CONS

• Ends 32-bit app support, forcing such apps to run in complex workarounds.
• Security enhancements may request repeated confirmations to allow some apps to run.

Riding the Sidecar

macOS Catalina Crack, if you wanted to use a tablet as a second screen for your Mac, the only solution was a third-party app like Duet Display, AirDisplay, or iDisplay. You’ll still need one of these if your tablet is a non-Apple model from Wacom or some other vendor, but Catalina adds advanced built-in support for iPads as a second screen for the Mac.

Simply place an iPad near your Mac, or connect it via a cable, click on the AirPlay icon and start using your iPad either as an extension to your Mac’s screen or as a mirror that displays the same content on the iPad that you see on the Mac. If you choose the mirror option, you can draw on the iPad with the Apple Pencil and see the results on both the iPad and the Mac.

When you use Sidecar, two toolbars appear on your iPad screen. One is a sidebar that lets you bring the Mac’s dock to the iPad and add Cmd, Shift, and Option keys to the iPad’s touch-based keyboard. The other acts like the Touch Bar on recent MacBook Pro models, and Touch Bar-style controls appear on the iPad when you’re using Apple apps or third-party apps that support the Touch Bar. This feature works whether or not your Mac itself has a touchbar.

Sidecar only works with macOS Catalina Crack models introduced in 2016 or later, or with a late-2015 iMac. It works with all iPad models that work with the Apple Pencil (either of the two versions), which means any iPad Pro, full-size iPad models from 2018, or iPad Air and Mini models from 2019.

It took me a while to realize that macOS treats a Sidecar-connected iPad like any second display and that I had to manage it from the Displays pane in System Preferences, not just the Sidecar pane. By default, a Sidecar-connected iPad is positioned to the right of your main screen, but you can use the Displays pane to position it to the left or anywhere else, so that the cursor moves smoothly between your Mac’s screen and the iPad.

More Curation, More Automation

Other built-in apps get varying degrees of updates. Photos has more built-in automation—Apple calls it curation—that decides what your best photos are and displays them more prominently in its new Days, Months, and Years layouts that show the photos from those time periods. The app’s preview screens automatically select what the app thinks is the most important part of each photo, but the whole photo is visible when you open the photo itself.

If you like to sit back and watch the app make decisions for you, you’ll admire these features. Fortunately for anyone who prefers to do their own photo curation, you can still use the All Photos view to display thumbnail images of all your photos and make your own choices among them instead of letting the app use an algorithm that may not understand what you want.

The Reminders app is completely new and uses a new format to store your data, so you’ll need to update all your iOS devices to iOS 13 and all your Macs to Catalina if you want to access the same reminders everywhere. The app now reads the text you type and suggests dates and locations.

A new Smart Lists feature works somewhat like smart mailboxes in Mail—you can display reminders for today only, or reminders you’ve marked as important, or other fine-tuning options. The Notes app, already updated in earlier versions, gets enhancements like the ability to share whole folders, not only individual notes, and options that make it easier to rearrange lists of notes automatically or by hand.

Safari shows only minor changes, like Siri Suggestions on the start page, offering to open pages related to messages that you’ve received or that are in your browsing history or elsewhere. Maybe these suggestions will be more useful to you than they are to me, though once or twice they’ve reminded me of pages that I looked at in the past and wanted to look at again, but never got around to again.

New Options, New Games

The Screen Time feature built into recent iOS versions now comes to the Mac through a well-designed option-rich System Preferences pane. But parents will have to wait for a later point release of Catalina to use a powerful and flexible new feature that lets you limit your children’s communications so they can only exchange messages and phone and video calls with specific people, or communicate at specific times, or with specific time limits. The feature, called Communication Limits, is still in beta.

Conclusion