10 Weird macOS Features That Are Somewhat Useful (2026)

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Here are some weird but still useful features you can find on your Mac.

I did a video like this awhile back and some of those weird features aren't there anymore in modern macOS. So here's a mix of some old ones and some new ones. 

The first one I want to show you is putting a background behind Finder windows in specific folders. For instance, here I'm looking at a folder and you can see I'm in Icon View. This only works in Icon View. Now it's got a standard white background behind the icons. But you can change that. If you go to View and then Show View Options or simply Command J you'll see Background, Default, Color, & Picture. Again this only appears if you are in Icon View. If you're in List View you won't see that option there nor will you see that in Column View or Gallery View. 

So in Icon View you can switch to Color. Once you switch to Color you'll see a circle here with a color in it. Click on that and it brings up the Color Chooser. You can use the Color Wheel or any other mode to select a color. So you can put a background color behind the icons here and this can help you differentiate between folders. You can quickly tell where you're at or, if you have multiple windows or Tabs open, where you're at without even having to find the name. 

You can also select Picture. When you do you get this little drop zone here. You can take an image like this one and drop it there and it will use the image there. So you can use a photo, but you can also create your own graphics in any graphics app you want. You can do a gradient or something else and have that as the background. At any time you can switch back between these. As you can see it remembers the color and remembers the picture even if you switch away and then back again. To get rid of the color you just want to go and set this to white. To get rid of the picture click there so it selected, like that, and then press the Delete Key on your keyboard. Then switch back to Default. 

Now when you copy some text you can, of course, then paste it somewhere else. But let's say you forget what you copied. In the Finder, and for some reason this is only available in the Finder even though the Clipboard is used throughout macOS and in all apps, you can go to the Edit Menu and there's Show Clipboard. This special little window is part of the Finder. So, if you switch to another app, like for instance if I were to go to Notes, you don't see it anymore. You have to be in the Finder to see it. It even tells you the type here. For instance, Text. So if I were to select, say, this file here and do Command C to copy the file, it'll show the file name and it will tell me that it's Items. But also contains some text, the File name. If I were to double click on it to Open this in, say, Preview, select an area and then Command C to copy, I could see that now that Clipboard window in the Finder shows me the image and says what the contents are. A PNG image in this case. This is handy if you need to confirm the contents of the Clipboard. Like, for instance, did a copy work or if you want to just confirm before you paste. 

Now the Music App has a feature that dates all the back to iTunes. In fact even the apps that were the precursor to iTunes. If you are playing music, as I am here, you can go to Window and then Visualizer, to turn On the Visualizer which gives you an interesting graphic that is coordinated with the music. If you press the Slash or Question Mark key on your keyboard you'll actually get some keyboard shortcuts there at the top left corner and you can customize this. You can use the Escape Key to Exit and also go to Visualizer Settings here and choose the classic visualizer for the older one and then you can activate it and you'll see this older version of the Visualizer. The same Slash or Questions Mark Key works here to show you settings for that as well. 

This is handy if you want to use your Mac to play music but you don't want it just to sit there and have the screen go to sleep or go to Screensaver. You'll actually get something related to the music. It's particularly useful, say, if you have a meeting or you just want your Mac to be playing music while you've got company at home and you want something more to be on the screen than just showing your Desktop. 

Now here's a trick you can do with apps and the Preview App. The Preview App, of course, is what you use to open PDF's and Image Files to view them and do various things with them. But you can actually Open up a lot of apps in Preview. The app doesn't run. Instead Preview looks for and finds graphics inside the apps. So, for instance, to make it easier I put Preview here in the Dock so I can easily Drag & Drop something to it. So if I took the Clock App here and I dragged that to Preview it will open up the Clock App in Preview and you'll see this list of graphics here. In this case different clock faces and some other graphics that are inside of the app. Sometimes you get a whole variety of things. I'll Drag & Drop the Books App onto Preview here and it's going to warn me that there's actual multiple files inside of this app that are going to be opened. So you're going to see all sorts of different things open up in cases like this and it's going to show you buttons and other controls. Some of these can make interesting graphics for you to use in, say, presentations and such. 

Also if you select an app and use Command i, then click to select the icon at the top left corner of the Info Window and Command C to copy you might know that you can Paste that app icon in different places where you can paste images. But in Preview if you then go to File, New From Clipboard, you don't just get the graphic by itself, you get all of the different sizes here in the left sidebar. 

