MacMost: MacMost Now

The most powerful keyboard shortcut for your Mac is the Tab key. This single key helps you get around in windows, dialog boxes and even web pages. You can modify how it works in System Preferences and also in Safari's preferences. Once you master using the Tab key you can speed up your computer use by keeping your hands on your keyboard more and using your mouse or trackpad less.

You can create a very short Automator action to take text as input, manipulate it, and replace the original text. In this example, we'll create a Javascript JXA action that encloses the text in quotes. You can use this in conjunction with a keyboard shortcut to quickly apply quotes in Pages and other apps.

Sometimes you need a series of shortcuts to accomplish a task, not just one. In this tutorial, you'll learn how to create three small shortcuts to save and recall text clippings. The first two allow you to save the clipboard or the selection to a file in a folder. The third shortcut lets you recall one of those clips so you can paste it into a document, email, note or just about anything.

A common complaint from Mojave users is that when you copy and paste a file icon to create a custom icon for a file or folder, the result is blurry. It turns out that this only happens when the icon image is not square. Convert the image to a square one, or copy a square portion of the image, and the result is crisp and clear.

You can share the screen of another Mac pretty easily. But it seems like it is impossible to do the same with another account on the same Mac. However, if you use Terminal to set up an ssh tunnel, you can share the screen of a second account using an alternate port number. This allows you to stay logged in to one account, while you use another account in a screen sharing window.

When you view movie trailers on YouTube or other sites, you often have to sit through advertisements to see the trailer. This means you are watching an ad before you get to the trailer, which is essentially an ad itself. Apple gives you a site where you can watch high-definition trailers without ads. In addition, you can use Siri or Spotlight to go right to a trailer. On iOS, there is even an official Apple Movie Trailers app.

A common problem people have been reporting is the inability to reformat an APFS drive as something other than APFS. It appears in Disk Utility that you can only erase a disk and keep it as APFS. However, a simple switch in Disk Utility is preventing you from selecting the device rather than the volume. Once you select the volume, you can reformat however you like.

You can use Dictation Commands to trigger a keyboard shortcut, menu item, or to even insert some text. You can do this while typing, or while dictating. You can set the spoken phrase to precede a dictation command to make sure the command only executes when you want it to.

GIF is an image file format that is commonly used to post images to the web, social media or messages. They are not ideal for photos, but are often used for graphics. Animated GIFs are commonly used to convey emotion on social media and messages. You can find free animated GIF images online and from tools right inside social media apps and messaging apps.

When you save a file you get to assign a name and pick a location. The standard save dialog provides a lot of power user techniques that most people don't know about. You can harness the power of Finder windows to choose a location, you can use keyboard shortcuts to jump to locations and cancel. You can click on existing files to inherit the same name.

Many apps will give you alerts that appear in the upper right corner of your Mac screen. You can set whether these alerts need you to click on them to dismiss, or they dismiss themselves automatically, or they don't appear at all. The settings for this are in System Preferences, under Notifications.

You can switch a text selection to use all uppercase letters, or just capitalize the beginnings of words, by using a style change rather than retyping the words. This makes it easy to try different capitalization options and always be able to switch back to your original text. You can also display text as Small Caps, which uses uppercase letters of different sizes to show which letters are really uppercase. This also works in Numbers and Keynote.

If you are an artist or photographer you may be asked to submit a PDF to schools or galleries. You can create a nice PDF portfolio using Pages and simply placing images on layout pages along with borders and text boxes. You can even include an information or bio page. Then just export as a PDF. The result is much better than just converting image files to PDFs.

Email signatures are easy to set up so that you can have your name and other information automatically displayed at the bottom of any email you compose. You can also add multiple email signatures and assign them to different email accounts. You can set a signature to use as your default, or change your signature each time you compose a new message.

FileVault is a feature of macOS that offers full-disk encryption for your Mac. This protects your files if someone were to steal your Mac. Without FileVault, someone with possession of your Mac's hard drive could view the data in your files. With FileVault, that data is encrypted and can't be read. It is unlikely that you will need FileVault, but it is still recommended if you are using a portable MacBook that could easily be stolen. Some companies also have policies that force employees to use disk encryption.

You can't resize or position an overlay and also apply a green screen effect in iMovie at the same time. However, you can do the scaling positioning over a green background, export, and then use the resulting video in another project to get the same result.

Some people like to put web location files on the Desktop or in the Dock as an alternative to using browser bookmarks. A better idea may be to create a folder to hold web location files and then add that to the Dock. You can set it to List mode and then use file names and folders to further organize your Dock bookmarks.

You can do a lot more than just simple addition and multiplication in Spotlight. You can use parenthesis to set the order of operations. You can use functions and symbols to do trigonometry and logarithms. You can use powers and roots, and even scientific notation. You can even do factorials, percentages and trig functions using degrees instead of radians.

You can create professional-looking video end credits with Keynote using only a single simple animation on a single slide. You can incorporate a long list of names, and add shapes, photos or other elements into a group. The result is easily modified and exported as a video to bring into iMovie, Final Cut or any other video editing app.

While private browsing windows do not really give you privacy, they are useful for a variety of things. You can use them to log into the same site as multiple users, or to view your own site or accounts as someone who is not logged in at all. You can search and shop without building up a history that can haunt you later on. It is also useful for giving presentations and getting around soft paywalls.