Like everyone else that has installed Ventura, the first, and most immediately noticeable item is: System Preferences have been replaced with System Settings, lifted almost directly from iOS/iPadOS. In fact, the Preferences menu in all Apple apps has become the Settings menu. Like it or hate it, my immediate reaction is, "at least it consistent across Apple OS variants", which IMHO is as good thing. One thing that has not changed is the download and install time estimates are still wildly inaccurate until the final ten minutes which are dead accurate. The initial estimate started out at 2 1/2 hours and a bit over half an hour I was up and running in Ventura. So far...

• Sounds Source is broken, but a Ventura fix is promised by fall
• Carbon Copy Cloner 5 won't run, but there is a version 6 beta available
• ScanSnap Home that was broken in Monterey 12.5 beta 5 works in Ventura
• DEVONThink 3 plugin for Mail is broken
• there has been an update to Safari Technology Preview
• ???

...and this is only fifteen minutes after booting. All-in-all not bad at all for a first public beta.

Now it is time for iOS 16 and iPadOS 16.

MAYBE THE BEST FEATURE

In theory, it isn't that much, but Stage Manager may be one of the biggest productivity features yet. Open two, three, four, or even more applications, click on Stage Manager and the application with current focus appears front and center on the screen and the others are lined up in nice neat little windows on the left side of the screen. Click on any one of those windows and that window takes the focus and pops up front and center. Simple, elegant, and works like a dream. Even better, if you have multiple monitors, it works on bother monitors and even across monitors.

I just had A bill paying session, and it cut the time to scan a bill, store it in the database, record the transaction in Quicken, copy the bill into quicken, and cut a check or pay it online dramatically. Each step flowed smoothly from one app to the other in a contiguous stream. As far as I am concerned, Stage Manager has just become a full time feature of my computer work flow. The next question is if and how this will work when I throw the iPad Pro into the picture. But more time for that tomorrow.

COOL RUNNING

Whether I ham-handed Mail or found a glitch in Ventura, I ended up needing to use some new features that carried over from Monterey to recover and it was way cool.

The Situation

I received an email in Ventura with an attached document I had forgotten to sign. So I printed it out, signed it, scanned it, attached the scan to a reply in Mail and hit send. Mail promptly crashed! to make a long story short I re-attempted to send the email and ended up with half a dozen stacked Mail windows all hung and all resisting being closed and the message had yet to be successfully sent.

The Fix

Opened my iPad Pro then using the trackpad on the Mac moved the cursor to the far right edge of the monitor and beyond until the cursor appeared on the iPad. Still using the trackpad and keyboard on the Mac I was able to open iPad Mail and draft a reply to the message I had been unable to send on the Mac, move the cursor back to the Mac to select and copy the attachment. Back to the iPad once again and paste the attachment to the document on the iPad and send it easily.

Then I noticed the Mail icon on the Mac had an icon attached to it that resembled an iPhone. Click on that and A new window opened in Mail on the Mac mirroring the window on the iPad. The data from the iPad is transfered to the Mac and the Mac actually handles the traffic.

Conclusion

The ability to smoothly move between the iPad and Desktop and pass processing tasks from one to the other started in Monterey, but Ventura has significantly refined it and it has become a powerful and useful tool. I can' wait to see this when iPadOS

STILL MORE ABOUT STAGE MANAGER

It has taken me a while to catch onto something about Stage Manager, it not only neatly organizes open apps along the left side of the monitor, if an app has multiple windows open, those windows are placed in a stack you can sort through by clicking on the stack. It is not the application that takes the focus, it is the specific window that takes the focus. Any other open windows remain in the stack on the left edge of the monitor. I have already discovered this makes windows preferable to tabs in numerous instances.

STAGE MANAGER IN IPadOS 16

I had forgotten that Stage Manager was coming to iPadOS as well as Ventura. To my surprise and pleasure, it is functionally identical on both platforms. Stage Manager effectively brings real multitasking to the iPad and blurs the distinction between Tablets and laptops into a very fuzzy line. If the iPad apps come up to full strength (and given the iPad Pro uses the same M1 processor as the MacBook Air that should mostly be a matter of validating compatibility) the distinction is going to what features the iPad has that are not supported on the MacBook (telephone modem and Apple Pencil come immediately to mind) and for many road warriors the iPad would easily be the handiest and more versatile choice.

