**Using Your iPhone as a Wireless Webcam with Continuity Camera**

One of the coolest features of Mac OS Ventura is its ability to use your iPhone as a wireless webcam for your MacBook. This feature, called Continuity Camera, allows you to use your iPhone's camera to stream video from your MacBook. To set this up, simply share your screen in Zoom and then share the Desk View window. This will allow people on the other end of the call to see what you have on your desk in front of you. The angle can be a bit weird, and the area that you need to show stuff in is a little bit weird, but overall, this feature is really cool and is going to be a game changer for a lot of people.

I've been using Continuity Camera with my iPhone, and I have to say, it's hilarious. The camera ability is still working as expected, even after all these months. Overall, I think this feature is going to be very useful for a lot of people, especially those who have an older MacBook that doesn't have the new 1080 camera in it.

**The New System Settings Menu**

One of the bigger changes in Mac OS Ventura is the new system settings menu. Gone are the days of the old system preferences menu, which remained largely unchanged for years. The new system settings menu is now called "System Settings" and features a more modern and user-friendly interface. Instead of a cluttered list of icons, you can now see all the different categories at a glance by scrolling up and down. This makes it much easier to find what you're looking for, whether you're trying to figure out how to do something on your Mac or just want to adjust some settings.

My favorite new feature in System Settings is the ability to turn on click and drag on the trackpad without having to dig through a bunch of menus. I used to have to navigate through the accessibility menu, which was buried under multiple sub-menus. Now, it's much easier to find and toggle this feature on or off.

**Live Captioning**

One of the most exciting new features in Mac OS Ventura is Live Captioning, which allows your MacBook to listen to video content and provide a real-time transcription of what's being said. This feature is perfect for situations where you're watching a pre-recorded video or live streaming someone, but can't hear them well. You can also use it during video calls on apps like Zoom or Facebook, so that the other person can see what they're saying in real-time.

I've been using Live Captioning with a pre-recorded video, and it's been really helpful. I turned down the sound to make sure it wasn't interfering with my own audio, and then flipped the switch on Live Captioning. Instantly, a live transcription of the video appeared below the screen. It was very accurate and helped me follow along much more easily.

**Other New Features in Mac OS Ventura**

In addition to Continuity Camera and Live Captioning, there are several other new features coming to Mac OS Ventura through public beta. These include improvements to Mail and Messages, as well as Spotlight. While these features may not be as exciting as Continuity Camera and Live Captioning, they still offer some nice improvements to the overall user experience.

If you want to try out all of these new features for yourself, you can download the latest version of Mac OS Ventura through Apple's public beta program. So far, it seems relatively bug-free, but if you're not comfortable with the process of using a public beta, you can always wait for the official release later this fall.

