macOS Catalina: The Missing Manual

Introduction

MacOS Catalina is the 16th major version of Apple’s operating system. It’s got very little in common with the original Mac OS, the one that saw Apple through the 1980s and 1990s. Apple dumped that in 2001, when CEO Steve Jobs decided it was time for a change. Apple had spent too many years piling new features onto a software foundation originally poured in 1984. Programmers and customers complained of the “spaghetti code” the Mac OS had become.

So today, underneath macOS’s classy, shining desktop is Unix, the industrial-strength, rock-solid OS that drives many a website and university. It’s not new by any means; in fact, it’s decades old and has been polished by generations of programmers.

Note

Beginning with Sierra in 2016, Apple stopped calling the Mac operating system “OS X.” It’s now “macOS.” That’s partly because Apple sought consistency with the software in its other products—iOS and watchOS—and partly, no doubt, because it was tired of hearing people pronounce it “oh ess sex.”

What’s New in Catalina

Having run out of big cat species (Cheetah, Puma, Jaguar, Panther, Tiger, Leopard, Snow Leopard, Lion, and Mountain Lion), Apple started naming its Mac operating systems after places in California. There was the surfing site Mavericks, followed by Yosemite, El Capitan, Sierra, High Sierra, and Mojave. And now there’s Catalina, named after Santa Catalina, a rocky island off the coast of Southern California.

The changes in Catalina are either “thoughtful and strategic” or “ridiculously minor,” depending on your generosity of thought toward Apple products.

Herewith: a list of what’s new.

Death of iTunes

The bloated behemoth program called iTunes is gone. In its place are smaller, simpler apps called TV, Music, and Podcasts. (The iTunes Store, however, still exists and is where you can continue to buy music.)

Why did Apple bother? Partly because people had been complaining for years that iTunes was trying to do too many things and becoming too complex in the process. And partly because, with every passing year, Apple adapts more of its popular iOS apps into Mac apps. By maintaining essentially the same program on two kinds of machines, Apple saves time and effort; and because you get identical apps with the same features on phone/tablet/Mac, you have less to learn.

And what about syncing your iPhone or iPad with the Mac, another duty of iTunes? Now you do that right in the Finder; see “iMovie”.

Sidecar

If you own a recent iPad, you can now prop it up off to the side of your Mac—and marvel as it acts as a second screen, either wirelessly or over a cable. It displays either a duplicate of the Mac’s screen or an extension of it. It works with the Apple Pencil, meaning that you can use your iPad as a graphics tablet for Mac software. And because Apple gives you a few essential Mac buttons on the iPad screen, you can relax on the couch with the iPad on your lap, operating, for the first time in history, Mac software.

Screen Time

The Catalina update continues Apple’s Quest to Make the Mac More Like iOS. It blesses the Mac with Screen Time, the iPhone/iPad feature that’s designed to help us with our digital addictions. Or at least our kids’.

Screen Time is a series of graphs that show how much time you’ve spent on the Mac, how much time you spend in each app, how many times you wake your Mac a day, and so on.

It incorporates limits that replace the old Parental Controls feature on the Mac. For example, Downtime lets you schedule periods when you’re not allowed to use your Mac, except for certain apps that you designate. App Limits are daily time limits for categories of apps, like Games, Entertainment, and Social Networking. You can also block raunchy or violent movies, music, games, and so on.

You can opt to apply these restrictions to your Mac or to a child’s Mac, have it apply to all your devices or only the one in front of you, require a password to override the blockades, manage the kids’ limits remotely from your own phone or Mac, and so on.

Voice Control

It’s now possible to do everything on the Mac by voice alone—an enormous engineering accomplishment. You can click buttons, drag things, scroll, dictate, make text edits—all with natural voice commands, all hands-free. This feature is primarily intended for people who can’t use the mouse or keyboard, but it turns out to be useful in all kinds of situations, especially when you’re trying to fix dictation mistakes. You can say, for example, “Replace ‘Mr. Trannidy’ with ‘missed her train today.’ ”

This feature, too, has been inherited from the iPhone/iPad. It’s not quite as comprehensive, but it’s still amazing.