SO FAR BETTER THAN GOOD

This is the first public beta of Ventura, IPadOS 16, and iOS 16 and (fingers crossed) the best first beta in memory.

• game changing new features that actually work, right out of the box
• several issues I was having in the last couple of Monterey betas don't exist in Ventura
• no major app broken and one significant app that was broken (ScanSnap Home), has been restored to functionality.
• the few broken apps I have encountered are so minor I will probably end up deleting them
• Preview has hung intermittently when annotating a document but the hangs are not reliably repeatable
• reboots are many times faster than they were in Ventura
• My devices are more stable in Ventura and iOS/iPadOS 16 than they were in the last few Monterey/iOS/iPadOS betas
• OS/iPadOS 15 and particularly Monterey are the culmination of a major structural reshape of the OS. Ventura and iOS/iPadOS 16 seem far more focused on user features and experience.

STARTUP ITEMS

If anyone had intimated I would be touting startup items as a significant new and improved feature of macOS, I would have laughed at the idea, but that was then and this is Ventura. The fact that System Preferences in Ventura is now System > Settings with a very iOS-like look & feel is well known, but this morning I ran into a new feature in System > Settings that could be a troubleshooting game-changer. Startup Items has been moved from the Users & Groups pane to General pretty much intact. The important change is a new section, Allow in the Background has been added including all the various LaunchAgents and LaunchDaemons along with toggle switches to turn each of them on or off! This opens a new troubleshooting dimension in Ventura, and I immediately found it useful. NOTE: I submitted a suggestion to add the toggle switches to the Login items.

I don't follow that specific part, but I love the general idea, because it apparently replaces safe boot with a much easier and more practical way to troubleshoot.

You have the right idea, Safe Boot is a shotgun approach and this is precision targeting. However, Safe Boot also disables extensions while this does not.

Any idea why it doesn't deal with extensions?

And I still don't understand what you suggested.

Thanks.

As it currently stands Settings > General > Login Items is divided into two sections

1. "Open at login" (heretofore Login Items) that can be added or deleted ( + or - )
2. "Allow in the background" (LaunchItems & Launch dragon and a little more) with individual switches to enable or disable each of them.

I am asking that the switches be added to the "Open at Login" items in addition to the add and delete option. Not only would that facilitate troubleshooting, it opens the possibility of different settings in different focuses and/or configurations. For example, a laptop user might have apps they want launched automatically when they are in the office, but not on the road, or an instructor might want different sets of apps to launch automatically for different classes.

CONTROL CENTER

Another feature that has come into its own in Ventura is the Control Center. That rather ho-hum item just to the left of the time/date at the extreme right end of the menu bar has become an alternative location for many of those icons cluttering up the right side of the menu bar. It takes, not just one but two settings screens to control all the items that can go into Control Center instead of or in addition to the menu bar. I typically have several things running, and my menu bar is often overcrowded. In Ventura, much of that clutter has migrated to Control Center, where it only appears when active. (Now I suppose I will have to de-clutter my physical desktop. )

It is a little thing, but these little things are adding up to a new, macOS experience. Fortunately, for those who hate change, many of them can be switched off.

Got it, thanks.

You're requesting that switches, NOT "the switches" be added to the Login Items pane.
"The" implies the same ones as are in the menu bar dropdown, which is why I was lost.

BOOTABLE CLONE FAILURE

This must be taken in light of the fact I am running a beta version of CCC 6.1.3-b1 (7374), on a beta OS version macOS 13.0 Beta (22A5295i), but when I select the Legacy Boot Copy utility in CCC, and click on “Allow CCC to erase…”, CCC returns instantly to the “Task Plan” window and I cannot get beyond that. The failure has been reported to both Apple and Mike Bombich. At least for the moment, there is no way to create a bootable clone of Ventura. In the meantime, CCC has added significant features for managing APFS snapshots, which offers a shotgun approach to versioning as opposed to Time Machine's "sniper rifle" versioning. I was going to test this using a newly created bootable, but I will have to postpone that until I can create a bootable clone.