**Additional Resources and Links**

For more information on my Mac OS Ventura impressions, check out the links in the description below. You'll also find links to download your own 3D printer file and make your own camera continuity iPhone mount, or send me $20 to print one.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enthere's a new version of mac os coming this one is code named ventura now it's going to be out in the fall probably officially but if you're feeling adventurous you can download the public beta version right now and try out at least some of the new ventura features i certainly found a few that i thought were really interesting and really worth the upgrade i always say that operating system update should be like good cinematography if you notice it too much well that's bad but if it adds a lot to the experience while staying in the background that's good and os updates for computers especially if you add too much new stuff you change too many things you're going to lose that muscle memory and that familiarity you have with your machine but if you change too little then what's the point of having an operating system update and people are not going to do it with all that in mind i downloaded the public beta version of the new mac os and installed it on this guy the new m2 chip macbook air so it's apple's newest macbook and apple's newest mac operating system now what are the biggest most important changes in ventura i found about three or four that i thought are really important really interesting uh they're really going to make your mac work differently hopefully you think it's better i think a lot of these are changes for the better but that's not going to be universal but i'll tell you the single most important change in ventura the biggest visual difference i think is something called stage manager that is a new way of grouping together windows from different apps that you're using and letting you jump between them easily instead of using command tab to go through apps like we used to do we're using the four finger swipe up and swipe down move now we've got a rail on the left side that shows you all the apps you have open and has all the windows from that app stacked up so if you have multiple chrome or safari windows open they're stacked up and if i click on any of these then i go to that app and if i keep clicking on the little stack here it'll switch between all the pages i have open in that or if i go to a different app it's going to replace it and i can go through things there so every time i click on an app that goes center stage and then the other apps move back to that right rail so it's really easy to switch back and forth between them but at the same time you have a visual reference here on the left side of what apps you have open which you could forget about if you just have a full screen uh you know window going give a ton of things running in the background that you've totally forgotten about is this going to change the way computers work forever no but it's an interesting way to rearrange the information on a macbook and i think it's pretty useful for keeping track of what you have and switching between things quickly now there is one thing that kind of bothers me about stage manager and that is we already have a dock along the bottom of the mac right here well now we've got kind of a secondary dock along this left side this left rail dock so now you have two docks basically and i think that can kind of get confusing and we should probably figure out a better way to make these two work together the other really big thing is going to be more about using your mac with another device you probably have and that is continuity camera and that means at long last you can take your iphone and use it as a wireless webcam with your mac now that sounds like it makes a lot of sense we should have been able to do this the whole time because frankly we're on a lot of video meetings these days and i don't feel like that's going to change anytime soon and the cameras built into mac have traditionally never been that good if you have the new m2 macbook air or the 14 or 16 inch macbook pro you have a new 1080 camera that is much better it's still nowhere near as good as the camera on your iphone before now you could use your iphone as a webcam with your mac uh but you had to download a third-party app on the phone on the mac uh get everything working together i used epocam from elgato and it worked sometimes but i found it wasn't reliable enough to use all the time it was frankly kind of a hassle so i'm very excited to just be able to use my phone as my webcam without doing anything different i did have to do one thing different i had to get the ios 16 public beta on my iphone in order to do it but once i did that everything worked out great so here i'm going to show you what i did here and it works in a lot of apps that use the webcam i found it works in photo booth it works in facetime it works in zoom almost everything i've tried so far it has worked in now i'm going to take my phone right here and i'm going to take this clip i made now how you're going to get your phone attached to your laptop to use the webcam different people are going to sell clip-on things and little tripods i went into a cad program took the measurements from my phone with the case and this and i designed just a tiny little clip right here that i 3d printed and i'm going to have the files for this that you can download and 3d print your own version i'll give you the cad file too so you can go and change the dimensions if your phone is a different case or your laptop is a different thickness so i just put this right here like that i take my phone and i put it in here and it's going to hang right there and as you can see the camera isn't exactly the right spot to use as a webcam i can move over to the center of one i can keep it over here if i want and then if i let's say launch facetime i can now look under the video options here and i can see i can use the camera built into the macbook that's this one right down here hello there it's a little bit lower down or i can use my phone and i think you're going to see that the phone really looks better because it's using the rear camera here there are even other tricks you can do with continuity camera and your iphone they're hidden here in the command center little two pills icon here you go into video effects and look what i can do i can turn on center stage and that makes the camera follow me it's using the wide-angle lens and kind of clipping it down so it follows my face around and that's that's super interesting or i can turn that off and i can turn on portrait mode which blurs the background behind me a little bit portrait mode off portrait mode on and i can combine that or use separately studio light which dims the background a little bit and make sure you know your face pop out a little bit more as if you had some studio lighting on you so studio light off studio light on and you can turn these off and on at will there's also another trick that you can do with your iphone hooked up and that is called desk view and i'm going to hit that right now and it is going to i'm going to move the laptop a little bit further away and i'm going to hit desk view and that is going to use the wide-angle lens to capture some of what is happening in front of me on the desk and looks really distorted because it's trying to grab you know just this area so if i took something and put it in front of me like let's say this book and i wanted you to see it if i hold it towards me facing up towards me it's going to look face up if you are watching it on the video stream i'm sending to you and the way that works is this is a standalone app called desk view so if you're in zoom you do share my screen and then you