10 Ancient Mac Features You Forgot Were Still On Your Mac

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Here are ten features that have been on your Mac for 20 years or more but you may have forgotten about. 

Sometimes I'll mention a Mac feature that's been around for a long time and I'll get comments back from people that used to use the feature but kind of forgot it was there and are amazed to find it is still on their Mac. So here are 10 examples of that. 

I'm going to start with two from the Music App. The Music App is fairly new but iTunes, which preceded it has been around since 2001. Apple actually bought an app called Sound Jam and then turned it into iTunes. It inherited features that even predate iTunes. For instance, if you are playing music and you go to Window you'll notice Visualizer. If I use it, and you can see there's a handy keyboard shortcut, it creates these graphics on the screen to go along with the music that's playing. You can use the Escape Key to exit. Also notice that you can choose the new Visualizer, new as in twenty years ago, or the Classic Visualizer which is even older than that, which looks a little bit different. In both cases if you press the key with the question mark on it on your keyboard you'll get other keyboard commands displaying at the top left. So there is a lot of ways to kind of modify and customize the Visualizer. It's a fun way to have your Mac's screen do something when you're playing music and not using your Mac for anything else. Like imagine your Mac sitting in the corner of your room playing music while you're entertaining. 

Now another option that goes all the way back to the earliest version of iTunes is still in the Music App. It is the ability to rip CD's. You can still take a regular music CD and insert it into an Optical Drive. Now Mac's don't come with an Optical Drive anymore but you can pick up a USB Drive pretty cheaply and most of them will just work, plug it in and play with your Mac. If you insert a CD into that while it is attached to your Mac and you've got the Music App running it's going to automatically recognize that and prompt you as to whether or not you want to Import that CD into your collection. So you can see it is asking to do that right here. It even recognizes the tracks and all the information. In Music Settings you've got the same settings as before. So you've got When a CD if inserted it asks to import the CD. You can go to Files and Change Import Settings to set how these files are translated into digital files. So you have all of that stuff that goes way back more than 20 years still available. 

You also still have the ability, in the Music App, to Burn CD's as well. Also I'll add that you can still sync the music that is ripped like this to some of the last iPod models and to modern iPhones the same way you used to back in iTunes. Except that that is now in the Finder, not in the Music App. So if you have your iPhone connected you can see it here in the left sidebar and you get a set of controls here that looks like what used to be in iTunes. You can actually select music to sync, either with a standard sync or syncing manually using Manually Manage setting here. This is how it used to work in iTunes, exactly the same way. It still works now if you know where to look and you want to use the old fashioned kind of sync instead of iTunes Match or Apple Music. 

If you find these videos valuable consider joining the more than 2000 others that support MacMost at Patreon. You get exclusive content, course discounts, and more. You can read about it at macmost.com/patreon. 

Now believe it or not it was only 20 years ago that Apple introduced the iMac G5 that had a built-in webcam. When they did they added an app to those Macs called Photo Booth. Photo Booth is still on your Mac today. It allows you to access your Mac's camera and do things like take pictures or record videos directly from that camera. So it's kind of the camera app for your Mac. It has some pretty neat features like the ability to select effects here and then have some cool effects like this. You can Drag & Drop photos and videos out of Photo Booth. So if you need to take a quick photo of yourself or something else and all you've got is your MacBook's webcam you can use this to do it. 

Now Apple first added a Graphing Calculator to the Mac way back in the 1990's in macOS7. That app was discontinued. But in 2004 Apple bought another Graphing App. So if you look for Grapher you'll find that on your Mac today and it allows you to create 3D graphs or even some examples that you can choose here and some of them are even animated over time. You can export videos from it. It's a very complex and interesting app. 

Another app that started with the original OS10 is the Digital Color Meter App. This is an interesting little utility here that will show you a large portion of the screen wherever the pointer is located. You can see the RGB values from that location. If at any point you get the color you want you can use Shift Command C to copy that color's text or Option Command C to copy that pixel as an image. One of the things that I love that it does that other similar third party utilities don't do is to allow you to set the aperture size. So notice now that that square in there includes more than one pixel. It has given me the average color in that area. So if you have an area that is part of a gradient and you just want to get that general color copied to the Clipboard you use somewhere else, you can do it. 