The CCC failure was on my side of the keyboard. The sequence of events changed slightly, and I missed it.

"Executive" editing privilege, huh?

UNIVERSAL CONTROL IS BACK

Universal Control was touted in Monterey (macOS 12) but didn't become functional until macOS 12.5. It disappeared in Ventura (macOS 13 public beta 1) but has returned to life in macOS 13 and iPadOS 16 public beta 2! Like Stage Manager, the power of Universal Control is difficult to describe to someone who has not experienced it. But for many users, it is a potential game changing feature. Activation simply requires turning on an iPad Pro running iPadOS 16 on within Bluetooth range of a Mac running macOS 13. At that point, moving the pointer past the right edge of the Mac's monitor or the left edge of the iPad Pro's screen, transfers keyboard and keypad or mouse control between the two devices. Since the two devices also automatically share the clipboard and open Safari pages, sharing data processed on one device is almost instantly available on the other. A drawing created using Apple. Pencil on the iPad Pro can be pasted into a document on the Mac. I am still working out work-flows between the two devices, but yesterday, I balanced my books on the Mac while verifying the transactions using the bank's app on my iPad then signed a contract on my Mac by signing it using Apple Pencil on the iPad. I could have done both tasks entirely on one device or the other, but it was just so darned convenient to split the work between the two devices.

The only downside is keeping track of which screen the cursor is on,

Here's something Interesting: There's hope that older Macs will be able to run macOS Ventura I don't know that I would trust my iMac to this way of running Ventura. Hopefully, it would be OK but I hesitate.

Ventura might run on the older Macs, but the hack would automatically rule out any possibility of support from Apple and with any hack, the next Ventura update might not work.

I just installed macos 13.0 beta 8 and after zero problems with previous betas, of all things this one broke Books (all of the books report unrecognized format) and Mail requires a separate step to download remote content. The latter is an understandable security precaution, but it is annoying as H3!!

Fixed! Restart didn't solve the issue, but complete shutdown and cold boot did.

I see Ventura is due for release on the 24th. I have only just upgraded to Monterey and got everything running the way I like. I presume Ventura will run on a 2019 iMac.

Question: I don't own an Apple phone or iPad, but I do have a MacBook Air. Is there any point in me upgrading to Ventura?

Thanks.
Jerry

Since I have been running the Ventura betas for months now, I have pretty well forgotten Monterey, but my observations are:

• Over time I learned to understand and like the changes in Catalina, Big Sur, and Monterey. I loved Ventura since I first booted it up.
• I have been running beta release macOS versions since the original Mac OS X Public Beta and Ventura has been the least problematic beta I can recall. It was stable in public beta 1 (developer beta 3), and has only become more stable with each subsequent beta update.
• The most significant new feature in Ventura is Stage Manager, and in my opinion, it is a game changer. Stage Manager is dead simple to use, took three seconds to turn it on, and after less than five minutes of use, I never wanted to turn it off. It is difficult to explain and at the same time immediately intuitive when you turn it on. This feature alone is enough to make Ventura a worthwhile upgrade, it has literally changed my entgire workflow.
• The most in your face change in Ventura is the switch from System Preferences to System Settings. Not that much new, but a reshuffle of the various settings more in line with iOS and iPadOS, and most definitely the wave of the future.
• There is nothing in Ventura that should affect or change the way things are running in Monterey.

Everyone around here should know by now that I am a firm believer in taking advantage of every upgrade and update. But this is one I can heartily recommend, even for the faint of heart.

Thank you, I expect I'll be an early adopter.

Here are some caveats for early adopters: macOS Ventura review: Great features & promise, but not all here yet My iMac cannot go beyond Big Sur so I can't relate any personal experiences with Ventura.

Thanks, Jon, for the link. After reading the article, I think I'll hold off upgrading until, maybe, 13.3 as I have done in the past. I don't really need another learning curve right now.

I did update my OS to 12.6.1.

