Small OS 27 Details From WWDC ⇥ macstories.net

Today’s live stream was a little over an hour long — the shortest presentation since 2005 — but, if this big list of refinements captured by Jonathan Reed, of MacStories, is representative of what will be shipping in September, I am not disappointed. Some choice bullet points, in no particular order:

• Uniform toolbars

• [iOS] Lock Screen consistently stays awake while scrolling notifications

• More distinct active windows [in MacOS]

• Search for photos and videos using additional metadata

These are a few things I have previously complained about or filed feedbacks against. Plus, there are a whole lot of things that begin with the words “faster” or “more reliable”. I would like to see this every year, of course, but this appears to be a long-overdue correction.

One more thing I would like to highlight:

• New keyboards for Indigenous languages including Blackfoot, Comanche, Cree, Kiowa, and Tsuu’tina

For about ten years, third-party keyboards from an app called FirstVoices have provided support for these and other Indigenous languages, and it is encouraging to see first-party attention, too, for languages at risk of extinction. While there are around 2,500 people living in Tsuut’ina Nation, located adjacent to Calgary, the Tsuut’ina language is spoken by only about 150 people as of 2021 thanks to a history of concerted efforts by colonial powers to stamp it out.

Update: It is disappointing that MacOS 26 is the last version supported on Intel Macs, meaning there are a bunch of people who updated to the slow and janky version of MacOS who will not receive any of the speed, stability, or performance improvements coming in MacOS 27. This is a little like a Mac OS X Snow Leopard year all over again. That version dropped support for PowerPC Macs and was only available for Intel models. Perhaps dropping legacy support is one reason for these refinements.