Posts By: Gary Rosenzweig

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.

I recently discovered that when people search the iOS App Store on an iPhone or iPad, they ofter view the typing suggestions as search results. However, these suggestions, which appear automatically, only give you a few established choices. Tapping the Search button to actually execute the search will show you the actual search results, complete with images, descriptions and more.

In addition to adding quick ways to access web sites in Safari bookmarks and the Favorites bar, you can also put links outside of Safari that will launch Safari and go directly to that page. You can add them to the Desktop or any Finder location. You can also put them in the Dock as a single link or a folder of links. You can add them to the Menu Bar with the help of the Script Menu.

In Numbers for iOS there is a special feature that allows you to enter data into form, rather than directly into a table. This one-record-per-screen data entry can make it much easier to enter information on the iPhone or iPad's small screen. The data in forms and the spreadsheet table is one and the same.

If you are having trouble with a web page in Safari, you can always use Command+R, or View, Reload Page to see if that fixes it. But if you want a more thorough reload, add the Option key. You’l see Reload Page change to Reload Page From Origin in the View menu with the Option key held down. This reloads everything on the page instead of using cached versions of images and other elements.

You don't have to settle for little round black dots as bullets in Pages. You can use a variety of different symbols and colors, as well as choosing any character. You can also use multiple characters and symbols or emoji for bullets. Images can also be used as bullets, making the possibilities limitless.

If you have trouble reaching the keys on the iPhone virtual keyboard, especially when holding it with one hand, you have the option to use left or right one-handed keyboards. These come in especially handy on the iPhone 6, 7 and 8 Plus models, where the screen is just a bit too wide to reach all of the keys using just your thumb.

You can do a few things to make the keyboard on your iPad easier to type on. You can undock the keyboard from the bottom of the screen and move it to a position that is better for your hands. You can also split the keyboard to place the keys closer to the edges when holding the iPad with two hands. Both of these options are available in vertical or horizontal orientations.

New Mac users may not have yet explored their display preferences. You can stick with the native resolution for your display or choose one that shows text and graphics larger or smaller. Which setting you use is a personal preference, and it is easy to switch between them when you need something different.

You can view PDFs on the web in Safari on your iPad and iPhone. You can also download those documents to store in either iBooks or the Files app. In Files, you can store them locally or in iCloud so you have access to them on all of your devices.

By default when you two-finger swipe the cursor over a Mac Mail message in the list from right to left you get a Delete button. But if you more commonly archive your email, you can change this to an Archive button by changing to Mail, Preferences, Viewing, “Move discarded messages into.”

I meant to do a video on adding something interesting to the Mac's Notification Center "Today" Widgets. But I re-discovered an old and useful friend. Have you ever used iStat Menu? It is has gotten even better over the years, and I think I can use it, especially on my MacBooks.

You may want to download third-party (non-Apple) apps for your Mac from time-to-time. When doing so, it is important to keep safety and security in mind. Four rules will help you stay safe when downloading apps: Don't get an app unless you really need it, get it from the Mac App Store if you can, only get an app if you trust it, and only download from the app's official site.

When you print you actually launch a print manager app. This app allows you to see which print jobs are waiting, pause them, and even result them if they have failed while in the middle of printing. You can also use a viewer to see what is being printed.

If you are using the Notes app only to store simple text, then you are missing out on some of its advanced features. You can store images, videos, audio, links, map locations and many other things in Notes. You can also add checklists and tables. Objects stored in notes can be examined and also exported and shared.

You can rename multiple files easily in macOS High Sierra and other recent versions of macOS. The option to do so only appears when you have selected multiple files. You can choose to simply replace text in all filenames. Yo can also add text to the beginning or end of a filename. You can also set up formatted names, such as numbering groups of files.

In Mac Contacts you select a name on the left and then view the contact information on the right. If you ever want to view more than one contact at a time, use Card, Open In Separate Window or Command+i. This opens the contact in a new window and you can continue to view other contacts in the main window. You can open as many of these windows you as like. You can even select multiple names and use Command+i to open them all at once.

In Icon View in the Finder, you have several options that are not available in list or column view. You can change the label size and move it to the right side. You can turn on an option to show additional information like image dimensions and how many files are contained in a folder. You can even set the background color of the Finder window to something other than white, or use an image as the background. Many of the same view options are available for the Desktop as well.

You can see which web pages you have open on all of your devices using iCloud Tabs. This makes it easy to start reading a page or searching the web on one device, and then continue on another. iCloud Tabs works between your Macs, iPhone and iPad, as long as you are using the same Apple ID for all of them.

The default behavior for shuffling songs in iTunes on your Mac is to play them in random order. However, you can use Grouping to group together songs on an album so that those songs play sequentially during a shuffle. This comes in handy with classical music, for instance, where a symphony may be broken up into several tracks.