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11 Features to Look Forward to in Apple’s 2022 Operating Systems

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It’s that time of year again. Apple CEO Tim Cook and numerous Apple employees took the virtual stage again at the company’s Worldwide Developer Conference keynote on June 6th to share what we can expect to see later this year in macOS 13 Ventura, iOS 16, iPadOS 16, and watchOS 9. (Almost no mention was made of tvOS or the HomePod, but Apple will undoubtedly move them forward in small ways as well.)

The announcements came thick and fast, and like last year, many of the technologies cut across several of Apple’s operating systems. Before we dive in, however, remember that some older devices won’t be able to upgrade. Here are the basic system requirements, though certain features won’t be available on all devices:

  • macOS 13 Ventura: iMac, iMac Pro, MacBook, and MacBook Pro from 2017 and later. MacBook Air and Mac mini from 2018 and later. Mac Pro from 2019 and later. Mac Studio from 2022.
  • iOS 16: Second-generation iPhone SE, iPhone 8, and later
  • iPadOS 16: Fifth-generation iPad and later, fifth-generation iPad mini and later, third-generation iPad Air and later, and all iPad Pro models
  • watchOS 9: Apple Watch Series 4 and newer, including the Apple Watch SE

Here are the promised new features we think will have the most impact on your Apple experience. Assume that these features are available on the Mac, iPhone, and iPad unless otherwise specified.

Customizable iPhone Lock Screen

We’ve been able to put a photo on the iPhone’s Lock screen for years, but that’s it. With iOS 16, Apple is opening up lots of customization options along the lines of what you can do to Apple Watch faces. To start, you can customize the font, color, and placement of various options, just like a watch face. Photos dynamically display in front of the time, and you can have a set of photos shuffle throughout the day. Widgets from Apple and third-party developers provide at-a-glance information so you can check the weather, say, without even unlocking your iPhone. Notifications now scroll up from the bottom, and Live Activities help you stay up on the music that’s currently playing or the latest score in the big game.

Messages Gains Editing, Undo Send, and Mark as Unread

At long last, Messages will let us edit messages after sending, undo sending to call a message back, and mark messages as unread. The first two features are essential for clear communication, especially when you’re fixing auto-correct failures, and being able to mark messages as unread ensures that you won’t forget to respond to something that you read when you’re not in a position to reply.

Mail Adds Undo Send, Scheduled Send, Follow-up, and Remind Me

It’s surprising that Apple hasn’t spent more time on Mail in recent years, but that’s changing in 2022, when it will gain some welcome features that are commonplace in other email apps. You’ll be able to undo sending, which is helpful when you remember something to add to a message within 10 seconds after clicking the Send button. For more specific timing, scheduled send lets you specify when a message should go out. This is helpful when you are working on the weekend or late at night but don’t want your co-workers to feel that they need to reply right away.  Mail will also move sent messages that haven’t received replies to the top of your inbox so you can follow up, and you can set a reminder to come back to messages that you’ve opened but not dealt with (many of us just mark those as unread).

Multi-Stop Routing in Maps

No longer are you limited to a single destination when creating a route in Maps. You’ll be able to specify up to 15 stops on a route, making it easy to build a trip that includes a swing by your favorite diner, a quick visit with an old friend, and a pilgrimage to the World’s Largest Bull in Iowa.

iCloud Shared Photo Library Improves Family Photo Sharing

Apple’s latest attempt to help families share photos looks like the best yet—certainly better than the shared Family album that’s created for Family Sharing groups now. It will be a completely separate iCloud photo library shared with up to five other people. You’ll be able to populate it with all your existing photos or a subset based on start date or who’s in them. Everyone will have equal permission to add, edit, favorite, caption, and delete photos, so maintaining and improving it becomes a group activity. Sharing new photos will be easy with a switch in the Camera app, automatic sharing based on proximity to family members, and sharing suggestions in Photos.

