Working together
Tune FaceTime and other collaborative tools to share better
Monterey does a great deal for communicating and collaborating, whether it’s with your colleagues or friends. Even before the slightly delayed arrival of SharePlay features to integrate rich media in your calls, FaceTime and Messages have enhancements which are tucked away in the Control Centre.
1 Portrait Mode
Depending on your Mac and its peripherals, you may be able to use FaceTime’s new audio and video effects. If you have an M1 model, Portrait mode should be available at least when you’re using the internal camera. With the app open and camera on, open the Control Centre, and at the top click Video Effects to reveal the Portrait option, which blurs the background.
2 Mic Mode
If you have either an M1 or a recent Intel model, with FaceTime open, open the Control Centre, and at the top click Mic Mode, where you may be able to turn on Voice Isolation, which suppresses most background sounds, or choose Wide Spectrum, which is ideal for capturing singing or music from a group.
3 Link in friends
To invite others to join your FaceTime call, click the app’s Create Link button with FaceTime turned on, then select how you’d like to pass that link, for example by sending it in an email or via Messages. To participate in a FaceTime call, they’ll need the latest version of Google Chrome or Microsoft Edge running on Windows or Android, a microphone and camera with full support for H.264 encoding, with a suitable internet connection.
4 Shared photos
Adding photos and videos received in Messages to your Photos
library is a single-click operation, using the Share button to the right of the image. In Photos, they then appear in its new Shared with You section. Sharing back is as simple: select the images in Photos and use the Share button in the toolbar to send them to Messages as a collection. Use the same basic Shared with You feature on other media like news, TV, podcasts and weblinks.
5 Skip silence
Voice Memos can be ideal when you want to record meetings, talks, or even your own quick audio notes, but recordings sometimes contain more silence than words. To avoid having to listen to long and awkward pauses in your recording, enable Skip Silence in the app’s Edit menu.
6 Tag reminders
Reminders work alongside your notes, so Monterey integrates their new hashtag ‘#’ feature. Not only can you now tag your reminders, but they’re perfectly coordinated with the same tag cloud, making it simple to cross-link between them.
7 Live Text
When you’ve selected some text in an image to use for Live Text recognition, you can not only copy it to paste it into a document, but the contextual menu offers additional services, shown when you ≈-click or two-finger tap on the text. These include a regular internet search, Siri’s more extensive look-up facility, and translation.
8 Check colour use
When you’re designing charts or diagrams which need to be accessible to those with restricted colour vision, test them out using the display colour filters provided in System Preferences > Accessibility, in its Display item. Switch to the Colour Filters tab and tick Enable Colour Filters, then switch between the different options in the Filter type menu there. These will give a good idea how others will experience the colours that you’ve used and so make changes accordingly.