12/17/209:00 am 10 Mac Apple Menu Tips and Tricks The Apple Menu gives you access to some primary system functions. There are some hidden features of the Apple Menu as well as other ways to access the functions there. You can also watch this video at YouTube (but with ads). Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let me show you ten tricks involving the Apple Menu. MacMost is brought to you thanks to a great group of more than 800 supporters. Go to MacMost.com/patreon. There you can read more about the Patreon Campaign. Join us and get exclusive content and course discounts. So the Apple Menu is the first menu at the top left corner of your Mac screen. When you select it you get a standard set of commands that are there no matter which app you're running. But there's a lot of hidden functionality there as well. Now the first item there is About This Mac. When you select it you get this About screen. You should be on the Overview section to start and there's a button there called System Report. Click that and you get a far more detailed look at everything on your Mac, every detail of every system. Now if your intention is to go there you don't need to first go to Apple Menu, About This Mac and then click the button. You can simply hold the Option key down and About This Mac changes to System Information. Select that and you go right to System Information. Now the next two items are System Preferences and App Store. These take you to those apps respectively. Now they are always there in the Apple Menu. So if you have those items in the Dock it's kind of redundant. I usually remove System Preferences and the App Store from the Dock to save the space and have less icons there. I know I can always get to them in the Apple Menu. Now what about the opposite of that. The only way to get to About This Mac is through the Apple Menu and the same thing for System Information. But you could actually find these as apps and add them to the Dock and other locations. For System Information, use Go and go to your Applications folder. Then in there look for the Utilities folder and go into that. In Utilities there's System Information. You can add this to the Dock if you like or access it through Launchpad. Now About is a little harder to find. It's not in your Applications folder. You can find it by going to Go and then Computer. Then at the top level go to your Hard Drive and then to System and then from there to Library. Under Library you'll find a folder called Core Services. In Core Services you'll find a bunch of special apps and inside the Applications folder in there you'll find About This Mac. You can actually add that to your Dock and then access it from there or drag an alias to the Finder or even hold the Command key down and drag it to the Finder Toolbar to add it there. Now the next item in the Apple Menu is Recent Items. This shows recent applications you've used, recent documents that you've opened, and recent servers you're accessed. At the bottom you'll see Clear Menu which will clear everything out. You can control how many items appear in the recent items section by going to System Preferences and then General and into a setting in here, Recent Items, and you could choose five, ten, fifteen, twenty, thirty, or fifty. So customize it to fit your needs. If you selected None then Recent Items disappears completely from the Apple Menu. Now another thing about Recent Items. When you go to it and you click an item in here it will launch the application or open the document or go to the server. But if you hold down the Command key these all change to Show In Finder. So instead of opening a document you actually want to see its location you can hold the Command key down, then select it, and it will bring it up in a Finder window. The next item is Force Quit. This will bring up the special screen that allows you to Force Quit any application currently running. But you could also hold the Shift key down and Force Quit changes to Force Quit and the currently running app. In this case the Finder. But it could be any app that you have that is at the front. Notice the keyboard shortcut updates as well. This will try to force quit that app without taking you to that extra screen to select it first. Now the next three commands here are Sleep, Restart, and Shut Down. The first thing I want to tell you about them is there are keyboard shortcuts for these on most Macs. But you won't see them listed here. How the keyboard shortcuts work depend on the Mac you have. If you've got a Mac, say an iMac with a keyboard and it has an eject key on the keyboard, you can actually use the eject key in combination with other modifier keys to Sleep, Restart, or Shut Down your Mac with the keyboard shortcut rather than going to the Apple Menu. This also should work on keyboards that have a Power button but not on keyboards that have Touch ID button like the latest of MacBook Pros and MacBook Airs. Now another thing about these options here is Restart and Shut Down both bring up extra menus. So if I select Restart it will bring up this screen here asking me to confirm, checks on other user, does things like that. You can tell it's going to do that because of the three dots. Anytime there are three dots, like with Force Quit, it means there's going to be an extra step before the action is actually performed. But if you hold down the Option key then you can see the three dots disappear from Restart and Shut Down which means that it will do it just with this command. So I can easily Restart with this command or Shut Down with this command as long as I'm holding the Option key. Notice the same is true for Log Out. Without the Option key down it gives me three dots. It's going to prompt me like that. But with the Option key held down it won't give me the prompt. Now another way to access some of these items here is using Hot Corners. You could go to System Preferences, and then you could access Hot Corners in Mission Control, and then the Hot Corners button. I can set a corner of the screen to put the display asleep. Then with that selected if I move my cursor up to the top left corner the display will go to sleep. I don't even have to click. Another option is Lock Screen. So that's another way to do the Lock Screen command here. But do note both Lock Screen and Log Out also have keyboard shortcuts using Control Command Q or Shift Command Q. Now my last tip is about accessing the Apple Menu using just the keyboard. Go to System Preferences to check to make sure you have this setup. It's under Keyboard and Shortcuts and then Keyboard. You'll see here Move Focus to the Menu Bar. If you have that turned on and set to Control F2 you can access the Apple Menu by using that. You may have to hold down the fn key in addition to F2 in order for this to work. It depends on your setting here in the Keyboard section. So I can now use this keyboard combination and now you could see the Apple Menu is selected. If I use the Down arrow I can now open up the menu and then the down arrow will continue to go through the items. I can either use the right arrow to go into recent items and the left arrow to go up out of it. When I get to something that I want to use I can use the Return key or the Spacebar to activate. So there's a look at getting the most out of using the Apple Menu on your Mac. Thanks for watching.Related Subjects: Menu Bar (12 videos) Related Video Tutorials: 31 Mac Menu Bar Tips and Tricks ― 50 Mac Features Hidden Behind the Option Key ― 10 Screenshot Markup Tips and Tricks