Security Tweaks

Truth be told, there isn’t much in the way of Mac malware. Even so, Apple continues to ruggedize the Mac against the bad guys on the internet.

• Gatekeeper, the feature that warns you when you open a program that didn’t come from Apple’s sanitized, inspected App Store, has been beefed up; now it actually scans all new apps for viruses and malware before you open them.

• Any time a program tries to access data in your Documents, Desktop, or Downloads folders; your iCloud Drive (or similar services like Dropbox); or external or removable drives, you get a dialog box asking you for permission to proceed. That warning puts a big damper on the activities of nefarious badware.

• Any time a program tries to record your keystrokes or take a screen capture of the screen (still or video), a message alerts you and asks for permission.

• Until now, somebody who steals your laptop could just erase it and use it as their own—or sell it. Thanks to the new Activation lock feature (inherited from the iPhone), that’s become impossible, at least on Macs that contain the T2 security chip (Macs introduced in 2018 or later, plus the iMac Pro).

  Here’s how it works. Once you’re signed into your iCloud account and you’ve turned on Find My Mac (“Find My Mac, Find My iPhone”), your Mac is essentially un-erasable. Nobody can wipe it without your iCloud login information.

• When you install macOS Catalina, it partitions off a chunk of your internal drive to use as its own private “system volume”—a read-only disk that can’t be changed or tampered with, just for the operating system itself. It’s completely separate from your programs and your files—and unavailable to any badness you download.

Radical Photos Redesign

The Photos app, too, has been iPhone-ized. The main browsing mode now presents AI-chosen representative photos for Years, Months, and Days, with easy zooming in and out of these times.

New Notes

With every passing year, the Notes app becomes more mighty. In Catalina, you can view your notes as a gallery of thumbnail miniatures instead of a list; share entire notes folders, rather than one note at a time; share notes or folders either in “view only” or “go ahead and make changes” mode; and search for words even inside scanned images you’ve attached to your notes.

New Reminders

Reminders, too, has had a huge upgrade—in fact, it’s been fully replaced by a new app. This one features reminder groups, subtasks, attachments, the automatic parsing of phrases like “Poker Tuesday nights at seven,” and more.

Lots of Misc.

Some of the smaller tweaks:

• Safari. The Start page (which appears before you’ve entered a web address) has a new design. It features icons for websites in your browsing history, sites you’ve recently visited, bookmarks, your reading list, and even links people sent to you in Messages.

• Mail. When you get an email from a commercial mailing list, there’s an Unsubscribe button right there above the body. A new Block Sender command auto-deletes incoming messages from somebody who’s annoying you. And there’s a Mute Thread option that stifles notifications for a particularly overactive email conversation.

• Continuity Sketch. If you have a recent iPad and an Apple Pencil stylus, you can sign or annotate PDF documents that are on your Mac. And you can draw something on the iPad and drop it directly into a Mac document.

• Find My. The Find My Mac and Find My Friends apps have been combined into a single app. And when you’re trying to find your lost device, you can now see where it is even if it’s offline, using some Bluetooth passerby magic (“Offline Finding”).

• Unlock with Apple Watch. Often, your Mac displays a message asking for your password, just to confirm that you’re you and that you know what you’re doing. Now, if you have an Apple Watch, you can just double-click its side button to authenticate yourself instead of typing your password. That comes into play when, for example, you want to make a change in System Preferences, view your Safari passwords, unlock a note, OK the installation of a new app, and so on.

• Apple ID in System Preferences. A new icon, Apple ID, at the top of System Preferences gives you direct access to all things Apple: your iCloud settings; your name, contact, and payment info; your subscriptions and purchases; your Family Sharing settings; and so on. You can also view a list of all your Apple gadgets and their statuses.

• QuickTime Player tweaks. You can now play back a video Picture-in-Picture style: as a floating mini-window that keeps playing while you do other things. You can also create a video from a folder full of sequentially numbered images.

• HomeKit video recordings. If you have an Apple TV or a HomePod, your HomeKit home security camera can record a clip automatically when it detects movement. You can get notified, and you can view the clips in the Home app on your Mac or online.

