes seem to be gone for good. Music supports AppleScript too, and even the Visualizer is still around, although it’s been moved to the Windows menu.

Devices connected to your Mac appear in Music’s sidebar.

iPod and iOS device syncing over a cable has been removed from Music entirely and moved to the Finder. iPods and iOS devices now show up in the Locations section of the Finder’s sidebar. Clicking on a connected device reveals controls very similar to what used to be displayed inside iTunes. From here, you can manage sync settings, media loaded on devices, and backups as well as update and restore devices

Syncing via the Finder.

To smooth the transition and make the move to the Finder discoverable, iOS devices and iPods that have been plugged in still show up in Music between your Library and Playlists. If you click on a device, Music displays the songs stored on it along with a few options. In the upper right-hand corner of the window is a Sync Settings button that opens the Finder with the device highlighted in the Locations section of the sidebar.

At the bottom of Music’s device window are controls for auto-filling a connected device with music from your smart playlists and a subset of your other playlists. The Settings button lets you pick whether songs are replaced when autofilling a device, whether they are chosen randomly and whether higher-rated items are preferred. You can also set a storage limit for auto-filled music.

The other feature of iTunes that has been moved elsewhere is Home Sharing, which has been centralized as part of the Sharing pane in System Preferences. Home Sharing allows a Mac in your household to act as a server for media you own. Any device on the same local network can download music, movies, and TV shows to play. Home Sharing can also be set up to share photos with an Apple TV. In iTunes, this feature resided in the Sharing tab of the app’s Preferences.

I’ve enjoyed the addition of a dedicated Music app on the Mac. As someone who primarily streams songs from Apple Music, the new app is a meaningful update from iTunes. It loads faster, is more responsive, and benefits from the clarity that results from focusing on streaming instead of purchased music and other media. I also prefer the UI to iTunes’ because it works better in a smaller window than iTunes did. Music will be harder to get used to for anyone who is accustomed to browsing a large library of owned and/or downloaded music, but other than column browser, so little has been removed from iTunes that I expect with time, even library-oriented users will find a way to make Music work for them.

Podcasts

Podcasts breaks out iTunes’ podcast functionality into an app that closely follows the look and feel of the Music app. What’s most impressive to me about Podcasts is that it’s built with Catalyst, which means it’s built using iOS and iPadOS’ UIKit, whereas Music is a traditional Mac AppKit app. Regardless of whether you like the design direction Apple has taken with its latest Mac apps, the similarities between Music and Podcasts demonstrate that a consistent look and feel between apps made with both technologies can be achieved.

Like Music, Podcasts’ window includes a left sidebar for selecting content sources, the main content view, and a slide-in panel for displaying additional details about selected shows. The left sidebar is divided into three sections: Apple Podcasts, Library, and Stations.

The Apple Podcasts section of the sidebar includes Listen Now, Browse, and Top Charts sections for discovering the latest episodes of shows to which you subscribe as well as new shows. In addition to the latest episodes of shows you subscribe to, Listen Now generates a list of suggested shows based on your subscription list and displays the last couple episodes you played. Listen Now serves as a good home base where you’re likely to find something you haven’t listened to yet or find something new that is similar to other shows you enjoy.

Podcast discovery has taken a step backward in Catalina.

In iTunes, the information density was greater, and the top podcasts chart by genre included 200 instead of 20 entries each.

The Browse and Top Charts sections are less useful. There is far less surfaced in these sections than was available in iTunes. For example, iTunes included top charts for each podcast genre that displayed 200 podcasts, while the genre categories in Podcasts are limited to displaying the top 20 shows in each category.

Some podcasts are now transcribed, making them text-searchable.

Of course, there are other collections of shows like New and Noteworthy and curated collections, but the overall lack of depth for a medium that rivals apps in the sheer volume of content is disappointing and at odds with what others in the industry are trying to achieve. Without a better system for surfacing shows, the Podcasts app is unlikely to aid discovery of anything but the largest, most popular shows. One step Apple is taking though is transcribing certain podcast episodes so you can find them via search, but for now, the feature appears to be limited to a relatively small number of popular shows. As before, a new show can be added if you have its RSS feed or by using search.

Podcasts’ Recently Updated section of the Library.

The shows you subscribe to live in the Library section of Podcasts. Here you’ll find any recently updated shows in reverse chronological order by the date they were last updated, a section with all the shows to which you subscribe, another with all available episodes, and finally, just the downloaded episodes. The last section of the sidebar is Stations, which are essentially playlists of shows you create manually and can adjust with a handful of settings. Show notes are listed under the info button in the toolbar, and next to that is a button for viewing chapter information, both of which slide in from the right side in a panel.

Show notes and chapter markers can be found in a slide-in panel by clicking on the buttons in the top right-hand corner of Podcasts’ window.

Podcasts doesn’t have a way to skip silences, or equalize audio like some podcast players, but it does sync its playback position with the iOS version of the app and offers controls for speeding up or slowing down playback. The app also has the advantage of being a native Mac app in a category where few iOS and iPadOS apps have been ported to the Mac. I rarely listen to podcasts on my Mac, so I don’t plan to use Podcasts much going forward, but in my testing, it works as expected and gets the job done, even though it doesn’t have some of the more advanced features that third-party iOS and iPadOS apps have.

TV

The TV app experience on the Mac is similar to iOS and Apple TV except in one important way: the content available. Here’s the thing, on the Mac (as well as smart TVs and streaming sticks with TV app integration) content is limited to channels and purchased content.

When it was first launched on iOS, the TV app integrated with third-party apps. Those apps populated Apple’s TV app with content, but it also meant you were kicked out to another app whenever you wanted to watch something. That experience wasn’t great, so Apple introduced channels as part of the TV app in March. Channels allow you to sign up for and watch content directly in the TV app without being sent to another app.

However, there is still a gap between what you can get through Apple channels and third-party apps. On iOS and tvOS, the gap is less apparent because both still support third-party app integrations too. Those apps aren’t available on the Mac though, which means that if you have lots of apps tied to the TV app on iOS and tvOS (I have 27), the Mac experience may feel a little thin. Still, I look forward to channels taking over across all of Apple’s devices because the experience of watching shows directly in the TV app is far superior to dealing with multiple apps.

On iPadOS, iOS, and tvOS, you can connect the TV app to third-party apps which means more viewing options.

Content aside, the experience of using the TV app on a Mac is closest to what you see on the Apple TV minus content from third-party apps. The Watch Now tab has an Up Next section for series you’re in the process of watching and newly-purchased content. Watch Now also suggests new shows and movies based on what’s popular and your past streaming and purchasing habits. There is access to channels you’re not yet subscribed to as well as curated collections.

The Movies, TV Shows, and Kids sections are essentially identical to those sections on the Apple TV with collections of themed movies and TV shows, spotlighted content, sales, integrations with channels, and genre-based browsing. The one notable casualty of the channel-only content available on the Mac is sports, which doesn’t have a section in the Catalina TV app, presumably because there is too little channel content to warrant it yet.

