Posts By: Gary Rosenzweig

The Predictive Text feature in iOS helps you save taps by trying to predict the next work you want to type and giving you a button to type it with one tap. Predictive text will show you suggestions based on context so sometimes it will seem like magic as it guesses what you want to write before you know. With some practice it can save time and frustration when typing on your small iPhone screen.

A new feature in Pages allows you to create color, gradient or image backgrounds in Page Layout documents. You can stretch or tile images across the page. You can also tint the image to fit your needs.

If you are using a third-party email address as your Apple ID, you may need to change it if you are losing that email address or plan to move on to another email service. Apple has a page that spells out the steps needed to change which email address is used as your Apple ID.

People often use the term Virus when what they really should be saying is Malware. A computer virus is a very dangerous type of malware that can spread from computer to computer on its own. Malware is a more general term that can be correctly used to describe viruses, trojan horses, adware, spyware and more. It is better to use the term Malware unless you know for a fact that the problem is a virus.

There are many settings on a Mac that determine how the Dock appears. You can change the size, hide it when not needed, and even move it to the left or right sides of the screen. You can change these settings in System Preferences, or by Control+clicking on the divider line in the Dock.

ScreenTime is the new feature of iOS 12 that lets you view your iPhone/iPad usage and set personal limits on a device or per-app basis. It gives you tools to deal with how much time of your day you are using your mobile device, should you want to use it less. I like that Apple is giving tools for those who want them, but they are simply optional things that most of us can ignore.

The iPhone and iPad have a built-in dictionary that doesn't appear as an individual app, but as a resource you can access Safari, text editing and other apps. You can look up any work you have selected. You can also look up words directly and quickly narrow search results to only show the definition. You can customize which dictionaries are used as well.

You can use Preview to combine more than one image into a single image. By using a trick to start a new document, and then resizing, copying and pasting other images into the new document, you can create a collage of images. Then you can export in the format of your choice to use in video projects, online posting, and so on.

You can use the wildcard characters question mark and asterisk in some Numbers functions to get more powerful results. In this example, we'll look at using a SUMIF function that sums rows that match only a portion of a string, rather than an exact match.

OK, you've really got to watch this. It is just a sample. A quick demo.I'll wait... Done? Well, what do you think? Back when Animoji were introduced last year with the iPhone X, I was super excited that one day we would be able to create our own Animoji characters. And if that happened, I would try to use them in videos in place of, well, actual me. Lets face it (pun intended), there's nothing special about me. I'm not going to attract any new viewers to MacMost with my smile. That's not what MacMost is about anyway. It is about the information and learning how to get the most from your Mac, right? (Not that I didn't try to have a pretty face for MacMost, as those of you who remember MacMost from 2007 will know). So with the new Memoji in iOS 12, I can do this. I don't need a backdrop. I don't need a good camera. I don't need to worry about my hair, or if I have a big mosquito bite on my forehead (I actually do, right now, from camping). I don't know if I'm going to switch to this any time soon. But I want to keep playing with it. Maybe I'll do a few here and there like this to see what others say.

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.

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.

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.