Passkeys Aims to Replace Passwords… Eventually

Apple’s new Passkeys technology, which is associated with the work of an industry consortium called the FIDO Alliance to ensure cross-platform support, aims to replace passwords for websites and apps with private passkeys that are stored only on your device and accessed by Touch ID or Face ID. Passkeys are easier to use than passwords and significantly safer because they can’t be stolen from websites and each one is specific to the site for which you create it. They’ll be available on all your Apple devices, syncing end-to-end encrypted through iCloud Keychain.

Use Your iPhone as a Webcam for Your Mac

Mac webcams are nowhere near as good as the rear-facing cameras in your iPhone, so Apple is helping us improve our videoconferencing by using an iPhone as a webcam and microphone. The feature, called Continuity Camera, works wired or wirelessly and can automatically switch to using your iPhone as a webcam when you bring it close to your Mac. It provides Portrait mode to blur the background, Center Stage so you can move around, Studio Light to dim the background and illuminate your face, and even Desk View to show what’s on your desk in front of your Mac. Apple says Belkin will be making clips to attach your iPhone to your Mac.

Stage Manager Offers New Window Management Approach

We’re not yet sure what to make of Stage Manager, which is Apple’s new approach to window management on the iPad and Mac. It puts one app in the center of the screen while keeping other apps off to the side, making it easy to flip between apps or show multiple apps at once. It doesn’t replace traditional window management—you have to turn it on in Control Center—so you won’t be forced to change, but it might be welcome, especially on the iPad, where it also enables the use of an external display.

Simultaneous Dictation, Touch Selection, and Keyboard Editing

On the iPhone and iPad, you’ve been able to tap a microphone button to invoke Dictation, a huge boon when you want to send a message without typing. In iOS 16 and iPadOS 16, Apple has radically improved Dictation, so you can now simultaneously talk, type, edit on the keyboard, select text via touch, and use the Apple Pencil (on an iPad). Dictation will also automatically add commas, periods, and question marks as you dictate, and you can insert emojis with voice commands. Sadly, it seems that the Mac gets only the punctuation and emoji capabilities.

Medications App on the Apple Watch

Many of us have to take medications, vitamins, and supplements regularly. To help us better manage our health, Apple is adding the Medications app to watchOS 9. You’ll be able to enter your meds in the Health app on the iPhone, be alerted to any critical interactions between drugs, and have your Apple Watch notify you to take the right pills at the right times.

Weather App Appears on the iPad and Mac

Finally, because our list goes to 11, Apple says it’s bringing the Weather app to the iPad and the Mac. Since Weather has been on the iPhone since the beginning, it’s hard to fathom what took Apple so long. If you haven’t already jumped ship for one of the 17,000 other weather apps out there, you’ll be able to enjoy using Apple’s built-in app in iPadOS 16 and macOS 13 Ventura.

Apple’s upcoming operating system releases boast many other new features, and we plan to explore more of them once everything ships in a few months. We’ll let you know when it’s time to update!

(Featured image by Apple)

Social Media: At its Worldwide Developer Conference keynote, Apple announced oodles of new features that we’ll see in macOS 13 Ventura, iOS 16, iPadOS 16, and watchOS 9 later this year. Here are the ten—no, eleven!—features we think you’ll most like:

Easily Share Wi-Fi Passwords with Other People and Devices

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You’re on vacation with your family, staying in an Airbnb, with multiple Apple devices to connect to the apartment’s Wi-Fi. Typing the password repeatedly would be a pain, but happily, Apple has added a password-sharing feature to all its operating systems. Once you enter the password on your iPhone, whenever someone else—or another of your devices—tries to connect to the Wi-Fi network, your iPhone will prompt you to share the password. Tap Share Password and then Done. It’s also a great way to share your home Wi-Fi password with a visitor. (For password sharing to work, both devices must have Wi-Fi and Bluetooth on and Personal Hotspot disabled, and you and the other person must have each other’s Apple ID email address saved in Contacts.)

(Featured image by Adam Engst)

Export Passwords from Safari to Ease the Move to a Password Manager

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Although Apple has improved the built-in password management features in macOS and iOS (you can now add notes to password entries!), third-party password managers like 1Password and LastPass are still more capable. For those still getting started using a password manager, another new capability will ease the transition: Safari password export. To export a CSV file of your Safari passwords, choose Safari > Preferences > Passwords, and enter your password when prompted. From the bottom of the left-hand sidebar, click the ••• button, choose Export All Passwords, and save the Passwords.csv file to the Desktop. After you import the file into 1Password (instructions), LastPass (instructions), or another password manager, be sure to delete the exported file and empty the trash.

