At this meeting, held on 6th October, we looked at new features in the recently released macOS Sonoma and Safari 17.
macOS Sonoma
Robert demonstrated some of the new features of macOS Sonoma including:
- Aerial screensavers and wallpapers which are automatically synced.
- Widgets on the desktop.
- New video conferencing features including reactions and presenter overlay.
- Shopping lists and column view in Reminders. DaveK pointed out that the column view can be used to setup a Kanban board similar to Trello.
- New features in the Notes app including links to other notes, block quote formatting and the option to create a Pages document from a note. The shortcut of typing “>>” to insert a link is particularly handy.
- Game mode.
- A telltale displayed below the cursor when Caps lock is on.
- Creating a stand-alone app from a website by adding it to the Dock.
He also showed Safari 17 which launched with Sonoma and is also available on older operating systems Monterey and Ventura:
- Profiles to separate browsing for different tasks, for example work and home.
- Option to lock private browsing windows.
- Automatically closing tabs once they reach a certain age.
Mac Rumors have a good round-up of the new macOS Sonoma features.
Member Topics
- DavidB mentioned that Steve Gibson is developing a utility called ValiDrive to validate external drives and detect counterfeit products that fake their capacity.
- DaveK recommended Partygate on Channel 4 and If the Streets Were on Fire on iPlayer.
- DaveK mentioned, but did not recommend iHuman on the iPlayer.