Some people have expressed disappointment that they can't use the new Mail Merge feature in Pages to print labels. But you can easily make labels without it. Here's a simple way to do it.
These definitely aren't worth mentioning in a major video or anything, but I'm sure someone will find them useful!
Came up with this idea to walk through the Denver Botanic Gardens and see how well my iPhone identified all of the different plants. It was interesting because the labels on the plants let me know if my iPhone got them right. But it must have been hard for it, seeing these plants sometimes in the wrong part of the world!
This is definitely something I do not recommend, but if anyone is curious how to do it anyway... I used the free UTM virtualization app to install Ventura Beta 1 as a virtual machine on my Mac Studio. Had to do it with Monterey 12.5 Beta 2 first, then update. But eventually it worked. One note: You cannot use iCloud or the App Store inside a virtual machine, so this has limited use beyond testing apps or doing some tutorials.
Watch as I investigate some new macOS Ventura stuff like Live Captions, the new Clock and Weather apps, dictation changes and more. Kind of long and rambling, but I wanted to share some of these things with you before I had time to do proper MacMost videos on them.
Some interesting things today. Here is what caught my eye most. FYI: Downloading and installing Ventura now. Will be able to share some things by the end of the week I'm sure.
Follow me down a rabbit hole as I look at how to combine Shortcuts, a Terminal command, a shell script and the crontab on your Mac to set up a text messages to be send in the future. You may not be interested in the end result here, but there's a lot to learn along the way!
Got the new firmware update for the Studio Display. See how the camera shoots video now. Also, I talk about needing to reboot the Studio Display due to sound issues.
My experiments with a MIDI keyboard to help productivity are paying off now thanks to Keyboard Maestro. Turns out no special MIDI drivers or software are needed at KM can do all I need and more all by itself. Keyboard Maestro: <a href="http://keyboardmaestro.com" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">http://keyboardmaestro.com</a> AKAI MPK mini: <a href="https://www.akaipro.com/mpk-mini-mkii" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://www.akaipro.com/mpk-mini-mkii</a>
A hear a lot of people opting to get a small drive in their next Mac, and then using an external SSD to put all of their "stuff." The reason is to save money as Apple drives are so much more expensive than third-party externals. But I don't think people realize just how much faster these Apple drives are. Getting a fast M1 Mac and then holding it back with a slow external SSD is probably the wrong way to go. Externals are good for backups and for archiving old data, but I wouldn't use them to actually "work."
Been a disappointing few weeks with rejections from Apple over a couple of things having to do with the app. Watch to find out the details. Original post and demo about the app here: <a href="https://www.patreon.com/posts/64497616">https://www.patreon.com/posts/64497616</a> To check out the documentation page with all of the details, see: <a href="https://macmost.com/macmost-toolbox-app" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://macmost.com/macmost-toolbox-app</a> And to sign up for the beta test, go to <a href="https://forms.gle/6kjoe6d9C2udqGSL7" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://forms.gle/6kjoe6d9C2udqGSL7</a>
I tried using an Akai MPK3 mini to trigger keyboard shortcuts and more. I used two apps: <a href="https://commandpost.io" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://commandpost.io</a> <a href="https://hautetechnique.com/midi/midishortcut/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://hautetechnique.com/midi/midishortcut/</a> Neither of these apps worked that well. Not sure if I will actually use one to do things, but at least I'm learning something new. Maybe a future MacMost video.
I'm looking at ways to use game controllers, MIDI devices, and other hardware as a control surface (group of shortcut buttons) to control my Mac and make it easier to edit video. So far not much luck in finding a good option, except in turning my iPad into a customizable control surface using Touch Portal. Link: <a href="https://www.touch-portal.com" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://www.touch-portal.com</a>
I wish I had a better way to produce a demo of this. But it is too neat to overlook completely.
Check out this promo video I'm building. Also, check out the new Calculator function I built into the app. A calculator, but in a way I haven't seen before. To check out the documentation page with all of the details, see: <a href="https://macmost.com/macmost-toolbox-app" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://macmost.com/macmost-toolbox-app</a> And to sign up for the beta test, go to <a href="https://forms.gle/6kjoe6d9C2udqGSL7" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://forms.gle/6kjoe6d9C2udqGSL7</a> I'll be reaching out the first beta test group later this week.
Was thrilled to find this. Someone has taken the time to make web browser emulators for two old versions of macOS. Better still, these are packed with tons of old apps and games. So you can draw in MacPaint, write in ClarisWorks, and play games like Maelstrom! Links: <a href="https://system7.app" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">System7.app</a> and <a href="https://macos8.app" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">MacOS8.app</a>
Apple released version 12.0 of all three apps and I really wish they just would have called it 11.3. There's not much that has changed. You can now have font sizes like 12.57 pt. Numbers has a new Snapshot Copy feature. Keynote can zoom to 400%. Also all three apps have more VoiceOver support. The biggest change is modest support for the Shortcuts app. But we already could do everything before using AppleScript and JavaScript. Still, I'll probably do a regular video on using Numbers with Shortcuts soon. One thing I forgot here is this: "Pages: Publish directly to Apple Books with larger file sizes up to 2 GB." So maybe useful for some who use Pages to publish to Apple Books. I assume "directly" means that you could have done this before, just not directly from Pages? I've never tried to publish something to Apple Books. At least not since iBooks Author.
Been using the new Mac Studio for two days now, and so far so good, with one big exception: ScreenFlow exports.
I've been using the new Apple Studio Display for a few days. It is a great screen, but expensive. It is probably good for some people, but perhaps not for me.
Been working on this for a while now and I'm a bit nervous revealing it to anyone after all of these months. The MacMost Toolbox. hopefully eventually become a free status menu app you can get from the Mac App Store. Maybe before that, as part of a beta test. Sorry for the long video. I was shocked to see it was 18 minutes. Felt like 4 minutes when I recorded it.