Playback works about as you’d expect. There’s a play/pause button, and you can skip ahead and back 15 seconds at a time. You can also AirPlay audio to compatible devices like a HomePod or Apple TV. There are subtitle and volume controls too.

TV inherits some concepts from iTunes too. While you cannot download streaming video from channels like you can on iOS, you can download iTunes movies and TV shows you own from your Library. The default Library view is a grid of show and movie art a lot like the rest of the TV app, but if you’d prefer, you can switch to a list view reminiscent of the iTunes Song view.

From here, you can sort by any of the available columns in List view and add checkboxes to items from Preferences → General. The Library section of TV also includes a left-hand sidebar to browse purchased content by type, recency of purchase, and genre. This is where you’ll find any standard and smart playlists of video content that you’ve created as well as any devices you’ve plugged in.

TV is a simple app, which is remarkably refreshing coming from iTunes. It wasn’t that playing TV Shows and Movies was a complex process in iTunes, but because the app did so much else, it felt crowded and as though you were opening a spreadsheet to add 2 + 2.

TV’s easy navigation and responsiveness is precisely why it was time to break up iTunes. Even if you don’t watch a lot of video on your Mac, the familiar interface and experience across it, iOS, iPadOS, and tvOS are a welcome change for the better that I expect will encourage more people to use their Macs to watch their favorite TV shows and movies than in the past.

Books

Apart from the incorporation of audiobooks, the Books app has changed very little in Catalina.

The updates to the Books app aren’t anything to get excited about, which is a shame. Books got a big update with iOS 12. That update included a ‘Reading Now’ section, similar to the ‘Listen Now’ section of the Podcasts app, which brings together what you’re currently reading, what you want to read, book suggestions, new and trending books, and reading goals. None of that has made its way to the Mac.

That’s not to say Books hasn’t changed though. The app has been updated with minor updates to its UI and functionality to accommodate the addition of audiobooks from iTunes. The changes are an improvement, but don’t go far enough.

Audiobooks have been added to the Books app as a tiny player tucked in the corner of the window that can’t be resized or separated from the main Books UI.

Books’ toolbar has been simplified. The segmented control at the top of Books’ window has been reduced to three buttons: Library, Bookstore, and Audiobook Store. They aren’t combined on iOS either, but I bet the store browsing experience would be better if written and audio versions of books were combined into one storefront instead of two.

The Bookstore.

Books has a new left sidebar similar to the ones used in apps like Music and Podcasts that differs depending on whether you’re in the Library or one of the stores. From the Library view, the first section of the sidebar titled ‘Library’ is broken into All Books, Books, Audiobooks, PDFs, Authors, and Categories.

None of the Library sections contain all of your books unless you’ve downloaded them all locally from the Purchased link in one of the app’s storefronts.

The All Books and Books sections need to be rethought. When I opened All Books, I was confused to see only the books downloaded on my Mac. In contrast, Books included a longer list of books, but still not everything. If you want to see only the books you’ve previously purchased that are available on your Mac or for download from one of Apple’s stores, you need to click on the ‘Purchased’ link in one of the two storefronts.

The use of stacks in the Library is confusing too. Stacks often appear with an unfamiliar book cover on top. That’s because those stacks are series. As best I can tell, the book displayed on the top of a stack is either the book you own, if you’ve downloaded it, or the next book in the series, except when there’s a free book available in the series, in which case the free book is shown.

Why Golden Son is listed as ‘Purchased’ when I click on the Red Rising stack of books is a mystery to me since I haven’t bought it.

The confusion is compounded when you click on a stack. The other books in the grid slide down, and you’re offered two versions of the stack: ‘Purchased’ and ‘All in Series,’ which are accessed by buttons. The trouble is, the Purchased button doesn’t just show what you’ve purchased, it also shows the next unpurchased book in the series. Also, any books in the series that you’ve already downloaded are displayed in Purchased, but if the book is still in iCloud, it doesn’t appear. Fortunately, the ‘All in Series’ button does as expected and shows everything regardless of whether it’s been purchased or downloaded.

The only meaningful change to the functionality of Books is that the app now includes a small audio player for audiobooks that appears at the bottom of the left sidebar. There are controls for play/pause, skipping forward and back, AirPlay, and moving among a book’s chapters. An ellipsis button reveals further controls to skip forward and back by one chapter, change playback speed, set a sleep timer, share a link to the book, and reveal the book in the store.

The player gets the job done, but I’d like to see something that can be used apart from the app’s book browsing UI. If you’re listening to audiobooks while doing other things on your Mac, having a dedicated player window that could be pinned to float above other windows would be preferable to having to navigate back to the Books app. With all the other work that went into separating content into individual apps, I hope that Apple takes a closer look at Books soon and brings it closer to the vastly better experience available on iOS and iPadOS.

Dismantling iTunes was going to be painful no matter when Apple did it. Although it felt like something that should have been completed before now, separating each type of media in the context of the large number of legacy devices still in use isn’t easy. Not only did it mean building new apps, but also rearchitecting parts of the operating system.

The dismemberment began with the removal of iOS apps from iTunes in 2017. With all of the company’s new media services coming online this fall, Catalina is a natural time to complete the separation. Despite a few rough edges, the new system works well. I’m particularly fond of Music, which has been less buggy than iTunes was. Music also benefits from its focus on Apple Music. Without purchased music and other media types occupying the same space, Music is substantially easier to navigate and use than iTunes was.

I rarely watch TV and movies or listen to podcasts on my Mac, so I don’t expect to get much use of those apps myself, but both apps work well if you do. I’m just glad video and podcasts are no longer weighing down the music experience on my Mac.

Books is a different story altogether. While the iOS version was significantly improved in iOS 12, the Mac version suffers from having new features bolted onto the app’s out-of-date UI to address audiobooks, and it’s not a good look.

I don’t read books on my Mac much, and I don’t anticipate listening to audiobooks much either, but I do find it handy to open a reference book on my Mac now and then, and I expect there are plenty of users who do use the app regularly. In a year with updates to so many system apps, kicking Books down the road is understandable, but I hope it’s at the top of the list for a refresh soon.

Productivity Apps

Most of Apple’s core productivity apps – Reminders, Notes, Mail, and Safari – have been updated to one degree or another. No update pleases me more than the update to Reminders, which has graduated from basic starter app to one that I expect can meet the work and personal needs of most people. It’s an update that puts it right alongside Notes in terms of depth of features and utility.

Although the updates to Notes, Mail, and Safari are less pronounced, they’re no less useful. Each app has received a handful of new features and refinements that don’t radically change the way they work but eliminate friction and allow users to tailor them to their individual needs. Each is a solid update, but taken together they represent a meaningful response to the needs of users. My greatest hope for future updates at this point is for further integrations among these and Apple’s other system apps, dynamically linking the data we collect in our lives each day to the tools we use to store, manage, and interact with it.

