Posts By: Gary Rosenzweig

A handy feature built in to your Mac is the ability to zoom in and magnify the part of your screen under the cursor. You can choose to have the entire display show the zoomed area, or frame the zoomed area in a rectangle or along the side of the screen. There are lots of customization options such how to trigger and adjust the zoom area andhow it follows the cursor. You can change the keyboard shortcuts and other features too.

Photos has a decent set of adjustment tools that you can use to change the mood of a photo. It is popular now to apply a bluish dark moody effect to photos and here are two ways to accomplish that. You can use light and color adjustments, or you can start with a filter and add some adjustments.

When looking for useful Mac keyboard shortcuts you'll come across the same ones over and over. Here are 10 that haven't gotten as much attention, but can seriously increase your productivity. Learn how to quickly switch between windows, get typing suggestions, access app preferences and menu items, rename files and more.

You have two main options for speaking to your Mac and having it take dictation. There is the built-in macOS Dictation function which works almost everywhere on your Mac. If you use Google Docs and Chrome, you can also dictate using Google's Voice Typing feature. Google's option seems to work better for typing, but macOS allows you to dictate in other apps and is highly customizable.

You can change the background color on all or some of your pages in Mac Pages. The technique is different depending on whether you are working with a page layout document or a word processing document. It is fairly simple with page layout, and each page has its own background. With word processing, each section can have a section master with a full-page rectangle in the background.

Some apps and Final Cut Pro allow you to add a camcorder overlay to make video look like it was recorded on an old video camera. You can do the same in iMovie using an overlay created in Keynote. With this approach, you can highly customize the camcorder overlay. Once you create your Keynote template, you can continue to customize and adjust it for future use.

So here is a little bit about a great microphone, that I had to return. It is probably too good as it picks up too much besides me, including echos. I'm sure this would be a great mic in a larger space or to record multiple people or musicians. But for getting my voice it isn't as good as a simple lavalier or shotgun mic. It is a super-cool gadget and the gadget-lover in me found it really hard to return it.

There are three main places you can find, buy and download games for your Mac. The Mac App store is the obvious place, but there are also two well-established sites that sell a variety of top titles. In addition, we may soon have a fourth option when Apple launches the Apple Arcade.

Apple News+ is the new service from Apple where you can get the contents of about 300 magazines and other publications for $10 per month. But is Apple News+ worth it for you? A critical look finds it lacking in many areas: design, functions, and content. But there are some reasons you may still want to consider giving it a try.

New Mac users are often given bad advice that leads to mistakes when they first switch to the Mac. Don't listen to others when they advise you to immediately installer add-ons, or give you tips to customize your Mac. Learn to use macOS in its default configuration first, which is best for most users. Also avoid the habit of shutting your Mac down and instead let it sleep. And absolutely avoid installing maintenance or anti-virus apps. Most are useless and many are actually harmful.

So in looking to improve the audio in the show, I bought a bunch fo stuff. The most interesting is a $22 item. It is a simple lavelier mic that plugs into the iPhone. You need to use the Lightning audio adapter with it, which is probably a good thing since the official Apple adapter is the only one that seems to work well anyway. And then it works great, better than any other mic I could find. Here is the product link: <a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01AG56HYQ" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01AG56HYQ</a>  And here is the app I mentioned: <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/promovie-recorder/id1076481548?mt=8" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">ProMovie Recorder</a> 

Image glitching can be used to create unusual and random effects to an image. On your Mac, you can convert an image to a TIFF file and then import that data into the Audacity audio editor. You can then manipulate the bits as audio and export it out to create what looks like a corrupt image. This techinque requires a lot of experimentation and trial and error to get a good result.

When building Numbers spreadsheets it is important to remember that a row in a table is the equivalent to a record in a database. To build a billing system, you can put clients in one table and invoice items such as billable hours in another table. Then you can build a sheet with tables that use functions to populate an invoice. The requires some advanced functions like LOOKUP, INDEX, IF, AND, COUNTIF and more. But once you are done, you can easily add more records and create invoices.

Apple has updated the way podcasts appear on the web, allowing you to preview and listen to episodes right in your web browser without needing to jump into iTunes. This could provide a nice way to listen to one episode without much fuss. It could also mean that Apple is getting ready to break up the iTunes app.