Another development: Malwarebytes crippled by macOS Ventura update

I'm not ready to upgrade to Ventura yet, but I decided to install it on my external SSD to take a look...in particular, to see if my printer will still work (Canon has since released a Ventura compatible driver! ) and which, if any, apps I'll lose.

And since I was experimenting, I decided to go the whole route and see if installing Ventura would turn a theoretically bootable, but actually non-bootable, clone bootable.

So, to make a long story short, after a seemingly endless succession of black screens, Apple logo screens, and screens with progression bars without time indicators, my MBP appeared to be getting ready to boot...when it kernel panicked...and kernel panicked a second time after it auto-restarted, at which point I threw in the towel.

I've dealt with failed installations before, but this was the first time I've ever (or in MANY years, at least) run into kernel panics, and just to be certain, I checked when I booted back into Monterey and found that the Ventura volume did, indeed, appear in System Prefs > Startup Disk.

Is there a key fact that I overlooked? (It seems to me that I've read that Ventura can't be booted from an external drive unless it also exists on the internal drive.)

Aside: After the kernel panics, I was unable to escape from the installer, even after powering down and trying an option boot. I was able to escape only after pulling the plug on my external.

I use Canon printers, but all of my Canon printers support Apple Air Print, so no Canon-specific driver is required.


There is no requirement to have a full Ventura installation on the internal boot drive but, there is a hidden partition, iSCPreboot, that must be present on macs with Apple Silicon. It takes the place of the boot firmware on Intel Macs. Is it possible that it is also required on Intel Macs in Ventura? I no longer have an Intel Mac to experiment on.


Wow! I have never encountered anything resembling that, and I have both cloned and installed Ventura on an external volume, but then I have always started with a freshly erased target drive. Where did you get the Ventura installer?

My Canon is 9 1/2 years old, and only connects to my MBP via USB. It won't run through my AirPort Express Base Station, and when you instructed me how to use Bonjour, I couldn't get that to work either. (The printer was discontinued around three years ago, but its successor apparently runs the same software and Canon has kindly accommodated us "old timers" with the most recent drivers.)

Fun fact: After 9 1/2 years, I still haven't used up the original 700 page cartridge that came with the printer.

Thanks. That's what I was thinking of. (Aside: At the rate you go through Macs, you must have an endless supply of donees for the "old" ones.)

I got the installer from the App Store.

I ran into a similar situation once before when my daughter-in-law loaned me her laptop with the caveat that I'd have to troubleshoot it before I could use it.

The machine inexplicably booted to a black screen, but I was able to option boot it and discovered that it was booting into an incomplete installation, which was resolved by rerunning the installer. Like I said, though, at least that machine option booted.

My only remaining Intel Mac, a late 2014 mini with a painfully slow Dual Core i7 processor, fell off the upgrade ladder with macOS 12.6.1.

I just found this Ventura comment on the SoftRAID web site


That fits with my experience.

I think that could use some clarification.

Thanks.

I took that to be a reference to everything in the OS relating to the organization, management, and storage of data on disk drives, SD cards, thumb drives, and other media. I find SoftRAID's comment particularly interesting because their product is more closely related to the "guts" of the system than even the various volume repair utilities. In fact, SoftRAID 7.0 has its own volume repair function that runs automatically when a volume error is detected. (Although for all I know, SoftRAID might be using Apple's own volume repair tool.)

That's quite a compliment, then.

Thanks.

A more down to Earth impression of Ventura than joemike has heretofore given us...

• The progress bar for the installation started out at 59 minutes, but the process took only 27.
• Most important, my MBP's "hesitating" to process input, which has plagued me since I upgraded to Monterey, has been mostly cured. (*)
• The extensions and legacy/unsigned apps I feared would stop working are all working as expected.
• Systems Settings is confusing as all get-out at first, but begins to make sense after a while. The hardest part of the learning curve arises from relocated items, which force you to search for stuff that used to be "right there."
• The Login Items pane has FINALLY been rendered in alphabetical order! Yay!
• My Input Source menu bar icon which morphed from an American flag to a generic icon, back to a flag when I added a second source, to US in an ugly black box in Monterey, has become an A in an ugly black box.
• For some reason that's incomprehensible to me, the background color of the graphs at the bottom of /Apps/Utilities/Activity Monitor > Energy has been changed from a pleasant light green to an unpleasant drab green. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

At any rate, I'm a happy camper.

