UNIVERSAL CONTROL

  • What Is It? Use a single keyboard, mouse, or trackpad to work between your devices. When you move from your Mac to your iPad, the cursor for your mouse or trackpad transforms from an arrow to a round dot, automatically changing shape to the one that is best suited for the device.
  • Observation: If it is enabled in this early beta i can't make it work and although there is supposed to be a Continuous Setup in System Preferences. SIdeCar is still available, but when I connect via SideCar, my left and right monitors switch places and SideCar is flaky.
  • Conclusion: Universal Control (an expansion of SideCar) is a work in process.


MAPS (macOS 12, iOS 15, IPadOS 15)

  • What's New? Too many changes, many of them subtle, but all worthy enhancements.
  • Observations: Maps has finally emerged into the top tier of Navigation apps. The turn-by-turn directions (printed or online) should get almost anyone through the most complex intersection in a new city like a native. It even has a separate route planning function. There are features I would like to see, such as the ability to flag roads/routes to b avoided, but there are lots of third party apps such as InRoute that are based on Maps and offer extensive route modification features and even work in CarPlay. Speaking of that if you have the right plugin electric automobile (BMW for one) Maps even adds charging stations to the route planning.
  • Conclusion: An evolutionary winner.


HICCUP

After downloading the latest version of Carbon Copy Cloner (6.0.2) I used it to create a bootable external clone of Monterey and everything proceeded normally. As expected the clone does not appear in System Preferences > Startup Disk 😠 but it does appear as a Startup option in the Recovery Drive. The system runs normally when the external boot drive is attached, but when I attempt to reboot the internal drive with the external boot drive attached the system continues to hang and reboot, hang and reboot. To recover requires powering down, disconnecting the external drive, booting the options menu and selecting the internal drive. After that everything is rock solid. I have seen a few scattered reports of problems updating when more than one bootable volume is found, but this seems different. More testing and exploration is needed than I have time or resources for so I will pass this along to Apple for further research.

If we knew what it was we were doing, it wouldn't be called research, would it?

— Albert Einstein