Monday, June 24, 2019

macOS 10.15 Public Beta 1

Apple today seeded the first beta of an upcoming macOS Catalina update to its public beta testing group, giving non-developers a chance to try out the software ahead of its fall public release.

It seems to be essentially the same as Developer Beta 2, which is surprising both because that version is a bit rough and because it doesn’t contain the redesigned Catalyst apps that Craig Federighi said would be in the public beta.

Jason Snell:

Music feels like a version of iTunes that’s been heavily influenced by Apple’s decisions on iOS. Up Next and Lyrics panes now slide out over the interface, obscuring what’s behind—essentially the inverse of the old drawer metaphor in the early days of Mac OS X. It’s a decision that makes sense if you’ve got a single-window interface, but I don’t use my Mac in full screen mode and I didn’t mind the popover approach that iTunes took with those windows.

[…]

The translation of the [Podcasts] app from iOS to Mac is not without quirks. Resizing the app window seemed sluggish. Clicking on individual podcast episodes in the Downloaded list kept adding to the selection rather than changing the selection; I had to click a second time to deselect them. And selecting a bunch didn’t actually do anything, since you’re not able to delete episodes via a keyboard shortcut or menu item—you apparently have to click a button on each individual episode, then confirm in a dialog box (which can’t be permanently suppressed, so you have to click every single time), before it’s deleted.

[…]

I found the [iOS] Finder integration slow and unreliable, which isn’t surprising for a beta, but it needs to be better by the fall. But it’s a good move and people who still connect their devices to their Macs will be well served by it.

Previously:

Update (2019-06-25): Brent Simmons:

Even if you get extremely lucky and everything works with one release, the next public beta could change all that.

Daniel Jalkut:

In my experience the Catalina beta is pretty stable, but the sheer amount of change, particularly with the filesystem, should warn off any “sunday driver” beta testers. Install this on a second volume until you understand which 3rd party software you'll be giving up for the time.

Update (2019-07-01): See also: MacStrategy, MacInTouch, Hacker News.

Update (2019-07-08): Max Seelemann (blog post):

Current State of iCloud in b3 of macOS and iOS: It’s just broken.

Folder duplicates, never finishing sync, not uploading anything, not downloading anything. Pages/Numbers collaboration is broken.

How could anybody approve this for a PUBLIC BETA?

The insanity of this is…

We now have 5x the number of users on iOS 13 now, then we have on iOS 11 and 12 combined.

Every tenth of our users got lured into a OS that has a completely broken sync.

Those users are laboratory rats, not beta testers.

Apple Podcasts Bug Catalyst (Marzipan) Finder iCloud Drive iOS Mac macOS 10.15 Catalina macOS Beta Music.app Syncing