Posts By: Gary Rosenzweig

People often confuse storage and memory, but they are two different things in your computer and mobile devices. Memory is temporary and helps your device perform complex tasks. Storage is persistent and determines how much data you can keep on your device.

Just about any app that deals with text, from TextEdit to Pages to Safari, has the menu choice Edit, Find, Jump to Selection. The keyboard shortcut is Command+j. You can use that to scroll to the portion of the document or page that contains selected text. So you can select some text in a document you are working on, scroll to read another part of the text, and then use Command+j to jump back to your selection.

A fairly new feature in Pages, Numbers and Keynote for iOS is the ability to add Smart Annotations. You can draw using the Apple Pencil or your finger and mark up a document. You can delete and move the marks you make. You can also view these on the Mac when you use iCloud to share your documents between devices, but you cannot draw new Smart Annotations.

So in the first beta of iOS 12 it looks like Siri Shortcuts is tied in with Workflow, which is what it looked like during the Keynote anyway. But you do have the option in Settings of enabling a Siri Shortcut and it works. I demo a "What is my IP address" shortcut, which is something Siri couldn't tell me before, so that's cool.

You can do more with dictation than just typing. You can also indicate when you want text to be bold, italics, or underlined. Some people have trouble because they try to include the command with the text they are typing, but it is important to wait between typing and issuing commands. In Pages you can even access everything in the Format sidebar using dictation commands.

Creating a custom Finder icon for a file or folder is as simple as copy and paste. However, a common problem people experience is when they try to copy and paste a whole file as the new icon and get a generic image icon instead of the picture. The trick is to copy the image inside the file, and not the file itself.

There was a lot more announced at this year’s Apple WWDC than I anticipated. I’ve very excited about a few things in particular.

The Memories feature in the Photos app will alert you with new Memories albums from time to time. If you'd rather certain dates, people or locations not trigger memories in the future, you can indicate that. If you'd also like to disable the notifications for memories so you can just ignore them, you can do that as well on the iPhone, iPad and Mac.

While there is no pivot table function in Numbers, you can simulate the most common uses for pivot tables using formulas, filters and hiding columns. In this example we'll look at a table of sales numbers and see how you can sum the number of sales for each product listed. Initially you end up with the first row containing each product showing the total for every sale for that product. But you can filter the list to only show those rows. Then you can hide columns that present excess data to end up with similar results as you would with a pivot table.

When watching a YouTube video in Safari, or most videos embedded using HTML5, you can jump around in the video timeline by simply pressing the number keys, 0 to 9. This doesn’t work if the site is using any kind of special embedded video player, but seems to work with YouTube, videos at Archive.org, etc.

Don't avoid using the iPhone's Do Not Disturb feature because you are worried you will miss an important call of message. You can set specific contacts to ring through the Do Not Disturb barrier by setting them up as a Favorite contact. You can also enable Emergency Bypass for individual contacts to bypass Do Not Disturb for calls and messages. You can also inform important people in your life that simply calling twice in three minutes will allow their call to get through in an emergency.

You can do more with Mac dictation than just typing text. You can use commands to control your Mac. You can select menu items, interface buttons and move between fields in the interface. In this example, I'll start, address, compose and send an email message without even touching the keyboard or mouse.

In addition to getting a sound and vibration when you get a notification, you can also choose to have your iPhone's light flash. You turn this on in the Accessibility settings. This can help anyone who may be in a situation where they can't hear or feel notifications, such as while listening to music or working in a situation where silence is needed.

You can quickly and easily create a website photo gallery using the Photos app on your Mac, iPhone or iPad. You can simply make it public and share the URL with your friends and family. Once the gallery is created, you can easily add more photos to it.

On the iPhone and iPad you can record video and at the same time take still photos. This can come in useful if you can't decide where to capture a scene in one of the other, or you want to record video of an event and also take high-resolution photos while recording.

On many recent MacBook models you will get an audible chime when you plug the machine into power. But if you have one of the models where this is not on by default, you can use a Terminal command to turn it on. If you'd rather not hear this sound when you plug in your MacBook, you can also disable it.

Did you know you can go into a mode in App Switcher to select an app window or even a recently-used document in an app?

You can easily clear your Safari browsing history on your Mac. But you can also delete individual history items. Go to History, Show All History. Then select an item from the list and press the Delete key on your keyboard. You can also use the Shift or Command keys to select a range or multiple items and then delete several, while leaving others.

For each account you have set up in Mail Mail, you have the ability to set mailbox behaviors. These determine where messages are stored. You can set the destination for sent email, drafts, junk, deleted and archived messages. Your options will depend on your email service. When possible set these to use the cloud-based options so that the messages are seen across all of your devices.

In the Photos app you can hide photos both on the Mac and on iOS. Hidden photos will disappear from Photos view, albums and other views, but they will appear in a special Hidden album. This feature is not meant to be a secure way to protect photos, but just a tool to hide photos before deleting them or to take off photos out of normal viewing methods when they don't belong there.