Reminders

The redesign of Reminders is transformative. Prior to Catalina, Reminders had a couple of key things going for it, and a lot holding it back. I started using Reminders, at least indirectly, for two reasons. First, I got a HomePod and especially in the early days, adding tasks using its built-in integration with Reminders worked better than adding tasks to other task managers.

The second point leads from the first. Third-party developers can build on top of Reminders’ database to extend its functionality and pull tasks created in it into their own apps. For example, Things can be tied to a specific list in Reminders and will pull the tasks in that list into its Inbox. GoodTask, another task manager (and sponsor of this review), and Grocery, a grocery list manager, take a different approach in extending Reminders’ functionality by building on top of Apple’s Reminders database.

Those two advantages outweighed the downsides of Reminders, which were significant. Before Catalina, Reminders hadn’t received a meaningful update in over five years. The app lacked important functionality like the ability to create subtasks and add URLs and images as attachments. Used by itself, Reminders was fine for quick, relatively short lists of tasks, but it didn’t scale well to multiple projects and the reference materials you might need for a task. As a result, although I’ve relied on Reminders for a couple of years now, I didn’t use the Reminders app itself.

Catalina changes that significantly. Although you won’t find all of the advanced features available in the apps I’ve already mentioned or apps like OmniFocus and Todoist, what’s been added should be enough for many more people to make Reminders their only task manager, which is what I’ve been doing since June.

One note of caution is in order, however, because the update changes the Reminders file format. Catalina will warn you before upgrading your reminders, but if you do, you won’t be able to see them or share lists with anyone unless your iOS and iPadOS devices and those of the people you share lists with are on iOS 13.

As in Mojave, Catalina’s Reminders window is divided into a navigational sidebar on the left and a content view on the right. The first major design change you’ll notice though is that right below the search field are four rectangular buttons: Today, Scheduled, All, and Flagged. These buttons are effectively smart filters for your tasks that cut across all of the lists of tasks that follow them.

Clicking on ‘Today’ reveals a view in the main window with just those tasks that are due today. ‘Scheduled’ lists all tasks with a due date in chronological order. ‘All,’ as you’d expect, includes every task in Reminders organized by the lists you’ve set up in the sidebar. Finally, ‘Flagged’ is a list of just those tasks for which you’ve enabled a flag, which can be a useful way to find critical tasks that you can’t afford to lose among the rest of your to-dos.

I’ve enjoyed using Reminders’ built-in task filters and have spent the most time in Today and Scheduled as a way to focus on current tasks and plan ahead a week or so at a time. It’s worth noting here that when you’re working in one of Apple’s smart filter views, and you add a new task, it will default to the list designated in the app’s preferences as your Default List, though you can always drag a task into another list if you’d like. Of course, Apple’s four built-in filters have made me long for the ability to create my own, which I hope the company adds in a future update, but for now, the four pre-defined filters have met most of my needs.

There’s actually a fifth button that comes and goes from Reminders that spans the full width of the two-by-two grid of other buttons. The fifth button is reserved for Siri Suggestions. If Siri finds information in other apps like Messages that looks like a task, it will suggest you add it to one of your task lists and even suggest a time and date for tasks where that sort of information is included in an app.

Adding dates to a task.

Each of your task lists in the sidebar is more customizable than ever before too. Lists can be organized into Groups, which are essentially folders of lists. When I first tested Groups on the Mac, I was unable to create one, which seemed to be because I hadn’t created any on iOS. Whether the timing was a coincidence or not, after I set up my first Group on iOS, I could do so on the Mac too. Lists can also be decorated with one of 60 icons and 12 colors.

Reminders suggests dates and locations as you type a task.

Tasks themselves have gotten a significant update too. Prior to Catalina, tasks could have a due date and time that could repeat, be triggered at a location, and include a priority and note. However, now, those elements of a task can be added in line, and Reminders even recognizes dates, times, and locations as you type offering one-click suggestions.

One of my favorite small changes in Catalina is to due dates, which no longer need to have an associated time. Dates and times have been separated so tasks can be set for a date without an associated time. If you’d like to be reminded of your all-day tasks, there’s a checkbox in Reminders’ preferences that will do that and let you pick the time of day for the reminder.

Reminders can also be triggered when you’re communicating with someone in Messages. Even though Federico and I use Messages to coordinate projects often, this isn’t a feature I expect to use a lot. Tasks are easily lost in Messages conversations, especially if they aren’t something that needs to be addressed immediately. For everything else, I’ve found that a shared note is a better solution. Still, this is a nice option to have and one I may use now and then as I get more used to it being available as an option.

A lot more detail can be added to each task in Reminders.

Tasks can also include URLs and image attachments. Adding a link to a webpage or App Store app to a task for reference purposes is a great addition to Reminders, but it’s the ability to link to Mail messages that has been a game-changer. Adding a link to an email is as simple as dragging the message into Reminders, where the subject of the message becomes the title of the task, and a link back to the original message is added to the task’s URL field. It’s a fantastic way to get back to reference material in Mail even if I’ve archived a message. I only wish that the feature also worked with Notes. Also, I don’t attach images to tasks often and would prefer being able to attach any file type to a task instead.

One difference between the iPadOS/iOS and Mac versions of Reminders, which I hope is simply an oversight, is that the Mac version of Reminders cannot display large thumbnails of links or images. Instead, Mac users are limited to the small thumbnail views, which is a shame given the additional screen space available on the Mac.

I’ve been using Reminders all summer long on the iOS and iPadOS 13 and Catalina betas, and it’s met my needs better than I expected. One of its strengths is that despite the addition of several new features, Reminders remains strikingly simple to use and navigate, which has minimized the amount of time I’ve spent fiddling with tasks instead of completing them. Still, I expect that I will probably move back to a third-party task manager later this fall if for no other reason than to try some of the new, advanced features developers are working on, especially those that take advantage of the new opportunities created by iPadOS.

Notes

Notes is an app I’ve turned to more and more often over the past couple of years. I expect this year to be no different. There are only a handful of new features in the app, but they are the kind of high-impact changes that have already resulted in my using Notes for more.

Probably my favorite but least visible change is that search now indexes text inside images attached to notes. With over 500 notes, random snapshots of business cards, screenshots of receipts, and photos of any document are easy to lose. However, if, for example, I remember my flight is on United, a quick search for that term will return a note even if it’s nothing more than a screenshot of my travel details, which wasn’t possible before. This feature also came in handy over the summer when I was watching WWDC videos and snapping photos of slides containing details I wanted to include in this review.

Notes recognizes objects and the text in images.

Notes recognizes more than just text in images, though – it also recognizes objects. The screenshot above is a simple example of a snapshot I took of a coffee mug with my iPhone. I saved it as a new note without any accompanying text, but when I searched for ‘cup,’ Notes knew to return the picture of my coffee mug. I’m not sure yet how handy this feature will be, but having more ways to find one note among hundreds is always an advantage.

