MacMost: Archives

If you need to draw text along a circular path on your Mac, you'll find you need a third-party app to do it. One general image editing app that will do it is Acorn, available in the Mac App Store at a much lower cost than anything from Adobe. You can easily add text outside or inside of a circle, and make adjustments to the text afterward. You can then export the result to use in any app.

You can quickly and easily made a slideshow in the Photos app, but those can't be exported to share. By using the free iMovie app from Apple, you can build a slideshow from a set of photos in minutes and then export it as video to share. You can also customize each photo with filters, cropping, movement and text. You can add music, audio and narration to the slideshow too. The basic idea works on the iPad as well.

You can create custom folder icons by using only the software that comes with your Mac. By taking the existing folder icon graphic and bringing it into Preview, you can tint the color and then add text, emoji or shapes to create a useful custom folder icon. Changing folder icons can be a little tricky and buggy, however. You can also use graphics apps to create more highly-customized icons and download icons online to use.

You can schedule notifications of important items at specific times using eithe the Calendar app or the Reminders app on your Mac, iPhone and iPad. So why are there two apps that seem to do the same thing? These apps do overlap somewhat, but they also have their own unique functionality. When you need to schedule something, however, it can be hard to decide which app to use. But there are good reasons to choose one over the other in most situations.

The Clips app is a free iPhone image and video app from Apple. You can use it to do a variety of things. In this tutorial, I'll show you how you can quickly and easily add a fun caption to any photos before sharing it in a message or on social media.

One advantage that Numbers for iPad has over Numbers for Mac is Form mode. If you want to simulate a form in Mac Numbers, you can do it using a few lines of JavaScript code in Script Editor and even make those script available in the menu bar. This could be the starting point for a more complex set of scripts that check values and even allow you to edit row data in a form too.

In macOS Catalina enhanced dictation is now part of Voice Control as part of your Mac's Accessibility features. It has several improvements over previous version of macOS dictation, including several ways to work to correct text, move the cursor, make selections and type difficult words.

You can use Keynote to create a presentation and then record yourself giving the presentation. Your voice and the timing as you advanced from slide-to-sldie will be recorded. You can then export this as a video. This is a good way to quickly get information into video format for distribution on YouTube and elsewhere.

Sometimes you need to shrink an image in order to upload it to a web site or send to someone. You can do this easily on a computer, but it is harder to do on an iPhone or iPad. This Shortcut will give you a way to do it by sharing the photo to create a smaller file.

There are many ways to record audio from your Mac's built-in microphone or a mic you have connected. You can use the Voice Memos app or the QuickTime Player app to record quickly into a file you can use in another app or send online. You can use GarageBand for more complex recordings and editing. You can also record audio directly into some apps like iMovie, Keynote and Pages.

Creatign pie charts from a set of numbers is easy. But if you have to count occurances in a long list of data and create a pie chart from the results, it can take a second table. However, if you use Categories, you can create it in fewer steps without the need of a second table or any forumlas.

Spell checking on a Mac uses a simple set of controls that are the same for all Apple apps like Pages, Numbers, Keynote, TextEdit, Mail, Messages and Safari. You can have suspected mispellings corrected automatically, or simply underlined for later review, You can review each mispelling with a keyboard shortcut, or bring up a control panel where you can ignore or learn new words. If you need to, you can edit the list of learned words directly.

There are many ways to launch apps on your Mac: LauncPad, Spotlight, double-clicking apps or documents, the Dock, Siri and more. So which is best? Let's look at each one of them and weigh the advantages and disadvantages.

If you just got a new iPhone there are some settings you should review right away. Some will just change the appearance of your iPhone or how certain features work. But others could save your life.

You can use a shell script inside an Automator Quick Action to add the date of a file to the beginning of the file's name. You can also make this work with photos using the date the photo was taken from the metadata in the file. As a Quick Action you can easily apply this name change to one or many files at once.

You can rename a group or folder full of files at the same time using the built-in batch rename tool in the macOS Finder. You can simple replace some text with other text in all of the selected files, add text to the names, or add numbers to each file. When using numbers, you can replace the names with some text and a number, or keep the current name and add a number before or after it.

You can use JavaScript in Automator to save the positions of each window in each app to a file. Then you can recall those positions later if you want to resume working with the same window locations. This script will save as many position settings as you like and then allow you to recall them easily. You can even set it up as a keyboard shortcut.

If you prefer to not use the Mac Photos app, or would like to store some of your photos in a different way, a viable alternative is to simply store them as files in folders. You can use subfolders, file names, comments and tags to manage and organize these pictures. You can use the four different Finder views to view the photos, and Quick Look and Preview for other views and editing. You can even use aliases to create albums.

You can create a fireball in Keynote and then export it as a transparent video. You can then record yourself with QuickTime Player and place the fireball in your hand. It can move with you and you can even throw it if you put the time in to create animation keyframes in iMovie.

When you are writing on your Mac, you don't want to have to take your fingers off the keyboard to move the cursor or select text. There are a variety of keyboard commands you can learn to make it easy to move the cursor by letter, word, line or paragraph, delete characters or words, and make selections.