MacMost: Archives

When you work with documents in macOS, each time you save you are saving a new version of that document. You can revert to a previous version of that document, or grab some items from a previous version that you may have deleted in your current version. This feature works in all Apple apps and many third-party ones as well.

A little-known trick will allow you to run your Mac's screensaver as a desktop background. You can use this to have an animated desktop, display useful information, or just for fun. It could be useful in situations where you have your Mac just playing music in a shared space and want something more interesting being shown than just a static image.

It can be useful for new Mac users, those switching from Windows, or even experience Mac users to take a tour of the typical Mac keyboard. Learn what modifier keys are called and what they do. Find out about keys that may not always be called the same thing that is printed on them. Learn what some obscure keys are used for.

You can export your voicemail on your iPhone to standard audio files that can be send via email or message, saved to your iCloud Drive, or used in other apps. This can be handy if you want to archive and backup potentially important messages while also keeping your voicemail list clean.

You can use the pen tool to draw on image and PDFs in Preview. Rough shapes and lines will be converted to smooth and perfect shapes and lines, but you can always choose the freehand drawing instead. You can move, resize and change the properties of shapes after you draw them.

If you do a lot of web searching, you may want to use the Safari Snapback feature to jump back to the page of search results. You can also use Safari tabs to keep search results around and load multiple result pages at once.

A good alternative to Photoshop on your Mac is Acorn, an inexpensive but powerful image editor in the Mac App Store. In this tutorial, learn how to cut out a person in one photo and place them in another.

There is no way in Photos to get a list of all of the photos that have no keyword tags applied to them. But with a little JavaScript in Automator you can add this command to Photos and use it with all photos or any selection of photos.

You can easily delete books you have added to iBooks unless you have added them from the iBooks Store. In that case the best you can do is to hide these books using a hard-to-find function in the iBooks app.

If you are out of the house and need to connect your MacBook to the Internet you can use your iPhone's personal hotspot function. This allows you to connect through your iPhone's mobile data connection. This is handy when you'd rather not use public Wi-Fi or none is available.

By default your Mac screenshots will appear on the Desktop. However, if you take screenshots often, it could be useful to set up a dedicated folder for them and have them automatically save there. You can do this with a simple Terminal command.

The Lookup function in Mac Numbers can be used to find a value based on another value. You can also use numerical and time ranges by simply stating the start of each range. In this example, we look at a rental rate sheet and calendar where the price for each date is populated from the the rates in another table.

You can use the Script Editor app on your Mac to create JavaScript programs that control other apps. In this example, learn how to take data from a Numbers spreadsheet and use it to add new slides to a Keynote presentation. While it takes some programming know-how to build automation tasks like this, it is good to know what is possible.

You can set a text message to appear on your Mac's lock screen. Use this to put contact information or instructions for someone who may find your lost MacBook. Change the message often to fit your situation.

Your Mac comes with 46 apps pre-installed. Gary attempts to describe each one in just over 3 minutes. Watch to discover things you may not have known were already on your Mac. You can find all of these with Spotlight searches, Launchpad or looking in Applications or Applications/Utilities.

While most keyboard shortcuts can be found by looking through the menu items, you can discover more obscure shortcuts by using the Help menu documentation, which often includes a page of keyboard shortcuts for the app you are using.

The Help menu can be used in all applications to find other menu commands. The search function in the Help menu will return any menu command that contains the keyword, which will help you locate commands buried deep in submenus.

The Help menu in Mac apps can be used to access app documentation. Some Apple apps come with extensive documentation that users do not realize even exists. You can search the documentation, or read through it by topic to discover features.

The Merge function in Sierra's Finder will allow you to merge two folders, keeping the latest versions of each file. The trick is to arrange the folders so they have the same name and use a temporary folder to place them both into.

In Sierra if you look at your hard drive storage you may see an item labeled Purgeable Space. The files here would include downloaded media and documents in iCloud Drive that Sierra knows it can safely remove if space is needed. There is no need to try to manually manage Purgeable space as macOS will clear them and re-download them as needed.