Posts By: Gary Rosenzweig

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.

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 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.

Did you know the Preview app has this Contact Sheet mode that makes it easy to browse hundreds of images? It has some interesting functions too, like the ability to arrange them and close them. It could be handy as a way to find a single image to use out of many.

You can use the MATCH function to get the location of a value in a row or column. You can also use the INDEX function to grab the value of a cell at a given location. This allows you to make 2-dimensional lookup tables to find values based on two variables. In this example, one table shows prices based on a store name and a product name. The other table will look up a price from the first table given the store and product.

You can check to see if your Mac, iPhone or iPad is still covered by a warranty or AppleCare by going to a handy page at Apple's site. You can also see if there is a valid purchase date and submit a proof of purchase if not. Also learn how to find your Mac or iOS device's serial number.

There really is built-in anti-malware software as a part of macOS. It gets malware "definitions" just like the third-party software and even has a blacklist of things that should never run on your Mac, as well as minimum versions of Safari plug-ins that are required.You can see how recently your XProtect data has been updated by looking for the XProtect* files in /System/Library/CoreServices/CoreTypes.bundle/Contents/Resources/ and examining their modification dates. Then you can read those files to see what's inside. The two files are: <ul> <li>/System/Library/CoreServices/CoreTypes.bundle/Contents/Resources/XProtect.meta.plist</li> <li>/System/Library/CoreServices/CoreTypes.bundle/Contents/Resources/XProtect.plist</li></ul>

The Top Sites feature in Safari allows you to quickly bring up previews of the sites you visit the most and jump into any one of them. You can manually pin sites to appear in Top Sites and arrange them as you like. This is a good alternative to keeping many tabs open at all times as some users do.

iPhone passcodes that are only 4- or 6-digits long can be easily broken by the same equipment law enforcement agencies use. While it is unlikely to be an issue for typical users, you can opt to use longer passcodes or even an alphanumeric password for your iPhone to make it nearly impossible to break.

If you need to encrypt your documents for security or legal reasons, you can do this easily in Pages, Numbers and Keynotes with the Set Password option. It is important to remember your password or you will lose access to the document. You can also just opt to use File Vault to encrypt all of the data on your Mac.

The Reminders app is a simple way to store to-do items, reminders and lists. You can get more out of it by knowing how to use some features like priorities, location alerts, sorting, and multiple windows. Check out these tips to become a pro at using Mac Reminders.