Notes has added shared folders.

A close second in utility to searching text in images is shared folders. Shared notes have become an integral part of my day-to-day workflow at MacStories. Federico and I try to coordinate ongoing projects that we want each other’s input on in a single note, but we invariably end up with multiple shared notes. I also use shared notes for travel plans and other information that I share with my family.

As handy as shared notes can be, they can get lost among other notes and folders that contain lots of notes. With shared folders, I have set up a folder for each person I share notes with, as well as a couple project-specific shared folders. Ideally, Notes would support tags and smart folders, so a note would be visible in multiple folders according to who it’s shared with and its contents, but in most cases, I can get by with person and project-specific shared folders.

The share button in Notes’ toolbar provides options for sharing just the selected note or its folder.

When you invite someone to share a note or folder, you can now grant read-only privileges at the time you set up sharing. You can also switch someone to read-only mode after the fact by clicking the person icon in the toolbar next to a note or folder or selecting View Participants from the File menu.

Notes has also added a new gallery view that displays thumbnails of your notes, which is accessed from the View menu, the keyboard shortcut ⌘2, or the gallery button in the toolbar. The view works best for small collections of notes or ones with images where the thumbnails make them stand out from each other. However, even text-only notes are surprisingly readable as thumbnails, allowing you to scan multiple notes quickly to find the one you want.

There are several new checklist options in Notes too. First, an entire series of items can be checked off or unchecked with a ⌘+click of one of the items or from the right-click menu. Second, checklist items can also be reordered by dragging and dropping them or using ⌃⌘↑ or ⌃⌘↓. Finally, checked off items can be moved to the bottom of a checklist automatically from the Format menu.

There are a few other noteworthy changes to Notes too. There’s a new header style in Notes this year called ‘Subheading,’ which is like a Heading but smaller. Also, you can now force Notes to use a light or dark background regardless of your system-level dark mode settings. Sort options have been removed from Preferences and moved to the View menu where notes can be sorted the same ways as before, but from newest to oldest and oldest to newest, and if you’re sorting by title from A to Z and from Z to A. Finally, you can also hide the note count that appears in the sidebar if you’d prefer.

Notes was already a fairly mature system app, and each of its Catalina updates falls into the category of impactful refinements instead of leaps forward. However, that’s fine because Notes didn’t need to make a major leap forward. Instead, it’s good to see Apple revisiting the app again this year and enhancing it further.

Mail

Mail now includes handy unsubscribe links in the header of email messages.

Unsubscribe links are often buried in tiny print at the bottom of an email message, which requires scrolling and makes them hard to find. I love that Mail now surfaces the Unsubscribe link at the top of the message where it’s easy to click. It’s a small touch, but the kind of thing where the saved time and aggravation avoided adds up over time, especially if you dive into your mailbox to unsubscribe to a bunch of mailing lists at once.

One of my favorite features of the Sanebox web service is the ability to bar messages from certain senders from my inbox. Apple has added a similar feature to Mail that lets you block certain senders, sending their messages directly to the Trash. I expect to use this feature a lot for misdirected messages and mailing lists that don’t honor my unsubscribe requests. Between VIPs whose messages can be viewed in a special Smart Folder and blocked senders, Mail now has both ends of the spectrum covered well.

Another excellent quality-of-life feature added to Mail with Catalina is the ability to mute message threads, so you no longer receive response notifications. Handy for group emails with lots of back and forth about which you don’t want to be notified, the feature can be enabled by going to the Message menu and selecting Mute, using the keyboard shortcut ⌃⇧M, or clicking the mute button in Mail’s toolbar. A bell icon with a line through it appears next to any muted threads in Mail.

Mail can now highlight conversations to make them stand out from other messages in your inbox.

Mail has added new view options too. Perhaps my favorite is the ability to highlight conversations in the message preview column. It’s a quick way to visually identify messages where you’ve received a response and may need to follow up further. You can also show and hide additional information in the preview column like message size, contact photos, and more as well as display message previews at the bottom of the window instead of to the side. I prefer Mail’s default settings, but it’s nice to have more options for users to make Mail suit the way they work better.

Safari

Siri Suggestions in Safari pull link suggestions from apps, other devices, your search history, and other sources.

The changes to Safari in Catalina are relatively minor compared to iOS and iPadOS. Still, there are a handful of helpful new features. You’ll notice the first as soon as you open a new tab. Beneath any Favorites you’ve saved and your frequently visited sites are Siri Suggestions, which are a collection of links gathered from multiple sources. I’ve seen links pulled from my Reading List, Bookmarks, tabs that are open on other devices, my search history, and the Messages app. I haven’t used the Siri Suggestions a lot, but especially with the links pulled from my Reading List and Messages, they’ve served as a reminder of things I want to read, even if I don’t end up reading them that moment on my Mac.

There are a few other conveniences as well. When a video is playing in Safari, you can click and hold on the audio icon in the page’s tab, which will give you the option to enter Picture in Picture mode. I’m not sure entering PiP mode this way is any easier than using the icon next to the playback controls for a video, but it’s nice to have another option.

As you type a URL or search into Safari’s address bar, in addition to suggesting search engine terms and sites from your bookmarks and history, the app now suggests any matching tabs you have open on your Mac or other devices. Also, Safari does more to encourage good password habits by warning you if you pick a weak password.

Apple has closed the Safari Extension Gallery too. Extensions are still available, but only through the Mac App Store. Behind the scenes, this means that the creators of Safari extensions need to have an Apple developer account, use AppKit to build their extensions, and deal with the Mac App Store as a distribution channel. The practical effect is that there are likely to be far fewer extensions available for Safari than in the past. The lack of options going forward will be a shame. However, I’m not surprised Apple wants extensions to be subject to App Review. I stopped using all but a couple of trusted extensions long ago because of the security risk they can pose and the drag many are on Safari’s performance.

Photos

Photos has seen a lot of change in recent years as Apple has seemingly struggled to find a better way of displaying large photo collections. This year, the company has redesigned the Photos tab of the app on the Mac and iOS, aided by machine learning, with impressive results. Not only does Photos look better than ever, but it’s easier than ever to move between the iOS and Mac versions of the app.

The lion’s share of the Catalina changes to Photos are found in its redesigned Photos tab. Photos shares the general window design that has become popular in Apple’s media apps and other system apps with a lefthand sidebar and a content viewing area that dominates most of the rest of the window. In Catalina, Photos’ sidebar is exactly the same as it was in Mojave. What has changed is the way photos are presented in the Photos tab.

The Photos tab is at the top of the Library section of the sidebar. It’s the tab that opens by default when you first launch the app, and for good reason; it’s the main view into all of your photos. At the same time, the Photos tab has been the one that Apple has struggled to find an effective way to present, especially for users with large photo collections.

