Posts By: Gary Rosenzweig

Learn how to create a Shortcut on your iPhone that you can activate with your voice to turn on Do Not Disturb. The Shortcut will then ask you for a number of miniutes and automatically turn off. You can also set it to activate silently as a Home screen icon.

When playing a video in Safari on your Mac, you can Control+click on it and select Enter Picture In Picture. But this doesn’t seem to work on YouTube videos. When you click on a YouTube video, you get a special context menu from YouTube instead of the default macOS one. The trick is to leave this context menu there without selecting anything, and then Control+click the video a second time to get the macOS context menu with the Enter Picture In Picture option.

If you use Icon View in the Finder to organize your files, here are some useful tips. You can place the icons where you want, or have them placed automatically by name, kind or time. You can also change the spacing and icon size, add more information to the file name and make other adjustments. You can also set a background color or image.

The Finder's List view gives you a sortable list of files and folders with columns of data such as date, size and kind. You can sort by the columns, add new ones, and arrange them. You can also navigate down into subfolders using the cursor or keyboard. Learn some little-known tricks for using List View.

If you use Column View in the Finder to organize your files, here are some useful tips. There are many ways to resize or "right size" columns. You can navigate and even move files with the keyboard. There are also some preferences you can set.

If you want something faster than an external hard drive, and better than a USB Flash drive, you can build an external SSD drive with an SSD and an enclosure. I built a 256GB USB 3.1 external SSD for less than $70 that works great on my Mac. Learn how to build your own.

Apple released the first public beta test versions of the new macOS Big Sur, iOS 14 and iPadOS 14 operating systems for anyone to install. To get these early releases of the new operating systems, start by going to https://beta.apple.com/sp/betaprogram/ to sign up.

If you haven't taken the time to play with Apple's GarageBand app on your Mac, here are 10 quick things you can do with it. Some are useful, like merging and trimming many audio files. Others are fun like turning your Mac's keyboard into a piano or drum kit. You can even import MIDI files and edit the audio of a video with GarageBand.

Take a look at this app that lets you control each sound output and input level and do all sorts of things with sound on your Mac. You can get it <a href="https://rogueamoeba.com/soundsource/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">here</a>, plus there is a free trial. Anyone use something like this or this one in particular? I could see this being necessary software for some people. But I've gotten along fine without it for this long.

If you want to help someone with a Mac issue, you can easily take over their screen from afar. They must have Screen Sharing enabled in System Preferences, Sharing. They must also be signed into iCloud with their Apple ID. You can then use Spotlight to launch the Screen Sharing app on your Mac, and enter their Apple ID. If all goes well, they will get a prompt to allow their screen to be seen and controlled by you. You can even talk to each other over audio.

There are more ways to move files on your Mac than just simply dragging them from one Finder window to another. You can also use a variety of shortcuts to get to the destination folder while dragging, use copy, and even create an Automator Quick Action.

The new 27-inch 5K iMac is an all-around improvement on the previous version, but not a new design. The new Intel processors are faster, and new GPUs are also available. The FaceTime camera is now at 1080p and there is an option for the same Nano Texture screen finish as the Apple Pro Display XDR. Fusion drives are now completely gone as an option, with SSDs ranging from 256GB to 9TB.

Here are some handy tips for using Keynote on your Mac. You can fill shapes or text with images, add links, record audio per slide, and insert math equations. You can also create animations that swap letters or draw lines. You can even use Keynote to create simple web site. That and much more!

You don't need to close a file to rename it or move it. Most modern apps allow you to rename or move the file from within the app. You can also move them in the Finder while the document is still open. But some third-party apps don't support this.

Watch if you want to add keyboard shortcuts for Launchpad, Do No Disturb or Notification Center on your Mac. You can also bring these up using gestures or Hot Corners.

Apple’s June quarter financial report is out and is shows significant growth with $59.7 billion revenue and $11.25 profit, compared to $53.8 billion and $10.0 billion for the same quarter last year. This is certainly due to high demand for computers and mobile devices as people around the world work from home. Mac and iPad sales saw double-digit growth, and online services as well.

You don't have to create a document all at once in a single app. You can take different documents from different apps like Pages, Numbers, Keynote, web reports, images and more, and combine them into a single PDF using Preview. This allows you to create pages of your document in the app best suited for that content.

If you are having trouble with iCloud, Apple Music, Apple TV or any other Apple online service, one thing to do before troubleshooting is to see if Apple is having an issue on their end. Just go to https://www.apple.com/support/systemstatus/ and see if anything is marked as not available. However, this just checks Apple’s servers and it could still be possible that your Internet provider is having trouble.

If you want to have an arrow, circle or other graphic follow a subject or object in a video in iMovie, you'll need to first create the graphic, and then use picture-in-picture and the keyframe animation tools in iMovie to guide the graphic throughout the video action.

You can work with text files using the Terminal and variety of commands and command line apps. You can merge files, search them, sort them, extract information and even edit them directly with Terminal text editors like vi and nano.