Solid New Features in Sequoia

TidBITS Talk
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I thought I’d highlight a couple of new features in Sequoia that are really useful:

  1. Safari’s new “Hide Distracting Items” feature. So many websites have the annoying drop-down, video clips, etc, that make them hard to read. Using this feature lets me give those pages a haircut. Really handy so far. This is what an article on Inc looks like before I trimmed it:

Screenshot 2024-10-15 at 10.14.22 AM
Screenshot 2024-10-15 at 10.14.22 AM2106×1220 294 KB

and after:

Screenshot 2024-10-15 at 10.15.02 AM
Screenshot 2024-10-15 at 10.15.02 AM2106×1220 207 KB

It’s more targeted than Readability and I find myself using it quite regularly.

  1. The iPhone Mirroring app lets me rearrange apps on my iPhone from my Mac. So much easier with the mouse than with my finger. At the moment, only my front page is heavily curated – the rest of them are a mess of random apps. This makes me want to actually put some organizational work in.

Anybody find anything else really useful?

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2

I’m liking the visibility of reminders in the Calendar app. Very useful and nicely done.

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3

Finally installed the release Sequoia 15.0.1.

iPhone Mirroring was one of the features I was looking forward to, but for reasons, I at least, don’t understand it requires iCloud, and 2-Factor Authentication.

In the Lock Screen settings “Require password after screen saver begins or display is turned off” is ghosted, and set to “immedidately.” Anyone else seeing this? (15.1 beta is does not do this.)

And, I had known, but forgot that I would have to write all my login apps into an AppleScript so that I could hide them.

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I’ve seen this on Macs with a profile. Do you have one on that 15.0.1 install?

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Don’t even know what you mean by “profile.” If there is a profile, shouldn’t it have been copied to the beta 15.1 partition.

If Apple flipped a Setting, as it has historically, liked to do, where might it be?

Thanks.

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It wasn’t obvious to me that this was all on the same volume.

Yes, MA would transfer a profile.

Profiles are listed under System Settings > Privacy & Security > Profiles and are often found on corporate managed Macs.

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Sorry, to be clear, 15.0.1 is on my internal drive. 15.1 beta is on an external one.

I thought that was the type of profile you meant, but never been near corporate. FWIW, profiles now seem to be in System Settings / General / Device Management. “No profiles installed.”

Thanks, though.

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Safari 18 and Hide Distracting Items has also been backported to Sonoma (and Ventura, I think.)

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