• International goodness. The keyboard prediction feature now offers Cantonese suggestions; there are 34 new fonts for Indian languages; Thai-English and Vietnamese-English dictionaries are on board; and there are new, more natural-sounding Indian voices for Siri.

• Un-upgrading. If, within 24 hours of installing Catalina, you decide you hate it, you can “rewind” your Mac to its condition before the upgrade.

The Dearly Departed

You may discover a few familiar features that are gone in Catalina:

• 32-bit apps don’t run. This one might be painful. In Catalina, ancient, “32-bit” apps (including years-old versions of Microsoft Office and Photoshop) don’t even open. See “The Death of 32-Bit Programs” for details.

• Dashboard. That weird screen full of “widgets” (floating windowlets showing stocks, weather, Stickies, and so on) has finally bitten the dust.

• iTunes. Yep, that old dinosaur’s functions have been split into individual apps for TV, Music, and Podcasts.

About This Book

To find your way around macOS Catalina, you’re expected to use Apple’s online help system. As you’ll quickly discover, these help pages are tersely written, offer very little technical depth, lack useful examples, and provide no tutorials whatsoever. You can’t mark your place, underline, or read them in the bathroom.

The purpose of this book, then, is to serve as the manual that should have accompanied macOS—version 10.15 in particular. Whether you have an antique, hand-cranked 2012 iMac or a shiny new model, this is your guide.

MacOS Catalina: The Missing Manual is designed to accommodate readers at every technical level. The primary discussions are written for advanced-beginner or intermediate Mac fans. But if you’re a Mac first-timer, miniature sidebar articles called “Up to Speed” provide the introductory information you need to understand the topic at hand. If you’re a Mac veteran, on the other hand, keep your eye out for similar shaded boxes called “Power Users’ Clinic.” They offer more-technical tips, tricks, and shortcuts.

When you write a book like this, you do a lot of soul-searching about how much to cover. Of course, a thinner book, or at least a thinner-looking one, is always preferable; plenty of readers are intimidated by a book that dwarfs the Tokyo White Pages. On the other hand, Apple keeps adding features and rarely takes them away.

That’s why some chapters come with free downloadable appendixes—PDF documents, available on this book’s “Missing CD” page at missingmanuals.com—that go into further detail on some of the tweakiest features. (You’ll see references to them sprinkled throughout the book.)

Maybe this idea will save a few trees—and a few back muscles when you try to pick this book up.

About the Outline

MacOS Catalina: The Missing Manual is divided into six parts, each containing several chapters:

• Part I covers everything you see on the screen when you turn on a Mac: folders, windows, icons, the Dock, the Sidebar, Spotlight, Spaces, Mission Control, Launchpad, Time Machine, menus, scroll bars, the Trash, aliases, the menu, and so on.

• Part II is dedicated to the proposition that an operating system is little more than a launchpad for programs—the actual applications you use: email programs, web browsers, word processors, graphics suites, and so on. These chapters describe how to work with applications—how to open them, switch among them, swap data between them, and use them to create and open files. And there’s also, of course, a chapter about Siri (and other ways to have a conversation with your Mac).

• Part III is an item-by-item discussion of the software nuggets that make up this operating system—the 30-ish panels of System Preferences and the 50-some programs in your Applications and Utilities folders.

• Part IV treads in more advanced territory, like networking and file sharing. These chapters also cover the visual talents of the Mac (photos, fonts, printing, graphics) and its multimedia gifts (sound, movies).

• Part V covers all the internet features, including the Mail email program and the Safari web browser; Messages for instant messaging and audio or video chats; internet sharing; Apple’s free, online iCloud services; and connecting to and controlling your Mac from across the wires.

• Part VI. This book’s appendixes include guidance on installing this operating system, a troubleshooting handbook, a Windows-to-Mac dictionary (to help Windows refugees find the new locations of familiar features in macOS), and a master list of all the keyboard shortcuts and trackpad/mouse gestures on your Mac.