share the desk view window and people can see what it is you have on your desk in front of you i think it's a clever idea i think this is one of the things that still needs a lot of work uh the angle is kind of weird the the area that you have to show stuff in is a little bit weird how it integrates with other apps can be a little bit difficult but it's a really cool idea and i look forward to seeing it get a little more perfected and a little more integrated so i think all things considered this camera ability the continuity camera to use your iphone with your mac as a wireless camera ah that's hilarious it's still doing it overall i think this ability to use your iphone camera through continuity camera as the wireless webcam for your mag is really going to be a game changer for a lot of people especially if you have an older mac that does not have the new 1080 camera in it the next thing in ventura i really like it's kind of small but it makes a big difference to me it is the old system preferences menu that has been unchanged for many years in terms of its general look and feel now it is called system settings and instead of a whole bunch of icons just kind of laid out for you it is now in handy list form and you can just scroll up and down and see all the different categories and if i go into something i can see that sub menu yes but i can also still see all the other options here which is helpful if you're trying to figure out how to do something on your mac and you may have to go through a bunch of these different menus to find exactly the right command because i find some of these choices fairly arbitrary my favorite one is how turning on uh click and drag on the trackpad is not in the trackpad settings it's under accessibility and a couple of sub menus under that so you always have to do a lot of digging around in the system preferences now system settings but i appreciate that is now easier to navigate and is laid out a little more logically the last big new ventura public beta feature i want to tell you about right now is live captioning and that is the ability for your macbook to listen to either a video a pre-recorded video a live stream somebody you're talking to on a video app and give you a very accurate live transcription of it as it happens i'm going to use a pre-recorded video just to show you very quickly how it works i'm actually going to turn the sound down so i'm going to hit play on it and then i'm going to go into system settings live captions here we go you can flip it off you can flip it on and once i flip it on i go back to my video and you are going to start seeing the live captions right here so i found this useful for not so much watching pre-recorded videos and getting captions because there are caption options in youtube and a lot of other places but if you're talking to somebody on a zoom call or facebook call and maybe you can't hear them that well there's a lot of noise around their microphone is not good they have problems on their end you can see a real-time transcription of what they're saying as they're talking so you don't have to keep telling them to speak up or go somewhere quieter i found it to be a real help in live video calls there are a lot of other new features coming to mac os through ventura there are improvements to mail and messages and spotlight i frankly found those not as interesting as the ones i pulled out to show you here today but if you want to try them all you've got two options you can try the public beta right now which so far seems to be relatively bug free and and i have not run into any major problems using it but you know go at your own pace and if you just want to wait for the official release the latest version of mac os called ventura is probably going to be available later this fall if you want to read more about my mac os ventura impressions you're going to find the links in the description below and i'm also going to include links so you can download my 3d printer file and make your own camera continuity iphone mount or send me 20 bucks on print one in the mltthere's a new version of mac os coming this one is code named ventura now it's going to be out in the fall probably officially but if you're feeling adventurous you can download the public beta version right now and try out at least some of the new ventura features i certainly found a few that i thought were really interesting and really worth the upgrade i always say that operating system update should be like good cinematography if you notice it too much well that's bad but if it adds a lot to the experience while staying in the background that's good and os updates for computers especially if you add too much new stuff you change too many things you're going to lose that muscle memory and that familiarity you have with your machine but if you change too little then what's the point of having an operating system update and people are not going to do it with all that in mind i downloaded the public beta version of the new mac os and installed it on this guy the new m2 chip macbook air so it's apple's newest macbook and apple's newest mac operating system now what are the biggest most important changes in ventura i found about three or four that i thought are really important really interesting uh they're really going to make your mac work differently hopefully you think it's better i think a lot of these are changes for the better but that's not going to be universal but i'll tell you the single most important change in ventura the biggest visual difference i think is something called stage manager that is a new way of grouping together windows from different apps that you're using and letting you jump between them easily instead of using command tab to go through apps like we used to do we're using the four finger swipe up and swipe down move now we've got a rail on the left side that shows you all the apps you have open and has all the windows from that app stacked up so if you have multiple chrome or safari windows open they're stacked up and if i click on any of these then i go to that app and if i keep clicking on the little stack here it'll switch between all the pages i have open in that or if i go to a different app it's going to replace it and i can go through things there so every time i click on an app that goes center stage and then the other apps move back to that right rail so it's really easy to switch back and forth between them but at the same time you have a visual reference here on the left side of what apps you have open which you could forget about if you just have a full screen uh you know window going give a ton of things running in the background that you've totally forgotten about is this going to change the way computers work forever no but it's an interesting way to rearrange the information on a macbook and i think it's pretty useful for keeping track of what you have and switching between things quickly now there is one thing that kind of bothers me about stage manager and that is we already have a dock along the bottom of the mac right here well now we've got kind of a secondary dock along this left side this left rail dock so now you have two docks basically and i think that can kind of get confusing and we should probably figure out a better way to make these two work together the other really big thing is going to be more about using your mac with another device you probably have and that is continuity camera and that means at long last you can take your iphone and use it as a wireless webcam with your mac now that sounds like it makes a lot of sense we should have been able to do this the whole time because frankly we're on a lot of video meetings these days and i don't feel like that's going to change anytime soon and the cameras built into mac have traditionally never been