Now a long time ago Apple actually had an app for web developers called iWeb. It was one of those old fashioned tools that allow you to design the HTML on your Mac and then it would upload the entire thing to a website. It also used to be able to use an old, old version of Pages and export all the Rich text in there as HTML. You can't do that any longer but there is one app that is on your Mac that still handles HTML. That is TextEdit. If you use TextEdit in the Rich Text Mode, not Plain Text Mode, but Rich Text Mode where you can change the style and color and font and all of that, when you go to Save, or if you've already saved hold the Option Key down for Save As here, you get to choose the File Format. Rich Text document is the default. But you can also choose to save as a Webpage  as dot HTML I'll get this HTML file. If I select it and QuickLook it you can see it shows it as HTML. I can even drag this now to Safari and it will load up in Safari as well. TextEdit will also read HTML as well. I can Control Click, right click or two-finger click on this, say Open With, and choose TextEdit and you can see it just displays it back. Just another format for it to handle. Now I can continue to edit that. 

I often hear from people that use the Pasword's App that say, well it is a shame that Keychain access isn't there anymore on the Mac. Keychain Access was a way to access passwords before there was a Passwords App. People assume that passwords replaced it. That's not true at all. Unfortunately, you can't find it if you use Launchpad. But it does come up in Spotlight. So you can open up Keychain Access right there. You can see its location is actually in your System Folder, Library Core Services Applications, and you can run it here. It will prompt you to open Password instead of Keychain Access. But you can override that by clicking the Back Button and get Keychain Access back. This is especially useful if previously you've stored secure notes in Keychain Access, like I've got a few sample ones here on my iCloud Keychain. I can still access those here even though I can't create new ones. Of course if you're a developer often you need to use Keychain Access to access things like certificates for software development. 

Another thing that was included with the original macOS10 in 2001 was an app called System Profiler. Use the Apple Menu, go to About This Mac, but hold the Option Key down and it changes to System Information. That brings up the App. System Information is the name it is currently called but it is a direct descendent of System Profiler. It allows you to do really interesting things like if I was on a MacBook here I could get more detailed battery information right here. On my Mac Studio I can get detailed information about, say, the graphics and displays. All sorts of things like that. You can even go down to Software here and see a list of your applications, like that, with all the version numbers and whether or not they are universal or for Apple Silicon only.

This is the oldest app that I'm going to talk about today. This dates back to 1994. When I show this to people in different lists of things you can do on your Mac they're amazed that it is still there. They forgot about it and it's very useful. It's called Stickies. Stickies is a little app that puts these little text windows on your screen and you can create new ones and place them anywhere you want. Under Window you can set them to float on top or be translucent there. You can use Font styling and all sorts of stuff in there. They are good for little notes that you want to leave for yourself on your screen. Handy little things you want to refer to. Some reference material. All sorts of stuff like that. But the big downsize is Stickies today doesn't work over iCloud. It's just local on your Mac. So the Notes app is better for most things. But for little things that just appear on one Mac's screen Stickies is a really interesting option. 

So one last thing that people forget is there is the DVD player. It doesn't show up in Launchpad like before but you can use Spotlight to find it. Of course it pops-up automatically if you have an external optical drive. You connect it to your Mac and you insert a DVD into it. It comes ups and it has all the DVD controls here and tons of different things you can do. Just to playback DVD's. I don't have a DVD inserted now so you can't see anything but it's there. If you've got a DVD player it also allows you to open up DVD images, if you have any of those back from days when you may have created DVD's on your Mac. 

So those are the ten I want to mention. But there are more! There's an app called BlueTooth File Exchange that allows you to use BlueTooth to send files between Macs. Image Capture dates back to 2001 and it's a great way to access camera photos directly without the photos app but also access scanners that are attached to your Mac or over the network. Print Center is an app that shows you all of the documents being printed right now and other information about your printers. Audio MIDI setup is an app that allows you to take detailed control over different audio inputs and outputs. The Dictionary App is 20 years old right now and that's a great app for looking up definitions of words. It has a thesaurus and lots of other language information. 

So I hope that you find one of these old apps that is still on your Mac useful. Thanks for watching.