MacOS Ventura Public Beta: The 3 Best New Features
MacOS Ventura Public Beta: The 3 Best New Features
10:37

MacOS Ventura Public Beta: The 3 Best New Features

Operating Systems
Speaker 1: There's a new version of Macko S coming. This one is code named Ventura. Now it's gonna be out in the fall probably officially, but if you're feeling adventurous, you can download the public beta version right now and try out. At least some of the new Ventura features. I certainly found a few, I thought were really interesting and really worth the upgrade. I always say that operating system update should be like good cinematography. If you notice it too much. Well, that's bad. But if it adds a lot to the experience while staying in the background, that's good. And [00:00:30] OS updates for computers, especially if you add too much new stuff, you change too many things. You're gonna lose that muscle memory and that familiarity you have with your machine. But if you change too little, then what's the point of having an operating system update and people are not gonna do it with all that in mind, I downloaded the public beta version of the new Maus and installed it on this guy, the new M two chip MacBook air. Speaker 1: So it's, Apple's newest MacBook and Apple's newest Mac operating system. Now, what are the [00:01:00] biggest, most important changes in Ventura? I found about three or four. I thought a really important, really interesting, uh, they're really gonna make your Mac work, uh, differently. Hopefully you think it's better? I think a lot of these are changes for the better, uh, but that's not gonna be universal, but I'll tell you the single most important change in Ventura. The biggest visual difference, I think is something called stage manager. That is a new way of grouping together, windows from different apps that you're using and letting you jump between them easily. Instead of using command tab [00:01:30] to go through apps like we used to do, we're using the four fingers, swipe up and swipe down, uh, move. Now we've got a rail on the left side that shows you all the apps you have open, and it has all the windows from that app stacked up. Speaker 1: So if you have multiple Chrome or safari windows open, they're stacked up. Uh, and if I click on any of these, then I go to that app. And if I keep clicking on the little stack here, it'll switch between all the pages I have open in that. Or if I go to a different app, it's gonna replace it and I can go through things there. So every [00:02:00] time I click on an app that goes center stage, uh, and then the other apps move back to that right rail. So it's really easy to switch back and forth between them. But at the same time, you have a visual reference here on the left side of what apps you have open, which you could forget about. If you just have a full screen, uh, you know, window going give a ton of things running in the background that you've totally forgotten about. Speaker 1: Is this gonna change the way computers work forever? No, but it's, it's an interesting way to rearrange the information on a MacBook. And I think it's pretty useful for [00:02:30] keeping track of what you have and switching between things quickly. Now, there is one thing that kind of bothers me about stage manager and that is, we already have a doc along the bottom of the Mac right here. Well, now we've got kind of a secondary dock along this left side, this left rail dock. So now you have two docks basically. Uh, and I think that can kind of get confusing and we should probably figure out a better way to make these two work together. The other really big thing is going to be more about using your Mac with another device [00:03:00] you probably have, and that is continuity camera. And that means at long last, you can take your iPhone and use it as a wireless webcam with your Mac. Speaker 1: Now that sounds like it makes a lot of sense. We should have been able to do this the whole time, uh, because frankly we're all on a lot of video meetings these days. And I don't feel like that's gonna change any time soon. And the cameras built into Mac have traditionally never been that good if you have the new M two MacBook air or the 14 or 16 inch MacBook pro you have a new 10 80 camera that is much better. [00:03:30] It's still nowhere near as good as the camera on your iPhone. Before now, you could use your iPhone as a webcam with your Mac, uh, but you had to download a third party app on the phone, on the Mac, uh, get everything working together. I used EPO cam from El Gado and it worked sometimes, but I found it wasn't reliable enough to use all the time. Speaker 1: It was frankly, kind of a hassle. So I'm very excited to just be able to use my, uh, phone as my webcam, without doing anything different. I did have to do one thing different. I [00:04:00] had to get the iOS 16 public beta on my iPhone in order to do it. But once I did that, everything worked out great. So here, I'm gonna show you what I did here. And it works in, uh, a lot of apps that use the webcam. I found it works in, uh, photo booth. It works in FaceTime. It works in zoom, almost everything I've tried so far. It has worked in. Now I'm gonna take my phone right here and I'm gonna take this clip I made now how you're gonna get your phone attached to your laptop, to use as a webcam. I different people are gonna sell clip on things. Speaker 1: And little tripods. I went into [00:04:30] a CAD program, took the measurements from my phone with the case and this, and I designed just a tiny little clip right here that I 3d printed. And I'm gonna have the files for this that you can download and 3d print your own version. I'll give you the CAD file too. So you can go and change the dimensions. If your phone is a different case or your laptop is, uh, a different thickness. So I just put this right here like that. I take my phone and I put it in here and it's gonna hang right there. And as you can see the camera, isn't exactly the right spot to use as a webcam. I can move over to the center of everyone. I can keep it over here if [00:05:00] I want. Uh, and then if I let's say launch FaceTime, I can now look under the video options here and I can see, I can use the, uh, camera built into the MacBook. Speaker 