I usually find these changes fun enough, although it’s a matter of personal interest. What I found most tweaking is probably that the toolbar buttons are now just floating symbols, like you can find in iOS. There appears to be no “border” to click on, although it will show what is selected when you hover your mouse over it. Most importantly, these visual changes do not change the basic Mac experience.
The control center is great, but the notification center needs work
Apple
That said, the Control Center represents a significant change in how you manage your Mac. Unlike its iOS counterpart, the Control Center on the OS COS does not group the set of commonly used settings (eg, WiFi, Bluetooth, Do Not Disturb) in one place. To see everything, just close the clock, just click the small “Sliders” icon in the menu bar.
Previously, settings like Bluetooth and WiFi sat directly in the menu bar for easy access, but many of these buttons make the menu bar feel cluttered very quickly. Now, you can select the items you want one-click want access and place them in the menu bar; The rest you can find in the control center. This means that I only see what I want to see (such as battery life and clock), while the settings I often don’t adjust (such as WiFi and Bluetooth) remain hidden, but still easily accessible.
Apple
The notification center still sits in a pane that slides to the right of the screen, but now it’s a space for widgets and notifications. At first, it seemed that things would get shorter. But if you have a lot of instructions that you can use, you can just hit the “Show more” button and move on. The rest of the time, widgets are more accessible than before. Like iOS 14, Apple’s first-party widgets now come in many sizes. No third-party widgets have been enabled in Big Sur Beta (at least as of this writing), but I’m looking forward to seeing how other apps take advantage of the improved widget system.
Unfortunately, the instructions themselves need some polishing. That’s mostly because it’s not always clear how to clean. On some instructions, you can hover over them and get an X to remove them, but it’s buggy. Sometimes the X appears and disappears at random when you hover the mouse over it, and sometimes it doesn’t appear at all. These are the kind of bugs that will probably be ironed before launch, but for now they are a bit disappointing.
Safari’s details about tracking security are interesting, but it’s not functional
Apple
As always, Apple is promising various performance improvements and new features for Pal Safari. I can’t judge yet if they are as fast as they say or if the battery life improvement is real. But one thing I really appreciate is the privacy report. Next to the URL bar is a small scroll icon that you can click to find out what web browsing trackers Safari has discovered on the page. Safari has had built-in tracking protection for a few years now, but that information is now much more visible.
The privacy-tracking drop-down block that Safari blocks can be extended to a full view of everything related to the tracker. It shows how many trackers it has blocked in the last 30 days, the percentage of sites you visited using trackers, what is the most contacted tracker, and then the trackers on each site you visit. It’s more information than most people probably need, but transparency is great, especially when it’s hard to find. On the other hand, it’s not terrible actionable information, it just provides more granular information on what Safari does to protect your privacy.
The messages should eventually be the same as the iOS app, but it’s hard to say yet
Messages has become one of Apple’s killer apps and one of the best reasons to have multiple devices in Apple’s ecosystem. As such, Messages is probably one of the most important applications for many people on the Internet, but it has lagged behind its ISS counterpart for years. Between Big Sur and iOS 14, Messages is getting a lot of nice upgrades that should put the iOS and iOS versions back in feature parity.
Apple
That means you’ll be able to send messages with effects like confetti and balloons, and you’ll have access to memoji stickers and a one-click GIF search. Things like the ability to pin conversations at the top of the app, improved search, inline replies and mentions are more useful. Unfortunately, I haven’t really been able to verify some very useful things like replies and mentions, because I don’t know many people who run beta software for exchanging messages. But there’s no doubt that messaging on Mac is getting better this year – pinned conversations, message responses and simple GIF searches have already gotten better using messages on Big Sur.
