Posts By: Gary Rosenzweig

There are a few interesting new things in Safari that are worth knowing about. Here's a quick preview in Big Sur developer beta 2.

You can highly customize what your Mac looks like without having to buy or download any new software. You can change the Destkop background, move the Dock, make folder names and icons more interesting, add notes and pictures with Stickies, change the system alter sound and so much more.

You can't lock individual cells in Numbers, but you can lock entire tables. By designing your spreadsheet well, or making alterations to an existing spreadsheet, you can only have exactly the cells you want as editable.

The old standard for evening out the sound in podcasts and other recordings returns with a <a href="https://apps.apple.com/us/app/the-levelator/id1493326487?mt=12" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">Mac App Store</a> app. Free! 

Learn useful and powerful tips and tricks for using Mac Stickies. Find out how to highlight text, change list styles, add images and other media, arrage the notes, archive and transfer Stickies, plus much more.

Youc an adjust the way your Mac's screen looks many different ways. By using Color Profiles or Accessbility preferences, you can change how colors are displayed. You can also use features like Dark Mode and adjust highlight colors. The Desktop background picture you choose is also important.

You can use Saved Searches on your Mac, also called Smart Folders, to give you easy access to files in your Finder sidebar. This can be a handy way to see recent documents, all documents of a specific kind, or even your most commonly-used apps. Learn how to create, edit, delete and store Saved Searches.

If you are using List View in the Finder, you an Control+click on any column heading and see a list of columns with checkmarks. You can use this to remove or add a column. But if you do this in the Movies or Pictures folders in your home folder, you will get some extra column names, like Dimensions, Resolution, Duration or Title. If you create your own folder somewhere and name it “Movies” or “Pictures” you also get these columns as options.

A new feature of macOS Big Sur is Control Center. This is an iOS-like feature that brings together various system controls like volume, Wi-Fi, Do Not Disturb and other settings into a single panel you can access with one click in the menu bar.

If you need to include something like a + symbol before positive numbers in cells, you can do it using formulas or using custom cell formatting. Using a custom cell format is more versatile and can be easily reused no matter how complex the calculation.

You can use images as video overlays for iMovie on your iPhone or iPad in the same way you do it for Mac. The Keynote app for iOS is a great way to create these images, which must have transparent backgrounds. Switching between Keynote and iMovie you can add text, shapes, lines or almost any sort of overlay image easily.

I haven't installed beta 1 of macOS Big Sur on my Macs. But I do have a way to run it anyway. I installed it on an external drive. But not just any external drive. A spinning HD would be too slow. A USB thumb drive would be too problematic. So I created a small, inexpensive external SSD drive. Installing Big Sur on this external drive is tricky. Basically, you boot into Recovery Mode, and then choose to install Catalina on the blank external drive instead of "restoring" the internal drive. Once that is done, you boot to the external drive and finish the setup. Then I installed the Big Sur beta 1 "Profile" on it from the Apple Developers site. In the future, you'll be able to do the same with the public beta "Profile." Then I just let the system on that external drive update to Big Sur. All this time, the normal internal SSD on my MacBook Pro remained untouched. So I can just boot my MacBook Pro and nothing has changed. But if I want to look at Big Sur and test things out, I just connect this external drive, hold down Option during a restart, and choose to boot from the external. Shut down and reboot without the external to return to normal operation with my internal drive and Catalina. Here are the two products I used to create the external SSD for $64. <a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07ZGK3K4V/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">Silicon Power 256GB - NVMe M.2 PCIe Gen3x4 2280 TLC SSD </a>  <a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07MNFH1PX/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">SSK Aluminum M.2 NVME SSD Enclosure Adapter, USB 3.1 Gen 2 (10 Gbps) to NVME PCI-E M-Key Solid State Drive External Enclosure</a>  As I point out in the long (too long, sorry) video, an external drive like this is much better suited for running macOS, as opposed to a cheap USB thumb drive, which is fine for storage and transfers, but not for active read+write constant access. Even better would be a Thunderbolt 3 case/adaater instead of USB 3.1. That would be faster, but more expensive and also impossible to access on a computer without Thunderboth 3.

To stay safe while downloading third-party software from websites to your Mac you have to weigh risk versus reward. Here are six factors you need to take into account before downloading anything.

The new macOS Big Sur coming out this fall will have a fresh new design and look quite different than macOS Catalina and before. While it is still early in the beta cycle, take a look at the design elements in Big Sur.

You don’t need to go to a web page or even use the Stocks app for a quick look at a price. Just use Command+space to open Spotlight and type the symbol, like AAPL. You’ll get the current price, a chart, and other information. You can also use the company name and the word “stock,” which comes in handy for symbols that are too basic to be recognized as stocks, like “AT&T stock,” or when you don’t know the symbol. Click on the result and you go to the Stocks app. Works more or less the same way on iOS in search too.

Paragraph styles in Pages make it easier to easily and consitently apply font styling and formatting in your documents. When you use styles from the start, you can apply them to all parts of your document and easily make changes throughout.

So I installed the first beta of macOS Big Sur on my MacBook for a look around. I recorded a 20-minute look at different things so I've got the ability to look back at that recording for reference. I'll restore that MacBook back to Catalina for the time being. Here's that recording, with my commentary if you want to see it. I discovered some interesting things, like changes to System Preferences and how to customize the new Control Center. Also some hints on what changes still need to be made as the beta testing continues.

Have questions about how Macs are moving from using Intel CPUs to Apple's own ARM chips? When will the first new Macs appear? Is it still worth it to buy an Intel Mac? How long will Apple support Intel Macs? Will your apps run on the new Macs? How about Windows emulation?

Here's my <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jLFZnxFzuRk" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">rundown of today's big Apple news</a>, including macOS Big Sur and the switch to ARM processors in Macs. I hope to post a look at Big Sur for Club MacMost later today perhaps. So now that we know that Macs will really start using ARM processors in the future, I thought I'd give Club MacMost my thoughts on how this will work and what to expect over the next few years as we transition. Ask me any questions!

At today’s WWDC event, Apple announced that it will be ditching Intel processors for Apple-created ARM processors similar to the ones used in iPads and iPhones. The transition will start with a model later this year and continue over two years when all Macs will be updated.