that good if you have the new m2 macbook air or the 14 or 16 inch macbook pro you have a new 1080 camera that is much better it's still nowhere near as good as the camera on your iphone before now you could use your iphone as a webcam with your mac uh but you had to download a third-party app on the phone on the mac uh get everything working together i used epocam from elgato and it worked sometimes but i found it wasn't reliable enough to use all the time it was frankly kind of a hassle so i'm very excited to just be able to use my phone as my webcam without doing anything different i did have to do one thing different i had to get the ios 16 public beta on my iphone in order to do it but once i did that everything worked out great so here i'm going to show you what i did here and it works in a lot of apps that use the webcam i found it works in photo booth it works in facetime it works in zoom almost everything i've tried so far it has worked in now i'm going to take my phone right here and i'm going to take this clip i made now how you're going to get your phone attached to your laptop to use the webcam different people are going to sell clip-on things and little tripods i went into a cad program took the measurements from my phone with the case and this and i designed just a tiny little clip right here that i 3d printed and i'm going to have the files for this that you can download and 3d print your own version i'll give you the cad file too so you can go and change the dimensions if your phone is a different case or your laptop is a different thickness so i just put this right here like that i take my phone and i put it in here and it's going to hang right there and as you can see the camera isn't exactly the right spot to use as a webcam i can move over to the center of one i can keep it over here if i want and then if i let's say launch facetime i can now look under the video options here and i can see i can use the camera built into the macbook that's this one right down here hello there it's a little bit lower down or i can use my phone and i think you're going to see that the phone really looks better because it's using the rear camera here there are even other tricks you can do with continuity camera and your iphone they're hidden here in the command center little two pills icon here you go into video effects and look what i can do i can turn on center stage and that makes the camera follow me it's using the wide-angle lens and kind of clipping it down so it follows my face around and that's that's super interesting or i can turn that off and i can turn on portrait mode which blurs the background behind me a little bit portrait mode off portrait mode on and i can combine that or use separately studio light which dims the background a little bit and make sure you know your face pop out a little bit more as if you had some studio lighting on you so studio light off studio light on and you can turn these off and on at will there's also another trick that you can do with your iphone hooked up and that is called desk view and i'm going to hit that right now and it is going to i'm going to move the laptop a little bit further away and i'm going to hit desk view and that is going to use the wide-angle lens to capture some of what is happening in front of me on the desk and looks really distorted because it's trying to grab you know just this area so if i took something and put it in front of me like let's say this book and i wanted you to see it if i hold it towards me facing up towards me it's going to look face up if you are watching it on the video stream i'm sending to you and the way that works is this is a standalone app called desk view so if you're in zoom you do share my screen and then you share the desk view window and people can see what it is you have on your desk in front of you i think it's a clever idea i think this is one of the things that still needs a lot of work uh the angle is kind of weird the the area that you have to show stuff in is a little bit weird how it integrates with other apps can be a little bit difficult but it's a really cool idea and i look forward to seeing it get a little more perfected and a little more integrated so i think all things considered this camera ability the continuity camera to use your iphone with your mac as a wireless camera ah that's hilarious it's still doing it overall i think this ability to use your iphone camera through continuity camera as the wireless webcam for your mag is really going to be a game changer for a lot of people especially if you have an older mac that does not have the new 1080 camera in it the next thing in ventura i really like it's kind of small but it makes a big difference to me it is the old system preferences menu that has been unchanged for many years in terms of its general look and feel now it is called system settings and instead of a whole bunch of icons just kind of laid out for you it is now in handy list form and you can just scroll up and down and see all the different categories and if i go into something i can see that sub menu yes but i can also still see all the other options here which is helpful if you're trying to figure out how to do something on your mac and you may have to go through a bunch of these different menus to find exactly the right command because i find some of these choices fairly arbitrary my favorite one is how turning on uh click and drag on the trackpad is not in the trackpad settings it's under accessibility and a couple of sub menus under that so you always have to do a lot of digging around in the system preferences now system settings but i appreciate that is now easier to navigate and is laid out a little more logically the last big new ventura public beta feature i want to tell you about right now is live captioning and that is the ability for your macbook to listen to either a video a pre-recorded video a live stream somebody you're talking to on a video app and give you a very accurate live transcription of it as it happens i'm going to use a pre-recorded video just to show you very quickly how it works i'm actually going to turn the sound down so i'm going to hit play on it and then i'm going to go into system settings live captions here we go you can flip it off you can flip it on and once i flip it on i go back to my video and you are going to start seeing the live captions right here so i found this useful for not so much watching pre-recorded videos and getting captions because there are caption options in youtube and a lot of other places but if you're talking to somebody on a zoom call or facebook call and maybe you can't hear them that well there's a lot of noise around their microphone is not good they have problems on their end you can see a real-time transcription of what they're saying as they're talking so you don't have to keep telling them to speak up or go somewhere quieter i found it to be a real help in live video calls there are a lot of other new features coming to mac os through ventura there are improvements to mail and messages and spotlight i frankly found those not as interesting as the ones i pulled out to show you here today but if you want to try them all you've got two options you can try the public beta right now which so far seems to be relatively bug free and and i have not run into any major problems using it but you know go at your own pace and if you just want to wait for the official release the latest version of mac os called ventura is probably going to be available later this fall if you want to read more about my mac os ventura impressions you're going to find the links in the description below and i'm also going to include links so you can download my 3d printer file and make your own camera continuity iphone mount or send me 20 bucks on print one in the mlt\n"