10 Fun Things You Can Try On Your Mac

Your Mac comes with all sorts of fun hidden things you can try. Capture funny photos and videos of yourself, play drums, listen to radio stations from around the world, lose at chess, and much more.

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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you ten fun things you can do with your Mac. 
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Now usually I'm all about telling you how to get the most from your Mac. Showing you useful things that can make you more productive. But every once in awhile it's good to have a little fun. So if you want to take a break from your work here are some things to try. First, you've got an app on your Mac called Photo Booth. This works with your eyesight camera. So the camera is built into an iMac for a MacBook model. You can use this simply to take a picture of yourself or record some video and there are all sorts of fun effects that you can apply there. It's fun to play with. It's particularly fun if you have kids around and you want to entertain them for a bit. But also if you want to record a video of yourself and you want to do it with a little bit of humor you can use one of the effects built in here to do it. 
Next in the Music App when you play music, of course, you get things like the name of the song and you can get lyrics and all that but you can also get something called the Visualizer. So if I were to play a song here and then go to Window, Visualizer I get something that looks like this and it displays all sorts of graphics that kind of go with the music a little bit. There are a lot of things that you can do to customize this including switching to the Classic Visualizer, right here. Then if you press the Slash Key, the one with the question mark on it, you get additional commands here for each different mode. You can of course make this full screen right here to fill the screen while you're playing music. Not to mention the fact that there's nothing to stop you from Screen Capturing while this is on and then using the weird screen effects in a video you're making. 
Now this next one is actually useful but it's also a lot of fun if you're never used Dictation on your Mac. You should give it a try. Go into System Preferences and then Keyboard and then go to Dictation and turn it On and you'll also see how to activate it right there. Then you can use this to usually dictate instead of typing. The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog period. There's another type of dictation that's even more powerful. If you go into Accessibility and then to Voice Control you enable Voice Control you get dictation as well. This is another type of dictation period. Along with this you also get commands that you can use to control your Mac in a variety of different ways. 
Now you can also make your Mac speak to you. There are a variety of different ways to do this. You can use the Terminal to do it and a variety of different apps. But one of the easiest ways to do it, and one that allows you to use Siri's Premium Voices, is if you go back into System Preferences, Accessibility and then you go to Spoken Content and enable Speech Selection. Then in here go and set the Options. You can see your Option Escape is what will trigger this. You can set the voice, Siri Voice 4 is the classic Siri voice, and then you can just type something here in an app like TextEdit, select it and then do Option Escape and have it speak whatever you want.
The next thing I want to show you is using GarageBand. GarageBand is a free app from Apple. If you don't have it on your Mac already you could download at no cost from the Mac App Store. Now you can create an empty project here and choose Drummer. Then create the Drummer there. Then you can basically play around with these fun rock drummers here. You can see there's all these different styles and you can pick a drummer that you like and then click here to set a loop. Then Play to play and then you can change where this Dot is to make is simple or complex, soft or loud, go to different presets here. Change which things are used in the drum kit, like that and create all sorts of different beats. It's fun to play with. There's basically an infinite number of variations. Or you could also create an empty project. Choose software instruments and then you'll have an instrument chosen right here, usually classic electric piano. You can use this onscreen keyboard and the corresponding letters on the keyboard to play some music. If you want to hear it in a different instrument just choose something different here on the left. Notice if I switch here to Drum Kit and then choose Drums then these keys actually correspond to different drums. You can tap out a beat.
You Mac actually comes with game preinstalled. It's called Chess. Go into Launchpad and look for Chess and launch that. You can play chess against the computer. You can move the pieces. The computer will make its move. If you're good at Chess you can go into Preferences here and create a more difficult opponent. You can also change the board type and the pieces. Make it look different and its 3D so you can grab a corner of the board here and actually tilt the board up or down and move it left and right. 
