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Apple Seeds Second Beta of macOS Catalina to Developers

Monday June 17, 2019 11:03 am PDT by Juli Clover

Apple today seeded the second beta of macOS 10.15 Catalina for testing purposes, two weeks after the new Mac operating system update was first unveiled at the Worldwide Developers Conference.

The new macOS Catalina beta can be downloaded using the Software Update mechanism in System Preferences. As with all new betas, you're not going to want to install ‌macOS Catalina‌ on a primary machine as it is early release software and could have major bugs.

‌macOS Catalina‌ eliminates the iTunes app, splitting it into Music, Podcasts, and TV apps. The Apple Music and Apple Podcasts apps are available now, while the Apple TV app is coming later this year.

The new apps are similar in function to iTunes, but are split up by feature. iOS device management is still available on the Mac, but it's now done through Finder rather than iTunes.

With a new Sidecar feature, you can turn your iPad into a second display for your Mac with just the click of a button. The Apple Pencil works with ‌Sidecar‌, so you can turn your ‌iPad‌ into a drawing tablet in apps like Photoshop and Illustrator.

Your Apple Watch can be used to approve security prompts in ‌macOS Catalina‌, and Macs with a T2 chip support Activation Lock. There's a new Find My that brings the ‌Find My‌ Mac app to the Mac for the first time and even lets you track your devices when they're offline.

Screen Time is now available on the Mac as well as iOS devices, and Project Catalyst, a new Apple initiative, will let developers easily port their ‌iPad‌ apps over to the Mac.

There's a new Photos interface that surfaces your best photos organized by day, month, or year, there's a new start page in Safari, Mail has new tools for muting email threads and blocking senders, and the Reminders app has been overhauled.

32-bit apps no longer work in ‌macOS Catalina‌, which is something to be aware of before installing the beta. Right now, Catalina is limited to developers, but Apple plans to release a public beta in July ahead of a fall public launch.

For more details on ‌macOS Catalina‌, make sure to check out our macOS Catalina roundup.

Related Roundup: macOS Catalina

Top Rated Comments

(View all)

Cyberpower678

22 weeks ago

Finder is a bit slow and finicky, unlike Beta 1. I found Home Sharing and enabled it but I cannot connect to my film and TV libraries through the Apple TV app on the phone (running iOS 13) or the Apple TV, running 12.3. I made sure I was logged into iCloud and that Home Sharing was enabled. On the phone I get "There was a problem playing this content" and on the TV, the library comes up but the error message is, "Cannot connect to shared libraries." My shared music library plays, however.

I know I can't get that excited about these issues running a Beta but if anyone else got this working, let me know. Thanks!

Turn your iCloud off and back on. That might fix your issues.
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I will never understand why every new OS results in the wholesale breaking of things that were working just fine prior. How is this progress? Seems more like a study in user aggravation.

Spoken like a non-developer. ;). When major changes are made and core sub-routines updates to improve efficiency, it can introduce breakages in places that aren’t immediately expected to break in. MacOS is large and sometime a core routine needs to be altered to implement the new features being introduced. Otherwise macOS would be just one big patch job. We might as well be using Windows at that point.

Rating: 4 Votes

Chris Grande

22 weeks ago

I'd like to see them bring back home sharing - at least by the final build.

It's in there, it's just been moved to System Preferences -> Sharing -> Media Sharing.

Rating: 4 Votes

DesertNomad

22 weeks ago

I wish they'd fix NSPredicateEditor when it is displayed in a sheet. It has been broken since at least the initial release of 10.14. I guess they are more interested in designing new emojis rather than fixing core parts of the OS.

I've been developing software for the Apple/Mac platform since 1985 and it's sad to see the state of Apple today. Lots of broken parts of the OS will likely never be fixed.

Rating: 3 Votes

cponto

22 weeks ago

I'd like to see them bring back home sharing - at least by the final build.

Home Sharing works well with Catalina Beta 1

Rating: 3 Votes

zorinlynx

22 weeks ago

Time Machine supporting APFS disks?

I don't know why this isn't a thing yet. APFS supports snapshot streams and incremental snapshot streams. This would be absolutely ideal for Time Machine and probably hundreds of times faster than the current way which is basically an rsync with hard linked directories.

Rating: 3 Votes

Chris The Bipolarbear

22 weeks ago

6.45 GB - about 3 hours remaining. Yeah, I figured Beta 2 would be popular...

it a complete new installer even has a pretty picture on it

Rating: 3 Votes

cponto

22 weeks ago

Someone mentioned that Home Sharing worked just fine in Catalina. I never saw where to turn it on. Was he mistaking it for Family Sharing? Home Sharing is/was one of the best features for using the Apple TV as a home theater. Please tell me I don't have to start using Plex...

Home Sharing doing well and Plex App and Plex Server too.

Rating: 2 Votes

tywebb13

22 weeks ago

The command for making a bootable usb has changed in beta 2.

It is now

sudo /Applications/Install\ macOS\ Catalina\ Beta.app/Contents/Resources/createinstallmedia --volume /Volumes/Untitled

whereas before it was

sudo /Applications/Install\ macOS\ 10.15\ Beta.app/Contents/Resources/createinstallmedia --volume /Volumes/Untitled

so “10.15” has been replaced by “Catalina”.

This has become quite a regular thing going from beta 1 to beta 2 for several versions now.

I think the reason is beta 1 literally doesn’t have a name until the keynote at wwdc, but they want all the betas ready anyway for that event. So beta 1 is nameless. But by the time beta 2 comes it has a name.

Rating: 2 Votes