macOS Sequoia Preview

macOS Sequoia update is interesting. It has been at least 5 - 6 years I felt macOS had some useful upgrade. But It is also arguably the smallest OS update in terms of number of new features sans Apple Intelligence. Most of the time macOS update talks about features that I have no idea who are they aiming for, or it felt more like certain people had to get new features in every macOS update for the sake of it. This time around most of them very small but useful additions.

iPhone Mirroring and Notification. No longer do I have to find my phone when I am at home sitting in front of my Mac just to check on notification. I could also enjoy most of my iPhone Apps and even some gaming without leaving my Mac. Making the Mac an extension of my iPhone. Very handy and useful. Something I wanted a very long time but thought Apple wouldn't do it.

Seamless drag and drop between devices - Probably need more testing, but AirDrop isn't reliable for doing massive amount of Files between iPhone and Mac. And again transferring files from Mac to an iPhone Apps no longer requires 5+ tedious steps.

Control over web video - Semi-Full Screen Video and the important thing here is "system playback controls". Some of the online video controls are just awful.

Notes - It does 90% of what I need from Soulver. I guess unit conversion won't be as good. And the Collapsible sections meant another note taking app of mine wont be needed.

Unfortunately Safari doesn't seems to get much update. It is still the worst browser for Tab Heavy Users. And their world fastest browser tagline for so many years is annoying because it is clearly very specific to limited cases. Both Chrome and Recent Firefox are simply faster.

Apart from Safari, my current major annoyance, unless there are some new problems from Sequoia, I am not even sure what is missing from macOS. At least right now it does seems macOS, in my view is 99% complete.

The only Apps [1] I will need installing as I wrote a few months ago are;

IINA - Media Player

QuickLook Video - Adds non-quicktime supported Video to Finder Preview.

Unarchiver or Keka - RAR or Zip files.

Little Snitch Mini - Network Monitoring

Transmission - Bit torrent

Apple Numbers, Pages - Alternative to M$ Office if you dont need all the features.

Text Editor - VS Code or Sublime,

And that is it. Other than the Apps above and Default Apps by Apple like Stocks and Notes, 99% of my time are inside Browser.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39164362

The only thing I would add is enabling javascript per tab. And remote fonts. This is my most used feature on UBO. The web is finally snappy again.

Been a happy Magnet user for long time! Nothing remarkable in this OS that hasn't been seen yet elsewhere. No innovation, only #MeToo features.

It took them a decade to release a "Send Later" feature? How's that for innovation? Snobs!

The commentary stream I was watching described it as "An whole lot of Sherlocking going on": Passwords app, Window Snapping, iPhone to mac Display mirroring. It feels especially tone deaf that they're doing it at their developer conference

If you're unfamiliar with the term, "Sherlocking" is the act of Apple introducing some 3rd-party's App features as a core component of the operating system, essentially obviating the app and the developers that created it.

An incomplete list of "Sherlocked" things:

- Watson - a tool for finding stuff on your Mac. Replicated by Apple's "Sherlock", hence the name of the phenomenon.

- Growl - Popover notifications Replicated by Apple's "Notifications"

- Konfabulator - provided a layer of widgets that could do various things, sort of like the old desk accessories applets. Replicated by Apple's "Dashboard"

- Camo - Allowed you to use your iPhone as a webcam. Replicated by Apple's "Continuity Camera"

The list goes on and on.

StopTheMadness can automatically fast-forward YouTube ads which produces effectively the same result

https://underpassapp.com/news/2023-10-19.html