This year though, Apple has nailed it. The difference is striking from the first moment you open Photos. In Mojave, the Photos tab opened into what was effectively an ‘all photos’ view that included every image whether it was a duplicate, strikingly similar, or a screenshot, for example. Great shots that you’d like to revisit and share were easily lost among the junk. Be warned though, the first time you launch Photos, the process of analyzing your photos to generate the app’s beautiful layouts takes time. I’ve got a library of 45,000 photos, and it took days to analyze my library the first time. I don’t know if it was a beta bug or not, but after a couple of days, I stopped checking on the progress, and it finished.

Catalina brings machine learning to bear on your photo library to present you with only your best shots. The results aren’t perfect, but they are far better than previous efforts. By way of example, check out the screenshots below that capture a small portion of my photo library from an August day I spent in Chicago. The screenshot of Photos from Mojave shows small versions of each photo in chronological order in the aspect ratios they were taken.

In contrast, Photos running on Catalina has created a much more compelling collage of my best photos, zooming in and framing the subjects of some of them using machine learning. Photos in Catalina has also reserved the most space for a short movie of an L train crossing the Chicago River, which auto-plays without sound, and hid three screenshots I took in the midst of scenes of the city.

The Photos tab in Mojave (left) and Catalina (right).

The view in the Catalina screenshot above is from the Days section of the Photos tab. Images can be browsed by Months and Years sections too. To provide a sense of place, moving from one section to another animates to the same spot in the newly-opened section.

For example, if I’m viewing Thanksgiving Day 2017 and click the Months section along the top of Photos’ window, I’ll be taken to a view of November 2017. Clicking the Years section takes me to 2017. Clicking back into Months or Days brings me right back to the same place I was previously viewing. Also, no matter how far back you are in your photo library, you can always click on the button for the section you’re viewing to be taken to the current date.

The Years section is a simple grid of square thumbnails with one photo representing the entire collection for that year. The thumbnail chosen feels randomly selected, but because it’s so hard to capture an entire year in one photo, it’s hard to be sure. Unfortunately, there’s no way that I can tell to switch the cover photo for a year.

Months view.

Months are displayed as rectangular collages of several photos per month that do a much better job of providing a sense for what happened in that time frame than Mojave did. The collages aren’t as big as they are in the Days section, but the layout, along with location information, serves as an excellent way to browse within a particular year.

The biggest collages of photos are reserved for the Days section, which shows off a collection of square and rectangular still images and movies by day. Movies and Live Photos play without sound as they scroll into view. The Days section also intelligently groups collections of photos by events like birthdays, holidays, and locations.

Machine learning also aids in framing each image spotlighted in a collection, centering the primary subject of the image and hiding what it concludes are duplicates or screenshots. As you scroll through a date that has more than one screenful of photos, the date and location scroll along at the top of the window to help maintain your sense of place.

The fourth section in the Photos tab is All Photos, which is very close in design to the Photos tab in Mojave. I don’t expect to spend a lot of time in this section of Photos going forward, but it’s good to have when I’m looking for something that isn’t highlighted elsewhere.

The All Photos tab of Photos hasn’t changed much, displaying thumbnails of every image in their original aspect ratios.

The Months and Days views have an ellipsis button in the top-right corner of each collage of photos. Clicking it gives you options to Play Movie and/or Show Map depending on what information is available for that collection of photos. Play Movie starts an automatically-generated Memory Movie of the day, while Show Map switches to a map view of where that day’s photos were taken.

Memory Movies are a new addition to the Mac, which were previously only available on iOS. The feature generates a slideshow of images and movies from an event with background music. When a movie is playing, you can adjust its length and background music from the gear icon next to the playback controls. In the Days view where the images for a particular day can extend beyond the available view of a window, the ellipsis button scrolls along the top of the view with the date and location information.

The ellipsis buttons in Photos are an interesting addition that I don’t think everyone will like. They’re a design element borrowed from iOS to reveal a menu of multiple options not unlike macOS’ right-click context menu. The button has the advantage of being more discoverable than a right-click or option-click, but it is only implemented in some system apps and not always consistently.

A Photos ellipsis button tucked neatly underneath the one true pizza.

I’m not surprised by the occasional design inconsistencies between apps that have adopted Catalina’s new design language. Other system apps don’t adopt the ellipsis button at all because they weren’t updated this year. There’s a design shift occurring that’s going to take time to permeate macOS completely and consistently. That said, I like the addition of the ellipsis button to Photos because it’s more discoverable than right-clicking and familiar to iPadOS and iOS users.

I also expect that the ellipsis button won’t be the last UI element that migrates to the Mac. SwiftUI promises to streamline UI development across all of Apple’s hardware and one way to deliver on that goal is to unify UI elements where it makes sense. For example, I can imagine a scenario where the ellipsis button ends up dedicated to actions available across iOS, iPadOS, and the Mac, while the Mac retains right-click menus for Mac-specific actions and things like system Services.

Although the iOS and Mac versions of Photos are similar, iOS got new video editing tools that I wish were available in Catalina too. On iOS, you can make the same sort of edits to videos that you can to photos such as cropping and rotating, adding filters, and adjusting variables like exposure, brightness, and contrast. Currently, only clip trimming is available on both platforms. Still, Photos for the Mac outshines its iOS counterpart in some ways, including by having tools to retouch photos and adjust color curves, which iOS cannot do.

Unlike iOS, video editing on the Mac is limited to trimming in Photos.

I have 45,000 images and movies in my Photos library, and it’s always felt like a chore to navigate it. The UI in Mojave worked, but it didn’t lend itself to browsing and discovery of the best photos in my library. Catalina changes that. Probably the hardest part of writing this section of the review was stumbling across past events in Photos as I tested its features and getting lost in browsing them.

So many apps are essentially front ends for databases. The trouble is that once a database reaches a certain size, column views and sorting aren’t enough. No two apps demonstrate this better than Photos and Music. By stripping away the ordinary, duplicates, and junk in Photos and surfacing related and favorite music in Music, Apple has moved away from a Finder-like list of files to something that is smarter and tailored to your tastes.

This is a big shift for Apple and one that won’t be easily accepted in some quarters. Sure, you can still access a long list of every song in your Music library and a grid of every photo you’ve ever saved, whether it’s an accidental screenshot or a family portrait, but those views have been rightly deemphasized.

For something like photos, it’s the difference between re-experiencing special moments of your life and managing files. As much as I’d like to edit and curate every photo I’ve ever taken carefully, I simply don’t have the time to do that. With the update to Photos, I no longer feel bad about that. Instead, I can simply enjoy my photos more easily than ever before.

Find My

Find My is a brand-new, Catalyst-based app in Catalina this year. The app unifies Apple’s people and device tracking functionality into a single app on both the Mac and iOS. The addition of Find My is especially welcome on the Mac, where the functionality was limited to iCloud.com and, in the case of Find My Friends, a Today widget.