About MissingManuals.com

To get the most out of this book, visit missingmanuals.com. Click the “Missing CDs” link, this book’s first letter, and then this book’s title, to reveal a neat, organized, chapter-by-chapter list of the shareware and freeware mentioned in this book.

The website also offers book corrections and updates. (To see them, click the book’s title, and then click View/Submit Errata.) In fact, please submit such corrections and updates yourself! In an effort to keep the book as up-to-date and accurate as possible, each time we print more copies of it, we’ll make any confirmed corrections you’ve suggested. We’ll also note such changes on the website so you can mark important corrections into your own copy of the book, if you like. And we’ll keep the book current as Apple releases more macOS 10.15 updates.

About→These→Arrows

Throughout this book, you’ll find sentences like this one: “Open the System folder→Library→Fonts folder.” That’s shorthand for a much longer instruction that directs you to open three nested folders in sequence, like this:

“On your hard drive, you’ll find a folder called System. Open that. Inside the System folder window is a folder called Library; double-click to open it. Inside that folder is yet another one called Fonts. Double-click to open it, too.” See Figure P-1.

Figure P-1. If this book says “Choose View→Sort By→Name,” it’s describing a logical sequence of steps.
In this example, that would mean clicking the View menu, choosing the Sort By command from it, and then choosing Name from the submenu.

The Very Basics

To use this book, and indeed to use a Mac, you need to know some basics. This book assumes you’re familiar with a few terms and concepts:

• Clicking. To click means to point the arrow cursor at something on the screen and then—without moving the cursor—press and release the clicker button on the mouse or trackpad. To double-click, of course, means to click twice in rapid succession, again without moving the cursor at all. And to drag means to move the cursor while holding down the mouse button.

  When you’re told to -click something, you click while pressing the key (which is next to the space bar). Shift-clicking, Option-clicking, and Control-clicking work the same way—just click while pressing the corresponding key. (There’s also right-clicking. That very important topic is described in depth on “Notes on Right-Clicking”.)

• Menus. The menus are the words at the top of your screen: , File, Edit, and so on. Click one to make a list of commands appear.

  Some people click once to open a menu and then, after reading the choices, click again on the one they want. Other people like to hold down the mouse button continuously after the initial click on the menu title, drag down the list to the desired command, and only then release the mouse button. Either method works fine.

• Keyboard shortcuts. If you’re typing along in a burst of creative energy, it’s disruptive to have to grab the mouse to use a menu. That’s why many Mac fans prefer to trigger menu commands by pressing key combinations. For example, in word processors, you can press -B to produce a boldface word. When you read an instruction like “Press -B,” start by pressing the key, and then, while it’s down, type the letter B, and finally release both keys.

  Tip

  You know what’s really nice? The keystroke to open the Preferences dialog box in every Apple program—Mail, Safari, iMovie, Photos, TextEdit, Preview, and on and on—is always the same: -comma. Better yet, that standard is catching on in other apps, too, like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.

• Gestures. A gesture is a swipe across your trackpad (on your laptop, or on an external Apple trackpad) or across the top surface of the Apple Magic Mouse. Gestures have been given huge importance in macOS. “Trackpad gestures” contains a handy list of them.

• Dialog boxes. See Figure P-2 for a tour of the onscreen elements you’ll frequently be asked to use, such as checkboxes, radio buttons, tabs, and so on.

  

  Figure P-2. Knowing what you’re doing on the Mac often requires knowing what things are called. Here are some of the most common onscreen elements. They include checkboxes (turn on as many as you like) and radio buttons (only one can be turned on in each grouping).
  Pressing Return is usually the same as clicking the default button—the lower-right button that almost always means “OK, I’m done here.”

• Icons. The colorful inch-tall pictures that appear in your various desktop folders are the graphic symbols that represent each program, disk, and document on your computer. If you click an icon one time, it darkens, indicating that you’ve just highlighted or selected it. Now you’re ready to manipulate it by using, for example, a menu command. (If you double-click an icon, it opens.)

A few more tips on using the Mac keyboard appear at the beginning of Chapter 6. Otherwise, if you’ve mastered this much information, then you have all the technical background you need to enjoy macOS Catalina: The Missing Manual.