Posts By: Gary Rosenzweig

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.

So I had this idea. If you put a video into Keynote, and the first 5 second on the first frame, and the second 5 seconds on the second frame, etc. And then you exported it as video, would it export just like the original? Turns out it will, as long as you set things up right. So given that, you now have a way to add all sorts of graphics, text and other elements to those frames. This could be a way to create some interesting videos.

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.

Happy holidays everyone! Here is an everyday task (for me) that I wanted to share with everyone. This is how I grab images from the Apple site, even though it doesn't appear as if you can save images from most of their pages. This same technique can be used at other difficult websites, or just to make it easier at other websites.

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.

So the popular Mac image editing app Pixelmator Pro added a new feature a few days ago called ML Super Resolution. Basically, what it does is to increase the resolution of an image. It uses machine learning to fill in the blanks. You can then take older lower-resolution photos and upscale them so they don't look as bad on today's higher resolution screens, or for printing. But does it work? I did some initial tests and it is pretty impressive. I may do a MacMost video on this if enough people want to see tutorials on 3rd-party apps like Pixelmator Pro. I'll have to try it on some images with people, and maybe some landscapes too. Oh, and by the way, this YouTube video is in 4K. I thought that was appropriate so you could see the images as clearly as possible. So if you have the speed and screen size, view it full screen.

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.