Apple WWDC 2022 | macOS 13 is now called Ventura and comes with new productivity and Continuity features

(Image Courtesy: Apple)

True to form, Apple's crack marketing team visited and drew inspiration from the city of Ventura in California, USA, and gave that name to macOS 13.

Along with the new name, come a new set of features that aim to make the multitasking experience better, combined with updates to Mail and Messages, and the ability to use your iPhone as a webcam. Here are the major features announced for macOS Ventura.

Like with iPadOS 16, Stage Manager enables a brand new multitasking experience that makes it easy to view everything you are working on, at a glance.

It organizes all your open apps and files automatically when you enable it, even matching open projects and files to their respective apps. The main window you are currently working with, is given center view, while the apps you have open in the background are moved to the left side of the screen, with overlays on the icons, representing files or projects open within that app.

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From here, you can simply click on an app to make it take center stage, allowing you to quickly switch between them. You can also drag and drop files and folders from one app to the other, and more impressively, save a collection of apps that are required for a workflow, and then bring them up later.

It also works with Mission Control and Spaces, letting you switch between your open desktop views and files.

If you happen to own an iPhone and a Mac, you can use Continuity Camera to use the cameras on your iPhone as a webcam. It's really easy to do as well, attach your iPhone to a stand and simply bring it near a Mac with Ventura installed.

It allows you to use all the iPhone camera tools on the device, like Center Stage, Portrait Mode, and the new Studio Light. What's even more impressive is that Continuity Camera uses the iPhone's ultrawide module for a top-centered desk view, that does not require you to fiddle with your iPhone for a good angle, it automatically generates it.

Besides this, Handoff now gains support for FaceTime, which means you can start a call on one device, and then seamlessly transition over to the Mac, or vice-versa.

Apple has updated Spotlight on the Mac with a new design, and users can now use Quick Look to quickly see a preview of their files. It will even show images in the photo library, across the system and the web. You can search for images using location, people, scene or objects. It even lets the search for text inside images.

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Spotlight also supports various quick actions now, like setting up an Alarm, or creating a new document, or finding a shortcut. Apple has updated spotlight to include detailed results for artists, movies, actors and TV Shows, along with various businesses and sports.

Apple's gaming API, Metal 3, has received a new feature called MetalFX Upscaling. Similar to Nvidia's DLSS and AMD's Fidelity FX, MetalFX uses lower resolutions to quickly render intensive frames, and then upscales them to the target resolution while applying temporal anti-aliasing to make them look sharper.

Besides this is a new Fast Resource Loading API that provides a direct path from storage to the GPU, speeding up load times for textures and geometry in a scene.

Apple announced that new games were coming to the Mac as well like No Man's Sky, EA's GRID series and Capcom's Resident Evil Village.

Besides these, improvements made to Mail, Messages and Search will also carry over from iOS 16 and iPadOS 16, including support for iCloud's Shared Photo Library.