Now, whether you’re using an iOS device or Mac, you can open Find My and locate anyone who is sharing their location with you and your Apple hardware in one place. On the Mac, the app’s window is divided into a left sidebar and map view that works just like the Apple Maps app. At the top of the sidebar, you can switch between People and Devices.

The sidebar in the People section lists each of the people sharing their location with you according to their distance from your current location. People whose location can’t be determined or with whom you’re sharing your location, but they aren’t sharing with you drop to the bottom of the list. People can also be moved to the top of the list if you mark them as favorites by selecting their name and clicking on the label next to their profile on the map.

Find My provides the same location sharing flexibility as iOS and iPadOS.

At the bottom of the sidebar is a button for sharing your location, which opens a view into your contacts. From here, you can share your location using Messages or email for an hour, until the end of the day, or indefinitely. If someone shares their location with you for an hour or until the end of the day, you can tell by the timer icon overlaid on their profile picture in the sidebar.

When the app first opens, it zooms into your current location. Clicking on an individual’s entry in the sidebar moves the map to their location. A label next to their profile picture shows their name, location, when they were last located by the app, and an info icon. Clicking the label opens a popover with more precise location information and the remaining time of a time-limited share. There are also buttons for the person’s contact information you’ve got stored in Contacts and directions to their location, which opens Apple’s Maps app.

The next button handles notifications. You can set up notifications to be sent to yourself or the person you’re sharing your location with any time you or they arrive or leave their current location, your location, or another one you define. When setting up a notification of someone else’s arrival or departure from a location, you can only set up single alerts whereas you can share all of your comings and goings with someone else, a limit that makes location notifications a little less creepy.

Device tracking.

Devices, which are the second section of the sidebar, work much the same way as people. The sidebar’s list of devices is organized by person. At the top are ‘My Devices’ followed by each member of my family. Within each section, devices are organized by distance from my current location.

When you click on a device, the map zooms in on its last known location including how long it’s been since it was last located. Clicking the label reveals a popover similar to the one in the People section, but with device-specific options. The first button will play the sonar-style sound on the device to help you locate it if it’s been misplaced. Next to that is a directions button that opens Apple Maps.

Tracking a lost device.

The Notifications and Mark as Lost sections of the popover come next. These seem like they should be flipped around because you can’t set a notification to notify you once something is found until you mark it as lost. It’s worth noting too that ‘Mark as Lost’ and notifications only work with iOS devices, Macs, and Apple Watches, not AirPods. The final section in the popover for Macs, iOS devices, and Watches is a button to erase the device.

The ability to lock and erase a Mac is new and works with any Mac that has a T2 Security Chip. If your Mac is lost or stolen, you can enable Activation Lock to ensure that only you can erase and reactivate it. As with the iPhone and iPad, which have had this feature for several years, Activation Lock should help deter Mac thefts because once turned on, a stolen Mac is of no use to a thief.

One nice touch of Find My is that you can easily identify devices the app has located because their icon displays an active wallpaper as though the device were turned on. Devices that can’t be located show a blank screen. When I launched Find My, I noticed a few old abandoned devices in my list like the AirPods that I sent through the laundry. They couldn’t be located because the battery was dead, and clicking on their icon gave me the option to remove them from tracking after I entered my Apple ID. Playing a sound, directions, marking as lost, erasing, and, where available, removing a device are all available by right-clicking a device in the sidebar too.

Consolidating Find My Friends and Find My iPhone on iOS made a ton of sense, but it’s even more useful on the Mac where the functionality previously required logging into iCloud.com or using the Find My Friends Today widget. That caused enough friction for me in the past that I rarely used the features on my Mac. However, now that there’s a native app a couple of keystrokes away, I expect I’ll be using Find My more regularly.

It’s also notable that Apple’s location-sharing functionality will now work the same on iOS and the Mac. Devices get lost all the time and sharing your location with family and friends has become something that people do as a matter of routine now. It didn’t make sense that users had to learn a different way to access location tracking on different platforms. Now, thanks to Catalyst, Apple has an app with a consistent user experience on iOS and the Mac and an easier path to keeping both up-to-date as features are added and updates released.

Catalyst Apps

Craig Federighi introduces Project Catalyst at WWDC 2019.

It’s been a disappointing summer for Catalyst. The set of technologies that allows iPadOS developers to bring their apps to the Mac was first previewed at WWDC in 2018 when Apple introduced four lackluster Catalyst apps: Stocks, News, Home, and Voice Memos.

This past June, Apple announced that Catalyst was ready for developers. Apple also introduced two new Catalyst apps of its own: Podcasts and Find My. Both apps are more Mac-like than Apple’s earlier Catalyst apps, but at least in the case of Podcasts, it appears that that may be in part because it relies on private APIs that aren’t available to third-party developers.

The original four Catalyst apps remained unchanged in the early Catalina betas, but interviews that Craig Federighi gave with Federico for AppStories and elsewhere suggested that the complaints people had with the apps were deliberate design decisions. An interview with CNET seemed to suggest further that the apps would improve during the Catalina beta cycle. They didn’t, which has left developers without a clear example of a well-designed Catalyst app on which to model their own apps, except for perhaps Podcasts.

The problems run deeper, though. There is virtually no developer documentation or sample code for Catalyst apps. The Mac App Store side of the equation is problematic too. TestFlight is still unavailable for Mac apps, making testing more difficult for iOS developers accustomed to using Apple’s in-house set of beta testing tools. Also, Mac apps cannot be sold as a bundle with iOS apps or as a Universal binary for a single price or subscription on the Mac App Store and iOS App Store.

Those friction points and issues combined with the fact that iOS developers already had their hands full this summer with the changes brought by iOS and iPadOS 13 have meant that I’ve had the chance to try fewer notable Catalyst apps than I’d hoped. Still, there’s cause for optimism. It’s too early to know where Catalyst will go, but I want to highlight a handful of Catalyst apps, which will be available at or shortly after Catalina’s launch, that I’ve been trying since WWDC that go to show that ‘quality Catalyst apps’ isn’t an oxymoron.

It’s still early days and too soon to know whether Catalyst apps will take off, but as I argued at the outset of the summer, I believe Catalyst is currently the Mac’s best shot at remaining a relevant part of Apple’s computing lineup. By tying the future of the iPad and Mac together, there is room for each to benefit and strengthen the other. Catalyst may not have come out of the gate as quickly as I would have hoped, but these five apps demonstrate that there’s a place on the Mac for UIKit apps.

PDF Viewer

Apple’s choice of apps that it built to showcase Catalyst left some people skeptical about whether it could be used effectively for productivity apps. That’s understandable since other than Voice Memos, none of Apple’s Catalyst apps are document- or file-based, and not even Voice Memos allows users to open files or save them to an arbitrary location on your Mac. However, PDF Viewer by PSPDFKit does.

PDF Viewer’s sidebar.