1: That's this one right down here. Hello, there it's a little bit lower down or I can use my phone. And I think you're gonna see that the phone really looks better because it's using the rear camera here. There are even other tricks you can do with continuity camera and your iPhone. They're hidden here in the command center, little, two pills icon here. Uh, you go into video effects [00:05:30] and look what I can do. I can turn on center stage and that makes the camera follow me. It's using the wide angle lens and kind of clipping it down. So it follows my face around. And that's, that's super interesting. Or I can turn that off and I can turn on portrait mode, which blurs the background behind me a little bit portrait mode off portrait mode on, and I can combine that or use separately studio light, which dims the background a little bit and make sure, you know, your face pop out a little bit more as if you had some studio lighting on you. Speaker 1: So studio light [00:06:00] off studio light on, and, uh, you can turn these off and on at will. There's also another trick that you can do with your, uh, iPhone hooked up. And that is called desk view. And I'm gonna hit that right now. And it is going to, I'm gonna move the laptop a little bit further away, and I'm gonna hit desk view. And that is going to use the wide angle lens to capture some of what is happening in front of me on the desk and looks really distorted because it's trying to grab, you know, just this area. So if I took something and put it in front of me, like, let's say this [00:06:30] book and I wanted you to see it. If I hold it towards me facing up towards me, it's gonna look face up. If you are watching it, uh, on the video stream, I'm standing to you. Speaker 1: And the way that works is this is a standalone app called desk view. So if you're in zoom, you do share my screen and then you share the desk view window and people can see what it is you have on your desk in front of you. I think that's a clever idea. I think this is one of the things that still needs a lot of work. Uh, the angle is kind of weird that the area that you have to show stuff in is a little bit weird, [00:07:00] how it integrates with other apps can be a little bit difficult, but it's a really cool idea. And I look forward to seeing it get a little more perfected and a little more integrated. So I think all things considered this camera ability, the continuity camera to use your iPhone with your Mac as a wireless camera. Ah, that's hilarious. Speaker 1: It's still doing it overall. I think this ability to use your iPhone camera through continuity camera as the wireless webcam for your mag is really gonna be a game changer for a lot of people, especially if you have an older Mac that does not have [00:07:30] the new 10 80 camera in it, the next thing a Ventura, I really like it's kind of small, but it makes a big difference to me. It is the old system preferences menu that has been unchanged for many years in terms of its general look and feel. Now it is called system settings. And instead of a whole bunch of icons just kind of laid out for you. It is now in handy list form, and you can just scroll up and down and see all the different categories. And if I go into something, I can see that sub menu. Speaker 1: Yes, but I can also still see all the [00:08:00] other options here, which is helpful. If you're trying to figure out how to do something on your Mac, and you may have to go through a bunch of these different menus to find exactly the right command, because I find some of these choices fairly arbitrary. Uh, my favorite one is how turning on, uh, click and drag on the trackpad is not in the trackpad settings. It's under accessibility and a couple of sub menus under that. So you always have to do a lot of digging around in the system preferences now, system settings, but I appreciate that is now easier to navigate and is laid out a little more logically [00:08:30] the last big new Ventura public beta feature I wanna tell you about right now is live captioning. And that is the ability for what your MacBook to listen to either a video or pre-recorded video, a live stream, somebody you're talking to on a video app and give you a very accurate live transcription of it as it happens. Speaker 1: I'm gonna use a pre-recorded video just to show you very quickly how it works. I'm actually gonna turn the, uh, sound down. Uh, so I'm gonna hit play on it. And then I'm going to go into, [00:09:00] uh, system settings, live captions. Here we go. You could flip it off. You could flip it on. And once I flip it on, I go back to my video and you are gonna start seeing the live captions right here. So I found this useful for not so much watching prerecorded videos and getting captions because there are caption options in YouTube, in a lot of other places. But if you're talking to somebody on a zoom call or Facebook call, and maybe you can't hear them that well, there's a lot of noise around their microphone is not good. Uh, they have problems on their end. You can see a [00:09:30] real time transcription of what they're saying as they're talking. Speaker 1: So you don't have to keep telling them to speak up or go somewhere quieter. Uh, I found it to be a real help in live video calls. There are a lot of other new features coming to Mac O S through Ventura. There are improvements to mail and messages and spotlight. I frankly found those not as interesting as the ones I pulled out to show you here today. Uh, but if you wanna try them all, you've got two options. Uh, you can try the public beta right now, which so far seems to [00:10:00] be relatively bug free. And, and I have not run into any major problems using it, but, you know, go at your own pace. And if you just wanna wait for the official release, the latest version of Macko S called Ventura is probably going to be available later of this fall. If you wanna read more about my Mac OS vent impressions, uh, you're gonna find the links in the description below, and I'm also gonna include links so you can download my 3d printer file and make your own camera continuity, iPhone Mount, or semi 20 [00:10:30] bucks. And I'll print one and mail it to you.

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