Posts By: Gary Rosenzweig

Kind of a hidden feature of the Maps app on your Mac. Pretty to look at and could be useful for creating graphics or just figuring out if it is dark yet in some part of the world.

Two of the most useful adjust controls in Photos are the Shadows and Highlights adjustments. You can bring out detail in dark or bright portions of a photo without changing the rest. An overall light adjustment slider also can bring out the real color of a photo.

You can use the popular Twitter site even if you don't have an account. Without an account you can still see messages posted publicly by others, and search for hashtags and specific news.

When you work with documents in macOS, each time you save you are saving a new version of that document. You can revert to a previous version of that document, or grab some items from a previous version that you may have deleted in your current version. This feature works in all Apple apps and many third-party ones as well.

You know that you can use Spotlight as an app launcher. Hit Command+Space to activate Spotlight, then start typing the name of the app, then press Return when the app appears. You can usually stop short of typing the whole app name, such as “tex” to get to TextEdit. But did you know you can also use initials? Try gb for GarageBand, as for App Store, qt or qp for QuickTime Player, fc for Final Cut Pro, ft for FaceTime, and so on. Even works for third-party apps, such as gc for Google Chrome.

A little-known trick will allow you to run your Mac's screensaver as a desktop background. You can use this to have an animated desktop, display useful information, or just for fun. It could be useful in situations where you have your Mac just playing music in a shared space and want something more interesting being shown than just a static image.

It can be useful for new Mac users, those switching from Windows, or even experience Mac users to take a tour of the typical Mac keyboard. Learn what modifier keys are called and what they do. Find out about keys that may not always be called the same thing that is printed on them. Learn what some obscure keys are used for.

You can export your voicemail on your iPhone to standard audio files that can be send via email or message, saved to your iCloud Drive, or used in other apps. This can be handy if you want to archive and backup potentially important messages while also keeping your voicemail list clean.

You can use the pen tool to draw on image and PDFs in Preview. Rough shapes and lines will be converted to smooth and perfect shapes and lines, but you can always choose the freehand drawing instead. You can move, resize and change the properties of shapes after you draw them.

If you do a lot of web searching, you may want to use the Safari Snapback feature to jump back to the page of search results. You can also use Safari tabs to keep search results around and load multiple result pages at once.

In Mac Reminders, in the Reminders menu, you can set a Default List. This list will be used when another app or a notification is used to create a reminder. You can also set this on the iPhone and iPad in the Settings app under Reminders.

A good alternative to Photoshop on your Mac is Acorn, an inexpensive but powerful image editor in the Mac App Store. In this tutorial, learn how to cut out a person in one photo and place them in another.

Take a look at a bizarre, interesting and potentially very useful calculator environment you can access from the Terminal app.

There is no way in Photos to get a list of all of the photos that have no keyword tags applied to them. But with a little JavaScript in Automator you can add this command to Photos and use it with all photos or any selection of photos.

You can easily delete books you have added to iBooks unless you have added them from the iBooks Store. In that case the best you can do is to hide these books using a hard-to-find function in the iBooks app.

If you are out of the house and need to connect your MacBook to the Internet you can use your iPhone's personal hotspot function. This allows you to connect through your iPhone's mobile data connection. This is handy when you'd rather not use public Wi-Fi or none is available.

By default your Mac screenshots will appear on the Desktop. However, if you take screenshots often, it could be useful to set up a dedicated folder for them and have them automatically save there. You can do this with a simple Terminal command.

If you use Command and the plus or minus keys in Safari you can zoom in and out on the page. This can often mess up the page’s layout. But if you add the Option key and use Command+Option with the plus or minus keys, you can change just the size of fonts on the web page. This can also disrupt the page layout, but in a different way. So if you need to make text easier to read on a page, try both methods to see which works best for that page.

The Lookup function in Mac Numbers can be used to find a value based on another value. You can also use numerical and time ranges by simply stating the start of each range. In this example, we look at a rental rate sheet and calendar where the price for each date is populated from the the rates in another table.

You can use the Script Editor app on your Mac to create JavaScript programs that control other apps. In this example, learn how to take data from a Numbers spreadsheet and use it to add new slides to a Keynote presentation. While it takes some programming know-how to build automation tasks like this, it is good to know what is possible.