PDF Viewer not only can create and open a PDF anywhere on your Mac, it includes a full suite of tools for marking up those documents. These are the same tools found in the iOS version of the app: a highlighter, marker, line drawing, shapes, and a lot more. The app also features a sidebar for bookmarks, edits, document information, and permissions, plus a thumbnail view and extensive sharing options.

PDF Viewer is exactly the sort of app I’ve hoped would be brought to the Mac. I use it on my iPad regularly, but the lack of a Mac version left me using Preview there instead. Preview is an excellent app, but from a continuity standpoint, the ability to use PDF Viewer on iOS, iPadOS, and the Mac is a superior experience.

GoodNotes

GoodNotes is my favorite note-taking app on the iPad. With its exceptional ink system, PDF handling, OCR capabilities, and adoption of the latest iOS and iPadOS 13 features like multiwindowing, it’s a fantastic tool for students and anyone else who does research or likes to organize their thoughts in their own handwriting. I use GoodNotes, Apple Pencil in hand, for taking notes about apps I’m testing, planning new projects, and jotting down quick lists of tasks.

At first blush, GoodNotes may not seem like a good candidate for a Catalyst app since the Apple Pencil doesn’t work with a Mac. It’s true that I don’t use the app nearly as often on the Mac as I do on my iPad, but at some point in the research process when I’m writing a story, I move from taking notes to drafting the article, which often happens on my Mac, and that is where GoodNotes’ Catalyst app comes into play.

Referencing a page of notes from my Mac.

GoodNotes previously offered a Mac version of their app, which I used, but as the company said when it announced it was working on a Catalyst version, the app had to take a back seat to the iPad app, which was used by many more people. As a result, the Mac app always felt behind the iPad app. That’s one of the best use cases for Catalyst. By unifying a lot of the two apps’ codebase, the developers expect to be able to keep the Mac app in sync with its iOS counterpart.

That’s great news to my ears. You can take notes in GoodNotes for Mac using a trackpad or other pointing device, but even if you only use it for reference purposes, having the app on the Mac is a big win. Since using the Catalyst app, I’ve found myself using the iPad app more too because I know I can reference my notes on my Mac without switching to my iPad. All of my folders, notebooks, and documents are perfectly synced using iCloud, so they’re readily available. That’s especially handy when I’m working my way through an outline for a story I’m writing or incorporating edits from a PDF I’ve imported into GoodNotes and marked up by hand, which I like to do for a change of pace now and then.

The app supports multiple tabs and windows, and virtually every feature found in the iPad app. PDFs can be dragged into GoodNotes’ main library or imported using a traditional Open dialog box. Best of all, because the app is so close to its iPadOS counterpart, it’s immediately familiar and easy to use, making the transition from my iPad smoother.

LookUp

LookUp represents the promise of what Catalyst has to offer by bringing iPad apps to the Mac. A quick search of the Mac App Store and web reveals precious few dictionary options available on the Mac. The Mac comes with a built-in Dictionary app that handles the basics well, but LookUp offers more.

A search of the Mac App Store for dictionary apps doesn’t reveal any good alternatives to Apple’s built-in Dictionary app.

The app is a standout on iOS and iPadOS, which makes it a welcome addition to the Mac. LookUp on the Mac includes the ability to maintain lists of favorite words and collections that you can use to create quizzes, which is an improvement to the Mac’s built-in Dictionary app. LookUp also features a beautifully-designed ‘Word of the Day’ section for expanding your vocabulary and displays meaning, origin, thesaurus, and Wikipedia results in a single entry, eliminating much of the clicking around that’s necessary in Apple’s app. There’s even a pronunciation button that speaks words out loud.

CARROT Weather

Like GoodNotes, CARROT Weather isn’t new to the Mac, but it too never received updates as regularly as the iOS and iPadOS versions of the app. I use CARROT Weather every day to check the weather from my iPhone and iPad and love that the same experience is now available on my Mac. Not only can I get the weather for my current location, but I can use my Netatmo Weather Station to keep tabs on the temperature just outside my back door.

CARROT Weather’s settings sync over iCloud, so any changes you make on an iPhone, iPad, or Mac are updated everywhere. The app also makes good use of Mac-specific features. The app’s settings have been moved to Preferences under the File menu, and clicking the radar icon opens a radar map in a separate window, for instance.

CARROT Weather can open a separate radar window.

There are also keyboard shortcuts to quickly access the forecast for each of the next seven days, to move between saved locations, and to search for a new location. There are other options for tracking the weather on my Mac, but the continuity of having the app I use throughout the day on my iPhone available without having to set up a different app is much nicer.

HabitMinder

Funn Media has ported a couple of its iPadOS apps to the Mac. My favorite is HabitMinder, an app for setting habit goals and tracking your progress. Like CARROT Weather, all the functionality existing users expect from HabitMinder are included in its Catalyst app. You can add new habits, update existing ones, and view statistics about your progress and history for each.

HabitMinder users could get by without a Mac version of the app because most people probably have their iPhone nearby most of the time, but that’s not the point. If I’ve gone back to work after eating lunch and am sitting at my Mac with my hands on its keyboard, it’s less of an interruption to quickly pop open HabitMinder and log that I ate something healthy than it is to pull out my iPhone and potentially get distracted by something else.

I’ve seen fewer Catalyst apps than I’d hoped since WWDC. A lot of factors have contributed to that; I’m optimistic that over time, more will emerge. There’s clearly work to be done by Apple to make it easier for developers to port their apps. With all of the company’s OS releases finally shipped, my hope is that developers will get the documentation and sample code they need, Apple will continue to improve the tools for porting apps to the Mac, and Home, News, Stocks, and Voice Memos will get updated.

There’s an opportunity with Catalyst to expand the catalog of apps available on the Mac and make the experience across iOS devices and Macs more seamless than ever before. There’s a lot of room from improvement, but the core pieces are in place. I just hope that the slow roll-out doesn’t dampen developer enthusiasm and cause Catalyst to stall.

All the Rest

QuickTime

As I covered at the outset of this review, the release of Catalina completes Apple’s multi-year transition from 32- to 64-bit apps. That means the end of the line for apps like QuickTime Player 7, which some people still used for its support of older file formats after QuickTime Player X was released. Although Apple isn’t bringing back Flash video playback, the latest update to QuickTime provides some nice enhancements.

QuickTime Player has gained a Picture in Picture control.

My favorite convenience is the addition of a Picture in Picture button next to the playback controls. It works just like the similar button you’ll find in videos in Safari. Click the PiP button and drag the resizable video window into a corner to watch as you do something else. The window will float above the other windows on your screen. When you’re finished, just click the PiP button again to return it to the app’s main window.

QuickTime has regained QuickTime 7 Pro’s ability to build a video from sequentially numbered still images too. After picking a frame rate, resolution, and encoding quality, you can save the resulting video as an H.264, HEVC, or ProRes video file. One common use for the feature is creating time-lapse movies from a series of photographs taken at regular intervals.