(*) I still get some hesitation, but I'm not certain that it's the same issue, and at any rate, it's very significantly less.

It seems to me that searching should not be necessary. Why can't the code writers/designers keep track of stuff they are moving and, once they are done, publish a list of "You used to find this item here, but now it's over there"? They could make things much easier.

A graphic presentation would be easier to deal with than a list, but it would probably be equally ignored by users in favor of posting questions.

Update: I'm still experiencing the hesitation, but it occurs less frequently and is less pronounced that it was in Monterey.

I'd love for it to be gone, but no, I haven't made any effort to troubleshoot it, because working in Safe Mode makes me crazy, and because any app that may be causing it would be more painful to lose than the relief I'd gain.

There have been numerous popups in Ventura requesting password entry, and I admit I too was annoyed until I realized it is Apple's way of mitigating the risk inherent in third-party apps that Apple has no opportunity to vet. The distinction between Apple applications, App Store and identified developer applications, and third-party applications has been significantly sharpened. Apps that have not been vetted must request access to each system resource they use and granting that access requires specific app-by-app and resource-by-resource permission which requires the user's password for verification as it is a System Settings change. Some developers recognizing this change will ask for all the needed permissions the first time the app is launched. Others either have not updated their app or have chosen to allow this to occur for each resource, which is very annoying. I may have become accustomed to the change, but I don’t notice it nearly as much now as I did back in July. I do know that I have learned to expect a new spate of user password entry any time I install a new app that needs access to any system resource, and occasionally after a Ventura update.


I am curious, can you describe the hesitation?

I've run into any number of unexpected requests for my password. As you say, they're a nuisance, but I just shrug and deal with them as they come.

I hit a key, and there's a short but noticeable delay before my system reacts.

And it's universal throughout the OS's range of actions...typing, navigating throgh menus, opening and closing windows, launching and quitting apps, etc., etc., and so forth.

As I said, though, the delay is shorter in Ventura than it was in Monterey.

Here's an unwelcome change in Ventura: How to shut down & start up automatically in macOS Ventura. Why did Apple do this? It looks like a royal PITA.

The entire boot process, and where it is initiated has changed radically because of security issues and because of hardware changes associated with Apple silicon. The old process simply cannot work any longer and the new process is unfortunately rather baroque. As far as the weekly shut down and restart go, except a few beta related glitches, in the last four of five years, my systems are never rebooted except to install the monthly(?) beta update or once when we had an extended power outage.

I just installed the latest update of Marcel Bresink's TinkerTool System 8.1 and under System Settings I found this. It appears, Marcel has solved your PITA. I haven't had time to test it yet, but it seems an elegant solution to your need.

NOTE: that is the commercial TinkerTool System not the freeware TinkerTool.

Your link points to TinkerTool 9.0, and according to the TTSystem website, its lates version is 7.93???

Update: Just found the paid upgrade to 8. Dunno why I wasn't offered it.

My version came from running the newly updated Bresink Software Updater? Obviously I was not as observant as I should have been, when I captured that URL. TinkerTool System is at 8.1. For what it is worth, I think Marcel is relying more on his software updater app than in-app announcments.

Thanks for that, Joe. I can't use Ventura with my system but it's good to know about the TTS workaround when I do. I have had TTS for many years but Ventura will be the first time that I use it.

One minor annoyance in Ventura has been the disappearance of the option to hide login items. (For security purposes all login items appear on the desktop when launched, so the user knows they are there and running.) While I was looking at Marcel Bresink's latest offerings I discovered an only available from the app store app called Autostarter that for 99¢ allows login items to be hidden on launch and restores both the ability to control the order in which they launch. Those apps that self-insert themselves into login items have to be manually removed from System Settings > General > login items and entered on the list of Autostarter apps, but, for myself, I am glad that I can once again hide login items.

