10 Mac Tips From MacMost’s Patreon Supporters

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today here are ten Mac tips from my Patreon supporters.

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Speaking of my Patreon supporters I recently asked them for their favorite Mac tips. I got a lot of responses with some great tips. Here are 10!

So Robert, a supporter since February 2020, still likes to use the old Save As command, as do I. But a lot of apps don't have that. If you go to File you won't see Save As but instead Duplicate. However, you can get Save As back by simply holding the Option key down. The Duplicate option will change to Save As. They are similar commands so that makes sense.

Steven, a supporter since January 2017 when I started my Patreon Campaign and also Albert, a supporter since August 2019, both had the same suggestion. That's using Command H to hide apps rather than quitting them. So, for instance, here I am in Pages and it's covering everything. Instead of just quitting Pages and having to relaunch it I can go to Pages, Hide Pages or just Command H. So Command H hides the app. It reveals what's behind but Pages is still running. I can use the Dock or any other way I launch apps to instantly bring it back. 

Now Jay, a supporter since August 2019, has the tip of using the App Switcher to see which apps you have running. So Command and Tab and continue to hold down the Command key while you tab through all of your different apps so you can see what you've got going on. If you want to Quit an app you can simply use the Q key and it will Quit that one app. You could also use the H key to Hide an app. So I can hide Pages right here by just pressing H when I'm over it.

Chad, a supporter since 2017, uses a lot of similar responses when replying to people in Mail. Instead of retyping everything he Saves the canned response as a Text Clipping. You can do that by selecting the text and then clicking, holding, and dragging the text to the Finder. So I'll drag it to the Desktop here. You can see this text clipping. If you have a lot of them you can put them in a special place. So let's create a new folder here in Documents called Responses. I'll add this clipping to it. Now you can see the response there. There's the name of the clipping and you click on it in a Preview or QuickLook will show you what's inside. If you want to use it again instead of an email message just drag and drop it there. You can see how it places it there. 

Now Chris, a supporter since January 2019, also has a suggestion for Mail. Sometimes when you type in the TO field to add an email address it will insert an incorrect one or an outdated email address for someone. You can find a lot of these by going to Window and then Previous Recipients. This will show you a list of previous recipients. You can search for them and you can select anyone that you want and remove it from the list so it won't be suggested anymore. Note that suggestions when you type an email address are also taken from your Contacts. So you may want to check there if you're getting a wrong address sometimes.

Bill, a supporter since November 2020, has a tip for using Photos. He finds that while the Enhance function right here will work great a better way to do it is to go to Edit and then use four Auto settings. Those are Sharpen, Noise Reduction, Color, and Light. Then from there if you want to go further just open this up and maybe change a slide a little bit to get the effect that you want.

Thomas, a supporter from February 2017, likes to add extra spacing to the Dock. You can do that in Terminal by using this Command right here. That will add an extra space in the Dock and restart the Dock. Notice now I've got the space right here and I could drag it over wherever I want to create some spacing and group apps together. Note that an alternative is to use Small Spacer Tiles instead of a regular spacer tile and now you'll get a smaller space instead of the full icon with one. 

Esteban, a supporter since August this year, has to save a lot of things as PDF. But not all apps have the ability to export as a PDF. But as long as you can Print you can get a PDF. Just go to File, Print and then from there choose PDF and you can Save as PDF. 

Now Jim, a supporter since October 2019, strongly suggests, and I completely agree, that you should get a UPS for your Mac, especially if you're using an iMac or Desktop Mac that if you lose power, or even get a quick fluctuation in power, it will shut it off. So you can find the UPS, an uninterruptible power supply, at just about any computer store. If you look on Amazon you'll find them at all sorts of different prices. You don't need an expensive one to save you from a quick power outage. But you can get a larger one to help you keep working if you get frequent outages in your area. It's useful not just to plug your iMac into but also things like external screens, internet modem. Anything that could suffer damage or prevent you from working if there is a quick power outage. 

Angela, a supporter since September of this year, has the very useful tip to utilize the Accessibility function in System Preferences under Keyboard to go to Viewer and enable the Accessibility keyboard. This gives you an onscreen keyboard. But you could go to Panel Editor here and create additional panels for this keyboard. On these panels you could have buttons that do various things. For instance this button here can insert some text. You can have it set in the Actions Enter Text, enter whatever text it is, and it would type that. You can add another button to this panel here and position it where you want and have it press multiple keys. So I can do Shift Command Option V, for instance, and then maybe a Return after that. So now here I could go to that Custom Panel, I can use this to insert some text, and then let's say I Copy this text here and I want to Paste it using Edit, Paste and Match Style, that's all those keys there, and then put a Return after it. This button is going to use that Command and put that Return after it as well. There's all sorts of useful things you can do using Buttons you create for these panels.

So I thank all my patrons for the tips that they suggested. I have many more that I couldn't fit into this video. I hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.