Posts By: Gary Rosenzweig

Learn some useful everyday tips, tricks and techniques to make it easier to manage your files and folders in the macOS Catalina Finder. See how you can use things like Undo, Copy and Paste, the Path Bar, keyboard shortcuts and more to navigate around in the Finder and work with your files.

With the Books app taking over audiobooks in macOS Catalina, a lot of Mac users are upset that it doesn't handle large collections very well. You have no option to store your audiobooks on an external drive. However, you can still keep a large audiobook collection by managing the files yourself outside of Books, and only brining in the books you wish to listen to at the moment. Audible users may find it better to simply use the Auible iPhone app instead.

iPadOS (iOS 13) refines multitasking so it works better than ever. You can bring up two apps at the same time with Split View, or float a window over a full screen all with Slide Over. You can pile up Slide Over windows and flip through them too. Apps can interact with each other through dragging and dropping. There is a lot of different ways to use multitasking so it is best to practice a little before you need it.

While working on your Mac, you can use your iPhone or iPad to take photos, scan documents and draw sketches. The result will end up as files on your Mac, being saved directly from the iOS device to your Mac. You can also insert these images directly into documents in some apps. You can also use this to create signatures in Preview.

I really wanted to make a MacMost tutorial about using the Record feature in Automator. But that thing is so frustrating to use! But it can some in handy. So here is me trying -- somewhat successfully -- to use Automator to make it easier to create circular text in Keynote. Lots to learn here.

If you like to switch between light and dark mode frequently, you can create a keyboard shortcut or Dock icon to do it with one fast action. By using a very simple workflow in Automator, with no scripting required, you can create either a Quick Action or a application for your Dock. The Quick Action can then be assigned to a keyboard shortcut.

Often those in technical or linguistic professions need to enter specific Unicode characters while typing. You can type characters using their specific 4- or 8-digit codes by using a special keyboard built into your Mac. For other users, it is often easier to search using the character viewer or create shortcuts for commonly-used symbols.

There are some changes to the Photos app in Catalina, most notably how you browse your photos. Gone are the confusing Years, Collections and Moments views, replaced by the more understandable Years, Months and Days views. You can also see square thumbnails in the All Photos view, plus a few other improvements.

A new feature in macOS Catalina is the ability to track and restrict your app usage. You can use Screen Time for yourself, to attempt to limit your use, or as parent controls on a standard account on your Mac. You can also limit individual websites.

The Music app on iOS 13 (and iPadOS) does some fun things with lyrics. I love music, and I love lyrics, so I love these features! First, the lyrics are now follow-along style. So you see what is being sung as the song plays. Second, you can scroll through the lyrics and then tap on a line to jump to that part of the song. Third, you can now search by entering in any obscure lyric you can think of and the song pops up. This helps find those songs that have non-obvious titles and ear-worms that you just can't place.

The Notes app gets a bunch of new features with Catalina, bringing it up-to-speed with Notes in iOS 13. You can do a lot more with Checklists now, share folders of Notes, and view your notes in a gallery. You can also search your Notes for objects in photos and words in scanned documents.

Improved security is a big new feature of macOS Catalina. Some features, like a read-only system volume, extra checks by Gatekeeper and the deprecation of kernal extensions will barely even be visible to the typical Mac user. Other features like new permission settings for apps and websites and Sign In With Apple will give us new security techniques that we can practice.

The iTunes app is gone. So how do you sync your iPhone, iPad or iPod? If you are still using a cable or Wi-Fi to sync your devices and not iCloud, you can still do it in macOS Catalina. That functionality has simply mostly moved to the Finder. You can sync music, movies, photos, books and other things this way. Ringtones is tricky, but you can still put custom ringtones on your iPhone. Even older iPods are supported by Catalina.

The new Reminders app adds a lot of new useful features. You can now set an icon and color for each list, place lists inside of folder, and view all of your lists in one long screen. You can also see which reminders items from all lists are due today or in the upcoming days. When creating a new reminder, you can easily add a due date, location, photo or URL.

Mac Catalyst is the set of developer tools that makes it easier for developers to create iPad and Mac apps at the same time. With the launch of Catalina, there are already several new apps in the Mac App Store because of this. Nothing too exciting though. Here are some lists compiled by some news sites.  It is great to see this actually happening already. But over the next months and years we'll see a definite boost in available Mac apps due to this new tech.