![]() ![]() The deck chairs have been rearranged on the top-level play bar - Now Playing content is now aligned left, with controls moved to the center and volume to the right.Īs someone who uses iTunes every day to listen to music, I’m disappointed to report that some features I use have failed to make the transition to Music. It’s a decision that makes sense if you’ve got a single-window interface, but I don’t use my Mac in full screen mode and I didn’t mind the popover approach that iTunes took with those windows. Up Next and Lyrics panes now slide out over the interface, obscuring what’s behind-essentially the inverse of the old drawer metaphor in the early days of Mac OS X. Music feels like a version of iTunes that’s been heavily influenced by Apple’s decisions on iOS. The Music app is based on iTunes but brings features (like an interface-eclipsing slide-in panel) from iOS. While the broad strokes of the change are pretty much what anyone might have guessed, the details are interesting: the Music and TV apps appear to be built out of the code of iTunes, while the pioneering implementation of podcast browsing from 2005 has been put out to pasture, replaced by a new Podcasts app sourced from iOS and brought to the Mac via Catalyst.ĭespite being sourced largely from iTunes, the Music and TV apps have been given a new coat of paint, with more colorful sidebars-and the Podcasts app has been designed to match, giving the three media apps a consistency that might surprise you if you think that apps built via Catalyst won’t feel the same as apps built explicitly for macOS. With macOS Catalina, the separation has arrived. The writing has been on the wall for the monolithic Mac iTunes app for a few years now: Apple’s strategy on iOS (where iTunes’s features have been served by separate Music, Podcasts, and video apps for years) set the course. iTunes becomes Music, Podcasts, and Apple TV (and Finder?) And never work with data that you aren’t also backing up somewhere else. Don’t install this on your main Mac’s main hard drive-either use a secondary computer or a separate partition or an external drive. And if you’re up for the challenge you can help.īefore you run to install the beta, some final words of advice: Consider if you really want to go down this path. Things will change and improve over the summer. ![]() Users of Apple betas should use the Feedback Assistant app to let Apple know if things just aren’t working right. With any luck, many of them will be smoothed out by this fall-though I fear that at least some of them are poor decisions on Apple’s part that we’ll be living with for longer than this summer.Īnd this is a key point of being on the public-beta train: using the Feedback Assistant app to tell Apple about bad stuff you see, and things you don’t like. We are headed in to a future with more unified apps and interfaces and an increased security focus.Īs for the present, Catalina definitely has its bumps. But for now, the public beta of Catalina shows the direction Apple is taking the Mac and all its platforms. With this much going on, it’s not surprising that most people should generally not upgrade to the public beta it’s a work in progress that will be officially released sometime this fall. Photos gets a new machine-learning-driven facelift, and many of Apple’s other apps-including Mail, Safari, Notes, and most especially Reminders-have gotten upgrades. There are also major new additions to parental controls and device management, a huge upgrade to accessibility, the ability to use an iPad as an additional display and input device, and a raft of new security and privacy features. iTunes is being broken into individual applications, including Music, Podcasts, and TV, with a small piece being spun into the Finder. This begins the era of third-party developers bringing their iPad apps to the Mac for the first time-and Apple’s bringing a few iOS apps of its own to the Mac as well. There’s a lot going on in macOS Catalina, version 10.15 of the software that runs the Mac, which arrives today with its first Public Beta release. Note: This story has not been updated for several years.
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