At this meeting, held on 11th July, we talked more about the new features in the version 26 operating systems coming later this year including the smaller improvements which have been spotted in the betas. Members also brought up several other topics.
Version 26 OS “little things”
Robert presented some the smaller new features that have been discovered in the iOS and macOS 26 beta versions including:
iOS 26
- The home bar at the bottom of the screen now only appears briefly when an app is opened.
- Customise the snooze time of alarms.
- Warning if the iPhone camera is dirty.
- You can spell out unrecognised words when using dictation.
- Messages has new filtering options for unknown senders and the option to detect and allow one-time messages like passcodes from businesses.
- In Messages on iOS and iPadOS, text within a message can now be selected (so you don’t have to copy the whole bubble). DaveK showed us how this works.
- The estimated time to full battery is shown on the lock screen when charging.
- The liquid glass transparency effect can be turned off in accessibility settings.
Macrumors has an interesting list of these features.
macOS 26
- Option turn off selected app icons in the menu bar.
- Many more Control Centre customisation options.
- Volume and brightness adjustments now appear below the menu bar.
- Menus now have icons next to most options to aid recognition.
- Automatic categorisation option in Reminders.
- For the technically minded, A new virtual disk format.
These articles cover many of the new macOS features:
Gotechtor: macOS 26 Tahoe New Features
Lifehacker: Coolest barely mentioned features in macOS 26 Tahoe
Member Topics
- DaveK pointed out that in Notes you can organise your notes into folders and subfolders. We also found that there’s an option to enable notes stored on your Mac (alongside notes in iCloud) in Notes settings on the Mac.
- DaveK demonstrated the categories feature introduced in Mail in iOS 18.2.
- DaveK mentioned pkl, an Apple-supported project for developers to generate configuration files.
- DaveK also talked about the viral AI band Velvet Sundown.
- Ben mentioned how useful the automatic voice mail transcription is in the Phone app.
- Denesh recommended Murderbot on Apple TV+.
- We talked about the annoyance of the ad implementation on YouTube and other online streaming services. uBlock Origin with Firefox was suggested as an effective ad blocker. uBlock Origin is also available for Chrome and some other browsers but not recent versions of Safari.