I was so happy to see that my login items are now in alpha order - as I've craved since Apple removed our ability to re-order them - that I never realized the check boxes have been removed. For what it's worth, though, my items that were set to hide on launch in Big Sur still do not appear on my desktop after a restart in Monterrey.

As for "the ability to control the order in which [login items] launch," I haven't tried to take advantage of that feature in MANY years...MANY OS versions, but it never worked when I tried.

Thanks for the Autostarter link.

First, correction: Big Sur & Monterrey s/b Monterrey&Ventura.

Well, so much for that! I just updated to Ventura 13.1, and my previously hidden login items weren't hidden when my MBP restarted.

Even more thanks for the Autostarter link.

I find Autostarter a pleasure to use.

Autostarter's functionality is, indeed, a pleasure to have. I can't begin to imagine why Apple made it necessary.

DriveDx gave me fits until I figured out that its pref must be set to show "Only in Menu Bar."

If it's set for "Only in Dock" or "Dock and Menu Bar," Autostarter doesn't hide it on launch.

Which I guess means that Autostarter doesn't work as far as DriveDx goes. Perhaps because although it's a login item it's not included in System Settings > General > Login Items? (If so, it could portend a big headache down the road.)

Do your apps really launch in your preferred order? It's not mentioned as an Autostarter feature.

DriveDX is not a login item per se. Neither is it a LaunchAgent or LaunchDaemon. To the best of my knowledge its launch mechanism is unique. Embedded in the DriveDX application package there as an executable named DriveDXLoginItemHelper I suspect is the trigger, but I have no idea how it works or why it is launched in this unique manner.

As to the launch order, I really have no way of accurately determining the actual launch order, but there are breadcrumbs that lead me to believe it is working and has resolved a couple of minor launchtime annoyances.

As you've suggested, DriveDx doesn't appear in any of the locations you've mentioned, but it does place an item in System Settings > General > Login Items > Allow in the Background when its "Launch at Login" pref box is checked.

As an experiment, I added Mail, Safari Technology Preview, and Music to Autostarter, and they not only didn't launch in that precise order order, but the CPU activity involved in their "simultaneous" launch was such a drag on "getting going," that I deleted them and went back to individual hotkey launches. It's been many years - since either Jaguar or Panther - since I last tried that experiment, and my recent results are the same as I remember from back then.

Apparently merely installing the app does that. Autostarter is in there too.


I currently have ten LaunchAgents, twenty-six LaunchDaemons, ten Launch Items (Autostart) The startup time on my Studio is short enough that I don't really notice it, except my database system sometimes launches before the RAID array the files are on completes mounting.

While I was futzing around with my DriveDx login options I noticed that the item had disappeared, so I paid attention, and I found that it reappeared when I checked the "Launch at Login" box. So there's part of the answer to the DriveDx login mystery.

I can't identify them, but I'm pretty sure that I've got other items that appeared as the result of some action I took after their apps were launched.

My 12 Agents/Daemons, load "graciously" behind the scenes, but when I put Mail, Safari, and Music in Autostarter, my CPU is still churning away and blocking progress when I could have already launched some app with a hotkey. Having everything hotkeyed facilitates launching, and, in my instance, actually makes autostarter counterproductive other than for login items that no longer hide.

Did you notice Mail, Safari, and Music have one thing in common? They are all three dependent on internet access and responses from remote servers. Does that suggest a reason they are slow to launch?

You got a point there, Judge!

In case anyone here is affected: Bug in macOS Ventura is breaking some networks

I just installed Ventura today and, to work my way through it, I figured I'd revisit this thread. You're right that Stage Manager is a great feature but, if memory serves, it's actually just giving back a function that Mac had a very long time ago. I recall being able to go the menu bar and click on a button that listed all the apps in use. You could scroll down and select the one you wanted now to use. I also recall being ticked off when it just disappeared with some OS upgrade.

However, I will admit that Stage Manager provides the function in a more elegant manner.

Yes and Stage Manaqger also works in iPadOS 16 and effectively provides full multi-tasking on their iPad.






Sent from my stateroom on the riverboat Song on the Columbia River

Woo hoo!

I've been wondering where you've been.

ENJOY!!!

Joe,

You're in my backyard up here....where's your next port of call?