12 MACWORLD JANUARY 2022
MACUSER MACOS STILL LAGGING BEHIND i OScredit, many of the new features that it
rolled out this year have arrived on both
platforms—even if not in simultaneous
releases. (SharePlay and redesigned
Memories in Photos are lacking from the
initial Monterey release, despite already
coming out for iOS.)
While attention often focuses on places
where iOS is still catching up to the Mac,
that street runs both ways. There remain
places where iOS offers features that the
Mac doesn’t, even some features that
have been around for a while now. And
though the Mac might be nearing 40 years
old, that doesn’t mean it can’t still learn
some new tricks.
A FAIR SHARE
When Apple first added the Share sheet
in iOS, it was a fairly limited feature, but in
the last several years, it’s ended up
becoming a critical piece of infrastructure
on Apple’s mobile operating system,
allowing you to not only share data with
others, but also share it between apps and
even via Shortcuts.
On the Mac, by comparison, the Share
sheet is...sort of present? It doesn’t exist in
most apps, and where it does—in Safari,
for instance—its features are mainly limited
to sending links to other apps on the
system. To be fair, there have long been
other easy ways of moving data around on
the Mac, and the Share menu was
originally iOS’s way of handling all those
inter-app communication options that its
sandbox model didn’t permit.
But the Share menu has ended up
growing and becoming increasingly useful
on iOS, in part because it acts as a central
clearinghouse for sharing data that’s
quickly and universally comprehensible.
There isn’t really any single analogue to
that on the Mac, and while Apple doesn’t
have to get rid of all the tools that are
already on the platform, it would be handy
if it could beef up the version of the Share
sheet in macOS to add features more akin
to iOS—such as the ability to run Shortcuts.DON’T BE A WIDGET
iPadOS 15 brought widgets to the Home
screen of Apple’s tablet line, echoing a
move made on the iPhone in iOS 14. But
on the Mac, widgets remain banished to
column just offscreen, as part of (peculiarly
enough) Notification Center—where they
are all too often forgotten.
This isn’t the Mac’s first flirtation with
widgets, of course. For a long time, the
Mac hosted widgets in a separate screen
layer called Dashboard, which would
appear to one side of (or later on top of)
the desktop. But Dashboard eventually
went the way of the iPod classic,
disappearing for good a few years ago.
With widgets seeing a resurgence on
Apple’s mobile platforms, now’s the time to