Posts By: Gary Rosenzweig

When you use Software Instrument Loops in GarageBand, you can switch the instrument used by the loop to something else. For instance, a piano loop can be changed to use guitar or orchestral strings. You can also change the drum kit instrument used by drum loops. Software Instrument Loops can even be edited at the note level to create unique loops.

We all get a lot of spam email. But did you know that websites also get spam? Comment spam is when bots and people post unwanted comments to posts trying to push their products, links and other nonsense. MacMost gets a tons of this. But not as much as just a few years ago. Check out some of the stats and learn a bit about what I do to combat comment spam at MacMost.

If you want to use complex graphics or create an animation in Final Cut Pro, you can build your image in Photoshop or another advanced image editing app that supports layers. You can then import that layered document into Final Cut Pro and access the layers. You can apply changes and effects to each layer, or use them to animate portions of the images.

You can copy pages in a PDF document in Preview and paste them to get a new document with only the pages you want. You can split a PDF into two or more smaller documents. You can also merge documents by dragging pages from one document into another.

If you have ever looked in your Applications folder to find nothing in there, or almost all of your apps missing, that is because you can have an Applications folder in your user Home folder as well as at the main hard drive level. Most applications will install to the main hard drive level, making them available to all user accounts on the Mac. But if you look in the wrong Applications folder, it can cause confusion.

Websites use notifications to send you alerts when there is a new post or just to get your attention when not at the site. Sites have to ask for your permission to send these notifications, but it is easy to accidentally allow them if you are not paying attention. You can turn them off by going to your browser settings. Learn how to turn website notifications off in Safari, Chrome and Firebox.

Many people don't realize that you can use animated GIF images in Keynote presentations without doing anything special. You can just drag and drop them straight from a website or file. You can then set them to loop, start immediately and even trim the animation.

I've read in a few places that you can use .nosync in a filename to mark a file or a whole folder as something that iCloud Drive should not sync. This could be handy as it means you can keep folders full of unimportant temporary files together with your regular files in your Documents folder, and not worry about them taking up space or bandwidth.

If you are getting online help from a source you trust, you can help them by providing a system report generated from the third-party app EtreCheck. This report includes many details about your hardware and software that can help someone help you.

When you buy or download a free app in the Mac App Store, you can load it on any Mac using the same Apple ID. You can also easily remove the app if you don't think you need it in the near future, and then download it again any time you wish. You load apps with the Mac App Store and remove them with LaunchPad. This makes the Mac App Store similar to cloud services from Adobe and Microsoft.

It is interesting to see the locations that your iPhone has recorded. A seemingly random list of locations is stored on your iPhone. Since this list in encrypted and shared with no one, there's really no privacy issue. It doesn't even leave your iPhone. But still, some people may not care for it.

You can take RAW photos with your iPhone, you just can't do it with the default Camera app. Apple does allow third-party apps to access the hardware and software needed to take RAW photos, so you can use one of the many options to do it. RAW photos provide a lot more flexibility than HEIC or JPEG photos, but with a much larger file size. Using a third-party app means you can keep using the Camera app for regular photos and use the other app when you want to take RAW.