Posts By: Gary Rosenzweig

Text Replacements are one of the most useful productivity features on your Mac. But even people that use them don't always use them to their fullest potential. Here are 10 examples of things you can do with Text Replacement on your Mac.

Here's a list of 10 features of your Mac that are hidden from view. You'll learn about hidden folders and files, hidden Safari menus, how to access hidden markup tools in Mail and Photos, hidden toolbar buttons, hidden menu commands and even characters hidden in your keyboard.

Many people archive important email to mailboxes or folders inside the Mac Mail app. But this may not be the best way to save important messages. Instead, export them as files so they exist in the Finder and you can name them, organize them, and archive them as you wish.

It is a good idea to back up your iPhone or iPad to your Mac, but it is also easy to forget old backups when you switch to a new device. These old backups take up a lot of space on your Mac's drive. You can find them in macOS Catalina if you know where to look and see how much space they use and easily delete them to free up that space.

While you can use iMovie or Photos to create slideshows, Keynote is probably the most advanced tool with the most options. You can quickly import many photos onto individual slides. Then you can work with each slide to scale and adjust each photo. You can add text and transitions. You can even create a Ken Burns effect by moving and scaling a photo over time. Once you have perfected your slideshow, you can export it as a video to share. You can also record naration to include in the video.

So in tomorrow's regular video, I talk about creating nice-looking photo slideshows in Keynote. Here's a different way to do it that makes it look like all of the photos are on one "canvas" that moves around. You can use this same technique for mixed media presentations too.

You can create your own custom keyboard shortcuts on your Mac for any item in the Mac menu bar. By going into System Preferences you can set a shortcut using the exact name of the menu item in an app or across all apps. You can also change the shortcut assigned to a menu item.

While Keynote is primarily a presentation tool, you can also animate objects with movement, rotation, opacity and scaling. You can include these animations as part of a presentation, or build them to use as animated GIFs or segments of a video.

In macOS Catalina if you are not using Apple Music you can choose to store your music files on an external drive. There are a number of methods you can use. Also learn how to clear out your Music app library to start from scratch.

The latest version of Catalina seems to respond to a new Terminal command to bring back the startup chime in at least some Mac models from 2017 or newer. Use sudo nvram StartupMute=%00 to get it back and sudo nvram StartupMute=%01 to turn it off again.

If you iPhone or iPad is almost full, you may need to take the time to clean out things you no longer need. iOS makes this easy by providing a list of apps showing how much space each uses and giving you controls to delete content. You can also change settings for Messages, Photos and the Camera apps so you use less space.

Preview is a great tool for viewing PDF documents. But you can do much more than just viewing. You can fill in forms, even PDFs that don't have preset fillable fields. You can password-protect them, export them as images, merge documents, rearrange and delete pages and more.

You can use Shell Scripts to run one or more Terminal commands, but as a single file you can easily double-click to run. In this example I create one that opens three files and launches an app all with one action. Then you have to set the permissions for the Shell Script file and set it to run in Terminal. An alternative is to embed Shell Scripts into an Automator app.

Preview is a great tool for viewing image files. But you can do much more than just viewing. In addition to the annotation tools you may already be familiar with, you can also use Preview to export images into a different format, crop, resize and adjust colors. You can even import images from cameras or scanners.

We include email signatures with every message we send, but often don't put much thought into the signature itself. You can make yours stand out with some simple techniques like using colors, including emoji or clever combinations of characters, images and more.

If you need to repeat a specific set of keyboard commands or movements often, you can reduce the sequence to a single action. One method is to use Automator Watch Me Do actions, which record key presses and allow you to repeat them. You can also write a script in Automator to press keys. A third method involves using the Mac Accessibility Keyboard to record and play back the sequence.

In the Finder, the menu bar shows Command+O to open a file, but Command+down arrow works just as well. It will open the selected file, and also open the selected folder in the Finder and navigate down into it. The benefit is that Command+up arrow will navigate up a level too, so Command and the up and down arrows work nicely together. The exception is in column view where the left and right arrows are used to move into and out of folders.

You don't need special software to create beautiful organizational charts on your Mac. You can use the shapes in Pages and Keynote along with techniques like groups, images in shapes, and connection lines. Learn the skills you need to build any diagram design.

The Mac Color Picker will appear when you want to choose a color in most Mac apps. You'll see it when you want to set the color of text, shapes, adjust images, draw, and many more places. There are several ways to choose colors and some of them are highly customizable.

Every year Backblaze publishes the stats on their drive. So many drives! And so big. I didn't realize you could get 16TB drives now relatively cheap. Anyway, the report is at <a href="https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-stats-for-2019/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-stats-for-2019/</a>