Did you know you can control your Mac with your head. If you go into System Preferences and then Accessibility and then go down to Pointer Control you can go to Alternate Control Methods and turn on Enable Head Pointer. Now if I move my head back and forth with my hands off the trackpad I can control the Pointer. You can also go into Alternate Pointer Actions. Then in Options here and then you could Add something like a facial expression and make it left click when you smile or stick your tongue out or blink your eye. All sorts of different things. 
Now you're probably familiar with using Emoji on your Mac while typing. You can use Control Command Space to bring up the Emoji and Special Character Viewer. You can scroll through it. Find all sorts of really interesting graphics here. Then you can select one and you get this little character. But the characters actually aren't so little. If you select them and you're in an app like Pages you can increase the size quite a bit. Then you can see how detailed the artwork is for each one of these. There are sooo many different characters representing so many different things in all of the Emoji sets and Special Symbols that it's worthwhile to go through and play around and see what there is. Take a look at some of the great artwork created by Apple for each of these emoji characters. It could actually be useful later on. But they are also fun to look at even to see some of the hidden things in them. For instance, if you search for Coin and come up with a coin here and you'll find out it has something here printed on the coin that's from a classic Apple advertising series. 
There's also an app on your Mac called Grapher. If you go into that you can use that to graph equations. Now it has some pretty complex things if you go into like 3D graphs. But if you just want to have some fun with it go to Examples and look at some of the 2D or 3D examples that are here. Select one of these and you get a pretty cool looking graphic and it's actually going to rotate it for you. There's a whole bunch of different ones you can try, like this. You can play around with the equation if you want to change it in subtle ways. Then if you want you can Export. Now if you go to File, Export you can export an image. But if you actually go to Equation, Create Animation you can create an animation that's a video. So you can set the number of frames here. You can go to Orientation and have it start at this orientation, for instance, and have it stop at this orientation. Create the animation. I'm going to save it here to the Desktop and you can see a little video it creates here. Now, of course, if I change the number of frames and other things I can actually create a much more advanced high resolution thing that perhaps I can use in some fun videos or something. 
Now let's go back into the Music App. Did you know that you can access radio stations in the Music App. I'm not talking about streaming online stations that play different songs based on your tastes. I'm talking about actual real radio stations that are broadcasting. If you search for a radio station by its call letters or sometimes by the name it goes by you can usually find it using Apple Music. So you want to search Apple Music for this. It seems to work even if you don't subscribe to Apple Music. You can play a radio station. So you can choose from radio stations from around the world. Many of them are available. 
So here are some additional ones. If you go to System Preferences, Screen Saver, most screen savers are just showing you your photos in different ways with different transitions. But there are two really interesting ones here at the bottom. One is Album Artwork that will show you the album artwork from your collection. You also have the Word Of The Day Screen Saver as well which will bring up a word and show you its definition. 
So there are some things that you can do on your Mac that may not be useful for you but they are fun to play with. There are others as well. If you've got some fun things you do on your Mac, especially if they use the built-in stuff, they don't require third party apps, let us all know in the comments below. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 4 Responses to “10 Fun Things You Can Try On Your Mac”

wei chong

1 year ago

Fun! Fun! Fun! Had lots of fun with this MacMost vid. I would encourage you to do more of these, maybe once of twice a year!

Thanks for sharing.

Paul Schwotzer

Mac dictation is mostly useless (for me) without a newline/CR command.
Dragon has it, of course, but it seems that Dragon has abandoned the Mac as far as the Dictate product.
Are there other dictation programs that work well on the Mac?

Gary Rosenzweig

Paul: There IS a new line command. It works great in Voice Control.
But it also works with the simple dictation function. It just doesn't add the new line until after you are done speaking.
Try it.

Yes, it does work with Voice Control!
So, the key is to enable both Dictation (Keyboard) and Voice Control (Accessibility) in System Preferences.
Thanks so much!!

Comments Closed.

10 Fun Things You Can Try On Your Mac

Comments: 4 Responses to “10 Fun Things You Can Try On Your Mac”

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