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If you don't know this already your Mac comes with an App called Photo Booth. It's basically a Camera App for your Mac. It allows you to take a picture with your Mac's camera. Now your Mac's camera is really meant for meetings and such, but if you need to you can take a photo with it. It's not going to be nearly as high resolution as an iPhone Camera or another camera. But you can still use it. But the weird thing about it is that it has special effects that has been there since day 1. So, you want to make sure you have the Still Camera option here. Then you click on the Effects Button. Then you're going to see all of these interesting effects that you can choose and do different things with, like that. There are actually multiple pages of them, like that. It's just a bit of fun and it's for keeping kids entertained. The middle one actually has some good filters that could be useful in various projects and situations. 

Now there are a variety of reasons you may want your Mac to speak to you. But did you know that you've got, in addition to regular voices like the Siri voices, you've got some actual weird novelty voices. Go to System Settings and then go to Accessibility and then to Read & Speak. Here you can set the voice that is going to be used. So, for instance, under System Voice here you can select from this list or click the i button there. Then you get a list of all of these. If you scroll to the bottom you're going to get a whole set of novelty ones, like for instance this one. (voice playing). All sorts of things. These have been around for a while and they could be useful especially if you're trying to have your written text spoken back to you. Using a novelty voice could sometimes help you hear mistakes that  a regular voice couldn't. 

Now for a use for spoken voices let's go to Menu Bar here in System Settings. If you go to Clock Options there is the option here to announce the time and have it spoken on the  hour, half hour, quarter hour. You can choose which voice to use. So you can have the time spoken to you, for instance here when it is about to turn 11:00. (time voice). You can imagine this could be useful for time management purposes. This is a good example of using an unusual voice here because you may be using a regular voice for other things. So having it spoken with a novelty voice could draw attention to the time as opposed to other things that are being said. 

An unusual feature that has been around forever is something called Text Clippings. It's what happens if you select text in almost any app. You drag that text, not elsewhere in the document or to another document, but to the Finder like here on the Desktop or to a Finder Window. What you'll get is a little file called a Text Clipping. You can see the extension there, dot text clipping. Now you can't edit them or anything like that. But you can Drag & Drop them into a lot of different text areas in situations like this, to add the text there. Like it works here in Text Edit or it works here in Pages. But it doesn't work everywhere. For instance it would be useful to do this in Mail. But if I drag this to the Mail Composition Window, for instance, it thinks I'm inserting a file. 

 Here's an app that you may not have known is on your Mac. I comes with the System. It's called Digital Color Meter. So use Spotlight to launch it and it has a bunch of different utilities built into it. But one of the things it does is it allows you to move your Pointer over a pixel on the screen and it will show you the red, green, and blue values for that color. It's useful in graphics applications, but what is really cool about it is that you can change the aperture size. So, you can incorporate a variety of different colors and get, kind of the average color of that. So you're not trying to get the exact pixel. But basically the general color of an area. Note that it has a keyboard shortcut in here. Copy Color is Text. Shift Command C. So I can get, say, the average color of this area, see what the RGB values are, but using Shift Command C I can copy that. ThenI could paste it in, in some other app. 

So for this next trick look for Activity Monitor, another app that comes with your Mac. Now you can use Activity Monitors to monitor CPU usage, memory usage, energy, disk, network, and so on. But one of the neat things you can do with it is you can go to the View Menu here, and there's a submenu for Doc Icon. So instead of having to show the normal application icon for Activity Monitor you can have it show CPU usage, CPU history, network usage, or disk activity. So, for instance, I'll have it show disk activity here. Then you could see it in the Dock right there. It gives me a little graph of disk activity. I can now Hide Activity Monitor, yet I still am monitoring disk activity down here. So, for instance, watch as I launch iMovie here. It's going to use a bunch of disk activity to load up this video. You can also Control Click, Right Click, or two-finger click or just click and hold the App Icon in the Dock and there's a Dock Icon option here. So you can switch to anyone of these or back to the regular application icon.

Now here's one last one. But I'm not sure if it actually has any real use beyond entertainment. Run the Chess App that comes with your Mac. Now, let's go and cancel this game and start a new game. One of the things you can do here, in addition to being human versus human or human versus computer is you can do computer versus computer. Then you can set the difficulty level here. Let's do 2 seconds per move. Then Start! The computer will play itself. It's going to play both sides like this. You can make this full screen easily enough. You can choose all the options like whether or not to show the moves there on the right. You can even go into Settings and have it speak the moves, setting different voices for each player. So, let's turn this On and watch. (watching computer chess game). It can be kind of an alternative to a screensaver, I guess, or just something you watch for entertainment if you like chess. 

So I hope you found some of these weird features of your Mac useful. Thanks for watching.