(Featured image by iStock.com/metamorworks)

Approve App Authentication Requests with Your Apple Watch in Catalina

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Tired of typing your admin account password whenever you try to install software or change security settings on your Mac? A new feature in macOS 10.15 Catalina removes that requirement for Apple Watch owners. In System Preferences > Security & Privacy > General, select the checkbox for “Use your Apple Watch to unlock apps and your Mac.” Then, whenever an app asks for your account credentials, you can instead just double-press the side button on your Apple Watch. Of course, if you forgot to wear it or its battery has died, you can always fall back on entering your password.

(Featured image by Adam Engst)

Never Send Someone a Password in Mail or Messages: Do This Instead!

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One of the big no-nos with passwords is sending them to other people as plain text in email or a text message conversation. You presumably trust your recipient with the password, but what if their email was hacked or phone stolen? Instead, always use a site like 1ty.me or One-Time Secret, which lets you turn a password into a Web link that can be opened only once. Send that link to the recipient, and when they get the password out, they can store it in a secure password manager like 1Password or LastPass.

(Featured image by Kristina Flour on Unsplash)

Have Your Online Passwords Been Stolen? Here’s How to Find Out.

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Data breaches have become commonplace, with online thieves constantly breaking into corporate and government servers and making off with millions—or even hundreds of millions!—of email addresses, often along with other personal information like names, physical address, and passwords.

It would be nice to think that all companies properly encrypt their password databases, but the sad reality is that many have poor data security practices. As a result, passwords gathered in a breach are often easily cracked, enabling the bad guys to log in to your accounts. That may not seem like a big deal—who cares if someone reads the local newspaper under your name? But since many people reuse passwords across multiple sites, once one password associated with an email address is known, attackers use automated software to test that combination against many other sites.

This is why we keep beating the drum for password managers like 1Password and LastPass. They make it easy to create and enter a different random password for every Web site, which protects you in two ways.

  • Because password managers can create passwords of any length, you don’t have to rely on short passwords that you can remember and type easily. The longer the password, the harder it is to crack. A password of 16–20 characters is generally considered safe; never use anything shorter than 13 characters.
  • Even if one of your passwords was compromised, having a different password for every site ensures that the attackers can’t break into any of your other accounts.

But password security hasn’t always been a big deal on the Internet, and many people reused passwords regularly in the past. Wouldn’t it be nice to know if any of your information was included in a data breach, so you’d know which passwords to change?

A free service called Have I Been Pwned does just this (“pwned” is hacker-speak for “owned” or “dominated by”—it rhymes with “owned”). Run by Troy Hunt, Have I Been Pwned gathers the email addresses associated with data breaches and lets you search to see if your address was stolen in any of the archived data breaches. Even better, you can subscribe to have the service notify you if your address shows up in any future breaches.

Needless to say, you’ll want to change your password on any site that has suffered a data breach, and if you reused that password on any other sites, give them new, unique passwords as well. That may seem like a daunting task, and we won’t pretend that it isn’t a fair amount of work, but both 1Password and LastPass offer features to help.

In 1Password, look in the sidebar for Watchtower, which provides several lists, including accounts where the password may have been compromised in a known breach, passwords that are known to have been compromised, passwords that you reused across sites, and weak passwords.

LastPass provide essentially the same information through its Security Challenge and rates your overall security in comparison with other LastPass users. It suggests a series of steps for improving your passwords; the only problem is that you need to restart the Security Challenge if you don’t have time to fix all the passwords at once.

Regardless of which password manager you use, take some time to check for and update compromised, vulnerable, and weak passwords. Start with more important sites, and, as time permits, move on to accounts that don’t contain confidential information.

Social Media: Have any of your online passwords been stolen in a breach? The answer is probably “yes,” and today’s article helps you discover and correct your most problematic passwords.