MacMost: Archives

You can change the background color on all or some of your pages in Mac Pages. The technique is different depending on whether you are working with a page layout document or a word processing document. It is fairly simple with page layout, and each page has its own background. With word processing, each section can have a section master with a full-page rectangle in the background.

Some apps and Final Cut Pro allow you to add a camcorder overlay to make video look like it was recorded on an old video camera. You can do the same in iMovie using an overlay created in Keynote. With this approach, you can highly customize the camcorder overlay. Once you create your Keynote template, you can continue to customize and adjust it for future use.

Recent generations of MacBook keyboards have been plagued by issues that have had users going back to Apple Stores for repairs. Apple has been replacing keyboards in most cases without much question and quickly, usually within a few days, and even if AppleCare has expired.

Analysts are forecasting a new model of AirPods by the end of the year. Unlike the second-generation AirPods which just arrived weeks ago, the third-generation will have a new form factor and a higher price, while another model may keep the same price and form, but with a new manufacturing process. They may also include noise-canceling.

There are three main places you can find, buy and download games for your Mac. The Mac App store is the obvious place, but there are also two well-established sites that sell a variety of top titles. In addition, we may soon have a fourth option when Apple launches the Apple Arcade.

Apple News+ is the new service from Apple where you can get the contents of about 300 magazines and other publications for $10 per month. But is Apple News+ worth it for you? A critical look finds it lacking in many areas: design, functions, and content. But there are some reasons you may still want to consider giving it a try.

New Mac users are often given bad advice that leads to mistakes when they first switch to the Mac. Don't listen to others when they advise you to immediately installer add-ons, or give you tips to customize your Mac. Learn to use macOS in its default configuration first, which is best for most users. Also avoid the habit of shutting your Mac down and instead let it sleep. And absolutely avoid installing maintenance or anti-virus apps. Most are useless and many are actually harmful.

Image glitching can be used to create unusual and random effects to an image. On your Mac, you can convert an image to a TIFF file and then import that data into the Audacity audio editor. You can then manipulate the bits as audio and export it out to create what looks like a corrupt image. This techinque requires a lot of experimentation and trial and error to get a good result.

When building Numbers spreadsheets it is important to remember that a row in a table is the equivalent to a record in a database. To build a billing system, you can put clients in one table and invoice items such as billable hours in another table. Then you can build a sheet with tables that use functions to populate an invoice. The requires some advanced functions like LOOKUP, INDEX, IF, AND, COUNTIF and more. But once you are done, you can easily add more records and create invoices.

Apple has updated the way podcasts appear on the web, allowing you to preview and listen to episodes right in your web browser without needing to jump into iTunes. This could provide a nice way to listen to one episode without much fuss. It could also mean that Apple is getting ready to break up the iTunes app.

The fight between Apple and Qualcomm over mobile chip patents has come to an end as the two companies reach a settlement. Apple will make a payment to Qualcomm and license their technology for six years. Qualcomm has been asking Apple for royalty payments on mobile technology patents, while Apple has insisted that Qualcomm has nothing to do with the technologies.

You can add a motion effect to a 2D photo without buying expensive software. By using Preview to cut a photo into layers and Keynote to animate them, you can make a photo come to life. This simple parallax animation effect can be used on all sorts of photos to create interesting videos or animated GIFs.

Clearing the browser cache was simple in Safari, but the menu command is gone. However, you can still clear the cache, and do so more efficiently by clearing cache, cookies and other items on a per-website basis. You can also bring back the Empty Cache command. Clearing a website's cache and cookies is one way to fix things when a website starts misbehaving.

The opening and closing slides of a presentation are often on the screen for a while, so why not make them more interesting than just some text? You can easily add a video as a background to a keynote slide. With iMovie you can create a few different backgrounds that you can reuse.

Most Mac users know how to use Command+Tab to use the app switcher. But did you know you can also hide and quit apps with the app switcher? You can also use the cursor to select an app and even drag and drop documents onto apps. By using other keys, you can navigate to a specific window or even a recently-opened document.

Sites are reporting that we may finally see the division of the iTunes app into multiple programs. This has already happened on iOS and tvOS, where separate TV, Music and Podcasts apps exist. So it wouldn’t be a surprising move.

A new feature of Keynote 9 is the ability to export as an animated GIF file. These are useful to upload to social media or send via text message. The exported GIF includes all transitions, animations and special effects.

A new feature of Pages 8.0 is the Table Of Contents View. This is an alternative to the thumbnails view that you can use to quickly navigate while writing and editing a large document. The Table Of Contents View is a separate feature from the Table Of Contents element that you can insert in your documents, though they have some similarities.

Yet another rumor suggests that Apple will put out a new iPhone late this year with five cameras. Several sites have mocked up iPhone backs showing three cameras, which would total five after you include the two front-facing cameras. Current iPhone models already include a regular and telephoto lens on the back. The new camera would be a wide-angle.

The Keyboard Panel Accessibility feature on your Mac lets you create sequences of keypresses that you can repeat by pressing a button. This could make some unusual tasks easier to perform. In this example we'll use a panel button to repeat an unusual search and style function in Pages.