Posts By: Gary Rosenzweig

In the debate over whether Apple should build software to allow the FBI to break into iPhones, the focus is often too much on privacy. Privacy is important, of course, and the debate we are having now is good. But this is really more about security than privacy.

You can use Keynote on your Mac to create photo journals by creatively arranging your photos on slides, then adding text and other design elements. You can then share these as view-only slideshows with iCloud.com. Other people can view these even if they do not use Macs or iCloud.

In Safari you can switch to the next tab in the current window with Control+Tab. Add the Shift key and you’ll switch to the previous tab. This also works in the Finder if you are in a window with multiple tabs.

You can use Keynote's animations and special effects in your video projects. Just create the animation in Keynote over a green background. Then export as video and import into iMovie. Use the green screen overlay function in iMovie to place the animation over your other video.

Since I’m the author of the best-selling book on the iPad, I get asked about any rumors concerning new iPads. We’ve got a strong rumor right now that Apple will announce the iPad Air 3 on March 15, with availability on March 18.

The iPad Air is the “main” iPad with a 9.7-inch screen. The iPad mini, which was updated last year, is the smaller screen cheaper version. The iPad Pro is the larger screen, more expensive version.

You can help out a friend by showing them something on their Mac by taking over their screen. There are many ways to start screen sharing between Macs, but the easiest is probably by using Messages. You can request to take over their screen during a chat. You can simply point things out to them, or you can actually take control over their cursor and text input.

If you command+drag the menu bar icons on the upper right corner of your Mac screen, you can move them left and right to change the order. You can also drag them down and off the menu bar to remove them. This only works with System icons like wi-fi, volume, the time, etc. It won’t work with third-party apps that add icons to the menu bar.

Long before I started MacMost in 2007 I was writing computer books. My first book was about multimedia authoring way back in 1995. For a while I wrote books mostly for developers. Then I started to write books about Apple things after MacMost started. My biggest success was My iPad for QUE (most recent edition). I also started publishing my own books last year with The Practical Guide to Mac Security.

Since the beginning of MacMost 9 years ago I thought about writing a “tips” book. After all, tips are the essence of MacMost. You come here to learn useful tips about how to use your Mac. People like the videos, but people like tips in book form too.

So I finally decided to write my tips book. I like how it turned out.

Using a trick hidden in the Accessibility features of your Mac you can zoom in to a portion of your Mac's screen. With El Capitan you can use this zoom feature as a magnifying glass, allowing you to see the screen normally while also seeing a zoomed view in a corner. This can be useful for artists or anyone who needs to focus on a portion of their screen. But it isn't useful for revealing more detail in an image.

If you share a Mac between multiple people, each with their own user account, then you can easily share files between these accounts using the Public folder. In addition, you can create special shared folders where you can collaborate more directly with files as long you set the permissions correctly.

If you decide to buy a used iPhone or iPad, be sure to check to make sure that the previous user disabled activation lock so you can take over ownership of the device. Visit Apple’s Activation Lock Checker page to be sure.

Live Loops is a new feature of GarageBand for iOS that makes it easy and fun to create music. You can use one of the provided set of loops, or full in cells in a grid with recordings or loops to create your own. Then you can play Live Loops in real time and record. When you are done, you can go into the normal GarageBand interface to add more or fine tune.

Wireless charging is a joke, but it doesn’t have to be. Have you seen those commercials for Samsung’s wireless charger? The claim is that you don’t have to deal with a cable mess. But you still do. The cable still runs from the wall to the charging pad. And you have to stick the phone directly on the charging pad. So is the experience any better than just plugging the phone in? Slightly. Very slightly. Lots of cool 21st century tech to go from “plug” to “place.”

Find and replace is useful tool for writers, editors and anyone who works with large word processing documents. You can use a variety of special find features in TextEdit to refine your searches. If you know the right techniques, you can swap words and search for patterns. In Pages searching isn't as powerful, but Microsoft Word has even more advanced features.

I’ve been busy working on a new book that will contain 101 Mac tips. I’ll be focusing on OS X and Safari and leaving iCloud and apps like Pages, Numbers and Keynote for another time.
While I’m working on it, I would love to hear from your about your thoughts.

One of the great things about the Mac App Store is that once you purchase an app, you can download it again later. So if you have an app you rarely use you can delete it now, and then install it again later for free when you need it. This is a good way to save space and declutter. This idea works with Adobe Creative Cloud too,

Perhaps one of the most useful things you can add to your app is a clipboard history manager. Take a look at two free apps that allow you to recall multiple clipboard items, not just the current text in the clipboard buffer. Any Mac user should find Jumpcut or ClipMenu useful additions to their computer.

Apple’s holiday quarter results came out today. It was a record quarter by most measurements, but a slight disappointment to stock analysts. They were looking at things like the next quarter’s guidance numbers. No matter to us users, though. Apple sold a lot of stuff and made a lot of money.

Apple released a new free app for iPhone and iPad this week that allows music creators to easily capture new ideas. You can sign or play an instrument and record it. You can add backing bass and drums and play around with the song. You can then export to Garageband or upload to a number of different places.

To move a window on the Mac you can click and drag its title bar. But that also brings the window to the front and makes it active. You can move a window without making it active, without even brining it to the front, by holding the Command key to drag it. You can even drag edges and corners to resize the window with the Command key down.