Also, QuickTime’s Inspector has been beefed up with additional information like the color space, aspect ratio, scale, and other data. QuickTime adds alpha channel transparency support and displays timecodes if they’re embedded in a video too.

Home

As on iOS and iPadOS, Home includes limited shortcut support.

Just like Home on iOS and iPadOS, the Mac version has added a limited set of Shortcuts actions that can be built into HomeKit automations. The actions available and opportunities they present for the creation of more robust automations in the Home app is exciting. For the details of what is and isn’t possible with Home-based automations, check out Federico’s iOS and iPadOS 13 review, which covers the options in depth. Because the two platforms essentially work the same way, I won’t retread the same ground here.

Just as on iOS and iPadOS, when you get to the step of picking accessories and scenes to add to an automation, there is an option at the bottom of the window to convert the automation to a shortcut. What’s remarkable about that and noteworthy compared to iOS and iPadOS is that unlike those OSes, there is no Shortcuts app on the Mac. Granted, the actions available in Home are a small subset of everything that’s available in the iOS and iPadOS app, but I expect this is just the start.

A unifying theme of Catalina is a rationalization of each platform’s apps and functionality so as to provide a more unified experience on every platform. For instance, why should finding your devices or friends and family involve two apps on iOS devices but only the web on the Mac? There may be perfectly valid historical reasons why that functionality ended up that way, but with Catalina and its other OSes, Apple is taking steps to bring them closer together than ever, and right here in Home, the future of automation on the Mac is hiding in plain sight.

I don’t expect we’ll see AppleScript or Automator go away soon, but I do expect Shortcuts to expand onto the Mac and benefit from the built-in community of users who are building and sharing shortcuts on iOS and iPadOS. It’s that unification of experience where skills learned on one platform are transferrable to the other that will enable the biggest user experience leaps in the years to come.

Mac App Store

Apple Arcade.

The Mac App Store has remained largely unchanged from Mojave, except for the addition of an Apple Arcade tab in the sidebar and moving password requirement settings to the Apple ID section of System Preferences. As with iOS and iPadOS, Arcade soft-launched to beta testers shortly after the GM build of Catalina was released. It’s too early to judge Arcade on the Mac, but as of its release to the public, fewer than half of the games released on iOS and iPadOS are available on the Mac, and the Store’s tab has no editorial content, except for a couple of short articles promoting the Arcade service itself. However, based on how quickly the Arcade tab has been filled on iOS and iPadOS, I expect that will change soon on the Mac too.

Conclusion

There’s no greater threat to the Mac than resistance to change that exists not because the change is worse, but because it’s different. For years there have been complaints that iTunes was a creaky, buggy mess and that the app ecosystem on the Mac was stagnant. Now that Apple is breaking up iTunes and bringing iPad developers to the Mac, that’s shifted to nostalgia for iTunes features not in Music and declarations that there are plenty of good apps for the Mac already. Perhaps that’s just human nature, but it’s not the way to preserve the Mac’s relevancy. It’s how Microsoft got itself into a cycle of preserving old versions of Windows for so long that it stifled innovation on the platform.

There’s no greater threat to the Mac than resistance to change.

Catalina is a cold splash of water in the face of users accustomed to small incremental changes to macOS in recent years. What makes Catalina different from updates in years past is Apple’s renewed commitment to the Mac.

In 2017, Apple held an unprecedented meeting with a small group of writers to lay out its roadmap for the Mac. The meeting signaled more than a preview of the Mac Pro that is still in development. The company was proclaiming a new strategy for the Mac, though in typical Apple fashion, without spelling out the exact details.

Catalina is the first sign of the software side of that strategy. Unlike hardware though, the OS has a much more direct effect on the way you use your current Mac, which makes the transition more fraught with risk. There are certainly rough edges and parts of Catalina that feel unfinished, but it would be unfair to judge the macOS update as though it were the destination itself. We’re only in the first year of a multi-year process. From that perspective, I’m encouraged.

Catalina is a careful balancing act between the old and new. One of the most successful advances by Catalina is the breakup of iTunes. I expected far more of the legacy features to be shed from the app than actually were. If you’re a fan of the column browser, you may not agree with that assessment, but the fact that you can still rip and burn CDs, buy music from the iTunes Store, use star ratings, view checkboxes in the Songs list, and create Genius playlists were all surprises to me. Those features are de-emphasized and will likely fade away over time, but Catalina accommodates users who rely on them. Given the long history of iTunes and its feature set, phasing out legacy features slowly makes sense.

Less successful is Catalyst. I’ve had high hopes for Catalyst since it was previewed at WWDC in 2018. The realization over this summer that Apple wasn’t going to update its original four Catalyst apps was a big disappointment, as was the lack of documentation and sample code and the inability of developers to bundle Mac apps with iOS and iPadOS apps. Together with the workload imposed on developers by changes to iOS and iPadOS 13, many I’ve spoken to put their Catalyst plans on hold, which is understandable. That’s not encouraging because, in the short-term, it means we’re unlikely to see many of the sort of new ideas and competition that the Mac app ecosystem needs to be sustainable long-term.

Nonetheless, I’m encouraged by the handful of Catalyst apps I’ve tried. Apps like PDF Viewer, GoodNotes, LookUp, CARROT Weather, and HabitMinder should serve as a roadmap for other developers. Apple’s Podcasts and Find My apps are also better examples of what can be done with Catalyst than Home, Voice Memos, News, or Stocks. Hopefully, it’s just a matter of time before the company rethinks some of the choices made in its early Catalyst apps.

What’s just as clear about Catalina, though, is that the transformation of macOS isn’t about breaking up one app or bringing iPad apps to the Mac. Catalina is more about bringing the user experiences between the Mac and other Apple platforms together. It encompasses everything from aligning the features between apps that exist on each platform, to each system borrowing interaction models from the others, but adapted to respect the differences between them – whether that’s something like the ellipsis menu buttons added all over macOS or the context menus added to iOS and iPadOS 13. The cross-pollination of macOS with iOS and iPadOS isn’t complete, and it certainly isn’t consistent in places, but it is nonetheless important because it’s what will make the Mac fit better on Apple’s computing continuum. Catalina makes the Mac a more familiar and inviting environment for the millions of iOS and iPadOS users who have never used a Mac.

That’s a hard reality to face if you are a long-time user of the Mac for whom iOS and iPadOS are the newcomers, but in the final analysis, it’s simple math. In an increasingly mobile computing-based world, the Mac’s future lies in making it a platform that has something to offer iOS and iPadOS users, and makes moving from those platforms to the Mac simple.

Perhaps Catalina isn’t such an ironic name after all. The work to fully integrate macOS into an unbroken computing continuum is far from complete. The Mac isn’t disappearing anytime soon, but it risks becoming a niche product that doesn’t get the attention that Mac users want or that I think it deserves. There’s a place for the Mac in Apple’s lineup, but the platform needs to change with the times, and Catalina is the first step of bridging the gap to its future.