MacMost: Archives

You can sign PDF documents in the Preview app and in Mail. You save your signature using either the trackpad or your Mac's camera. You can then insert that signature in any spot in the PDF. It then becomes a permanent part of that PDF just as if you had printed out the document, signed it, and then scanned it back in. You can do the same in Mail, but only the copy sent will contain the signature.

Rumors abound that the iPhone 7 will not have a headphone jack. Is so, how will we connect our earbuds or headphones? Is this a step forward, or an annoyance?

Besides the alternate calculator types or conversion functions in the Mac calculator app there are some advanced features that you may not know about. You can use copy and paste, the delete key, set a number of decimal places, and have your Mac speak the results. The most useful feature is the paper tape window where you can record your calculations.

You can create a ringtone for your iPhone or iPad from a song you own using iTunes and QuickTime Player. This works for iTunes purchases as well as songs obtained in other ways, but not for Apple Music songs. You can trim the song to a section you want to use as a ringtone and then use iTunes to transfer it to your iOS device.

The San Bernardino iPhone debate continues. Apple was on Capitol Hill this week fighting the FBI in their quest to have Apple build a custom OS that could get agents into the iPhone.

The Photos app uses the term Albums to refer to a grouping of photos that you create. But unlike physical photo albums, you do not create a copy of the photo each time you add it to an album. Only one copy of the photo exists in your library, even through you can place it in as many albums as you like.

You can set default ringtones and text tones on your iPhone. But you can also set each contact to use a specific ringtone or text tone so that you can identify the caller or message sender without looking at your phone.

Mac Numbers: Creating and Using Spreadsheets On Your Mac is a complete course with 36 lessons and 11 practical examples taking you from beginner to advanced level. It includes three and a half hours of video tutorials and 11 example files.

If you are building a spreadsheet in Numbers it can be useful to have sample data to help construct your tables and get things right before you have real data to enter. You can use the RANDBETWEEN function to create random numbers. Then if you copy and paste correctly you can turn those formulas into static numbers that won't change.

In the debate over whether Apple should build software to allow the FBI to break into iPhones, the focus is often too much on privacy. Privacy is important, of course, and the debate we are having now is good. But this is really more about security than privacy.

You can use Keynote on your Mac to create photo journals by creatively arranging your photos on slides, then adding text and other design elements. You can then share these as view-only slideshows with iCloud.com. Other people can view these even if they do not use Macs or iCloud.

You can use Keynote's animations and special effects in your video projects. Just create the animation in Keynote over a green background. Then export as video and import into iMovie. Use the green screen overlay function in iMovie to place the animation over your other video.

Since I’m the author of the best-selling book on the iPad, I get asked about any rumors concerning new iPads. We’ve got a strong rumor right now that Apple will announce the iPad Air 3 on March 15, with availability on March 18.

The iPad Air is the “main” iPad with a 9.7-inch screen. The iPad mini, which was updated last year, is the smaller screen cheaper version. The iPad Pro is the larger screen, more expensive version.

You can help out a friend by showing them something on their Mac by taking over their screen. There are many ways to start screen sharing between Macs, but the easiest is probably by using Messages. You can request to take over their screen during a chat. You can simply point things out to them, or you can actually take control over their cursor and text input.

Long before I started MacMost in 2007 I was writing computer books. My first book was about multimedia authoring way back in 1995. For a while I wrote books mostly for developers. Then I started to write books about Apple things after MacMost started. My biggest success was My iPad for QUE (most recent edition). I also started publishing my own books last year with The Practical Guide to Mac Security.

Since the beginning of MacMost 9 years ago I thought about writing a “tips” book. After all, tips are the essence of MacMost. You come here to learn useful tips about how to use your Mac. People like the videos, but people like tips in book form too.

So I finally decided to write my tips book. I like how it turned out.

Using a trick hidden in the Accessibility features of your Mac you can zoom in to a portion of your Mac's screen. With El Capitan you can use this zoom feature as a magnifying glass, allowing you to see the screen normally while also seeing a zoomed view in a corner. This can be useful for artists or anyone who needs to focus on a portion of their screen. But it isn't useful for revealing more detail in an image.

If you share a Mac between multiple people, each with their own user account, then you can easily share files between these accounts using the Public folder. In addition, you can create special shared folders where you can collaborate more directly with files as long you set the permissions correctly.

Live Loops is a new feature of GarageBand for iOS that makes it easy and fun to create music. You can use one of the provided set of loops, or full in cells in a grid with recordings or loops to create your own. Then you can play Live Loops in real time and record. When you are done, you can go into the normal GarageBand interface to add more or fine tune.

Wireless charging is a joke, but it doesn’t have to be. Have you seen those commercials for Samsung’s wireless charger? The claim is that you don’t have to deal with a cable mess. But you still do. The cable still runs from the wall to the charging pad. And you have to stick the phone directly on the charging pad. So is the experience any better than just plugging the phone in? Slightly. Very slightly. Lots of cool 21st century tech to go from “plug” to “place.”

Find and replace is useful tool for writers, editors and anyone who works with large word processing documents. You can use a variety of special find features in TextEdit to refine your searches. If you know the right techniques, you can swap words and search for patterns. In Pages searching isn't as powerful, but Microsoft Word has even more advanced features.