New Features of MacOS Ventura: Even More

Apple’s MacOS Ventura promises to take your Mac experience to new heights. With a slew of new features and enhancements, Apple aims to make the Mac more powerful, more convenient, and more user-friendly. Let’s delve into the features that this exciting update brings to the table.

Apple Pay

MacOS Ventura introduces a redesigned payment sheet for Apple Pay, enabling you to better manage your information, add cards directly from the Apple Pay experience, and review details about your purchase with an improved summary view.

Clock App

Previously available only on iPad and iPhone, the Clock app makes its debut on the Mac with MacOS Ventura. The app allows you to set world clocks, timers, and alarms, bringing a seamless continuity of Apple experience to your Mac. Siri can now be asked to set timers and alarms or for the time in another city. The Clock functionality can be extended with shortcuts, which you can access from the menu bar, Finder, or through Siri.

Dictation

MacOS Ventura brings automatic punctuation to Dictation, which adds commas, periods, and question marks for you as you dictate. In addition, it adds emoji support, allowing you to insert emoji with your voice while dictating on your device.

Dictionary

The dictionary feature on MacOS Ventura introduces five new bilingual dictionaries: Bangla–English, Czech–English, Finnish–English, Hungarian–English, and Turkish–English.

Focus

The Focus feature helps you set boundaries within Apple apps like Calendar, Mail, Messages, and Safari. With Focus filters, you can choose what content to show in different apps based on the Focus mode you enable. There is also a new Focus filter API for developers, allowing them to use the signal you’re in Focus mode to hide distracting content.

Focus can be scheduled to turn on automatically at a set time or location or while using a certain app. You can personalize the setup experience for each Focus option and select the apps and people from which you want to receive notifications.

Font Book

The new Font gallery lets you browse your fonts in the new grid and sample modes. You can also search fonts by name, family, designer, character, and copyright. A streamlined installation process allows you to preview multiple font families and manage installation options in a single window.

Home App

The Home app has received a significant overhaul in MacOS Ventura, with a new design that makes it easier to navigate, organize, view, and control all your accessories. The app now provides a whole-house view that shows your entire home at a glance. The updated architecture enhances performance and reliability, especially for homes with many smart accessories.

MacOS Ventura introduces support for Matter, a new smart home connectivity standard that promises to enable compatible accessories to work seamlessly together across platforms. This will allow you to choose from even more compatible smart home accessories and control them with the Home app and Siri on your Apple devices.

Keyboard Enhancements

MacOS Ventura introduces new keyboard features like an additional layout called Changyong for Shuangpin users, Cantonese input, Sichuanese dialect support, and new languages for autocorrect and emoji search. New keyboard layouts are available for languages like Apache, Dzongkha, Samoan, and Yiddish, and the English Dvorak keyboard is now available. The update also brings more than 21 new emojis.

Live Text

Live Text in MacOS Ventura now works with videos, making text completely interactive in paused video frames. You can copy, paste, lookup, and translate directly from the video frames. The feature also adds recognition for Japanese, Korean, and Ukrainian text.

Maps

Maps in MacOS Ventura now supports multi-stop routing, allowing you to plan a driving route with multiple stops on your Mac, which will automatically sync to your iPhone when you’re ready to go. The update also introduces transit fares, showing you the cost of your journey.

Memoji

MacOS Ventura introduces more sticker poses and new options for customizing your Memoji, including new hairstyles, headwear, noses, and neutral lip colors.

Music

Keep track of your favorite artists with new music notifications and improved recommendations.

News

News in MacOS Ventura brings a new My Sports feature, allowing you to follow your favorite teams, leagues, and athletes, and a Favorites group for quickly accessing the channels and topics you care most about. There’s also an expansion of local news coverage and new home pages for more in-depth coverage from local city and top newspapers.

Notes

The Notes app in MacOS Ventura brings enhanced Smart Folders, end-to-end encryption for locked notes with your login password, notes grouping by date, sharing notes with anyone who has the link, and filtering by any or all criteria in a Smart Folder or the Tag Browser.

Photos

The Photos app introduces duplicate detection, default locking of Hidden and Recently Deleted albums, batch pasting of photo edits, alphabetical sorting of the People album, a new Photos picker for importing photos into system apps, restarting of video in Memories, and new memory types.

Reminders

Reminders in MacOS Ventura introduces pinned lists, templates for reusing lists, a Completed Smart List, improved Scheduled and Today Lists, improved list groups, notifications in shared lists, and richer notes.

Siri

Siri receives an updated design with more focused results, so you get just the information you’re looking for.

Stocks

The Stocks app now displays upcoming earnings report dates for companies and allows you to add them to your calendar. It also introduces multiple custom watchlists and new widget options.

Translate

System-wide translation adds support for Turkish, Thai, Vietnamese, Polish, Indonesian, and Dutch.

Weather

The Weather app comes to the Mac with MacOS Ventura, bringing a host of features including severe weather notifications, more weather details, animated backgrounds, air quality monitoring, smart weather forecasts, and weather maps.

In summary, MacOS Ventura brings a raft of new features and improvements to the Mac, making it more powerful, more convenient, and more user-friendly. As with any significant update, it’s advisable to back up your data before upgrading to the new OS. Once you’ve done that, you can look forward to an enhanced Mac experience with MacOS Ventura.