MacMost: Archives

A common complaint from Mojave users is that when you copy and paste a file icon to create a custom icon for a file or folder, the result is blurry. It turns out that this only happens when the icon image is not square. Convert the image to a square one, or copy a square portion of the image, and the result is crisp and clear.

You can share the screen of another Mac pretty easily. But it seems like it is impossible to do the same with another account on the same Mac. However, if you use Terminal to set up an ssh tunnel, you can share the screen of a second account using an alternate port number. This allows you to stay logged in to one account, while you use another account in a screen sharing window.

When you view movie trailers on YouTube or other sites, you often have to sit through advertisements to see the trailer. This means you are watching an ad before you get to the trailer, which is essentially an ad itself. Apple gives you a site where you can watch high-definition trailers without ads. In addition, you can use Siri or Spotlight to go right to a trailer. On iOS, there is even an official Apple Movie Trailers app.

A common problem people have been reporting is the inability to reformat an APFS drive as something other than APFS. It appears in Disk Utility that you can only erase a disk and keep it as APFS. However, a simple switch in Disk Utility is preventing you from selecting the device rather than the volume. Once you select the volume, you can reformat however you like.

You can use Dictation Commands to trigger a keyboard shortcut, menu item, or to even insert some text. You can do this while typing, or while dictating. You can set the spoken phrase to precede a dictation command to make sure the command only executes when you want it to.

GIF is an image file format that is commonly used to post images to the web, social media or messages. They are not ideal for photos, but are often used for graphics. Animated GIFs are commonly used to convey emotion on social media and messages. You can find free animated GIF images online and from tools right inside social media apps and messaging apps.

When you save a file you get to assign a name and pick a location. The standard save dialog provides a lot of power user techniques that most people don't know about. You can harness the power of Finder windows to choose a location, you can use keyboard shortcuts to jump to locations and cancel. You can click on existing files to inherit the same name.

Many apps will give you alerts that appear in the upper right corner of your Mac screen. You can set whether these alerts need you to click on them to dismiss, or they dismiss themselves automatically, or they don't appear at all. The settings for this are in System Preferences, under Notifications.

You can switch a text selection to use all uppercase letters, or just capitalize the beginnings of words, by using a style change rather than retyping the words. This makes it easy to try different capitalization options and always be able to switch back to your original text. You can also display text as Small Caps, which uses uppercase letters of different sizes to show which letters are really uppercase. This also works in Numbers and Keynote.

If you are an artist or photographer you may be asked to submit a PDF to schools or galleries. You can create a nice PDF portfolio using Pages and simply placing images on layout pages along with borders and text boxes. You can even include an information or bio page. Then just export as a PDF. The result is much better than just converting image files to PDFs.