Learn how to find your friends and devices in the all new FindMy app introduced with macOS Catalina.
In this lesson for What’s New in macOS Catalina, I look at the all new app FindMy on the Mac. With the FindMy app, you can find your friends you are following, as well as find all your devices. With your devices, you can also play a sound, to make it easier to find, get directions to it, send notifications, and erase it. See how the new FindMy app can help you find your friends and devices on the Mac.
Video Transcript (video also has closed captions):
In this video, we’re going to look at the new Find My app on the Mac with macOS Catalina. With the Find My app, what we’re able to do is find any friends that we’re following and find any devices connected to our iCloud account. Let’s see how this works. Let’s go to My Mac. Now, the first thing I need to do is open up My Applications folder. The Find My app is just an application. I’m going to go down to my finder here. I click on it. We have a new finder window that opens up. Then I go over to Applications. From here, what I need to do is I need to find Find My app. I have it over here on the right. Again, it’s just another app, a new app.
When I double-click on this to open it up, let’s double-click on it. Let’s go and close this window in the back here. We’re just looking at my Find My app. We’re going to make it a bit larger here. From here, what I can do is I can decide if I want to find people that I’m following or devices. I’m going to be able to see all of the different people that I’m following under people. Now on my personal account, I have some of my family members and some of my friends, under Find My Friends.
Now, I’m able to locate them using the Find My app. They would show up underneath the list here. If I want to share my location with someone, then what I do is I go down to the bottom, and you’re going to see Share My Location. I would click on it, and then add the person I want to share my location with. That’s how we can use Find My Friends now on the Mac, we do it through the Find My app, and we go up to people.
Now let’s take a look at our devices. When we go over to Devices, we’re able to see all of the different devices that are signed in with our same iCloud account that we’re using for the Find My app. These are all the devices that I have connected to my Find My app. I want to find anyone of them, all I have to do is click on it, and it shows me where it is. Now, maybe I lost my phone, and I want to play a sound or send a notification, or mark it as lost. To do that, we go over to the eye here once we have it selected, and when we click on it, you’re going to see a pop-up. From here I can go and play a sound, I can get directions to it, I can set a notification, as well as mark it as lost, and then even erase the device.
The last thing I want to mention is we used to be able to use Find My Friends in the today view. If you recall, when we go up to these three horizontal lines to get to our notification center, it also gives us access to our today view. In past versions of Mac OS, we were able to see our friends, or Find My Friends, in the today view. We can no longer do that with the Find My app.
When I go down to where we add a new widget, these are called widgets here; I click on it. You’re going to see I do not have Find My in here, so I can no longer use Find My Friends in the today view. Even though I’ve gained a few features, I also did lose a feature.
That’s the new Find My app we have in macOS Catalina. With the Find My app, we can find our friends that we’re following and find all of our different devices. For our devices, when we select that device, we’re going to see a little eye where the location is. When we click on that, we’re able to play a sound, send a notification, or even erase the device.
That’s a look at the new Find My app on the Mac with macOS Catalina.