A few weeks back I shared with you my recorded half of an interview I did for a Bangladeshi YouTuber. He posted the whole thing to his channel today if you are interested. This one you can share to anyone.
I usually don't share things like this here. But I thought this was so fun and it is making the rounds. This A Cappella ground recreates iPhone ringtones and other Apple sounds. Something to make you smile on the weekend.
You can use the Safari console on any Mac in a similar way to the Terminal, but for JavaScript commands. This allows you to do things like perform calculations with a ton of functions and variables. You can even do loops and output to a blank web page if you like.
Got my award today for passing 100,000 subscribers on YouTube! Fun!
I was contacted a few days ago by a young YouTuber from Bangladesh. He wanted to interview me about my experience creating the MacMost videos. I said OK, and he sent me 10 questions to answer in video form, so he can edit them into his own video for his own channel. I thought some of you might find my answers interesting. So here's my half of the interview. You'll see the breaks between questions, but I usually repeat the general question when I start so it shouldn't be too hard to figure out what I'm talking about.
The free OBS Studio has a new feature that lets you stream the output from OBS as a webcam. This means you can compose a video using graphics, effects and other OBS features and then "broadcast" that as your stream on a service like Zoom. This could be a powerful tool for anyone who runs meetings or teaches classes online.
Here's a way to use TextEdit to delete all lines in a text file that contain a specific word. The trick is to use the Special Patterns search function when doing a search and replace.
(I posted this earlier this week, but it disappeared! Weird. I was wondering why no one commented.) WebP is a new image format. Well, it has been around for a few years now, but with Big Sur it now has macOS support in Safari and throughout the system. At least for viewing. As for creating them, there is at least one Mac app that will do it.
So I was playing with Automator and trying to use the built-in variables. Turns out you can use them for all sorts of things, like a Quick Action that inserts the date in text. By using a compound "Text" variable, you can build interesting strings of text to insert without using any other Automator actions or scripting.
I was curious whether there were any features unique to Microsoft's Edge browser that would make it useful to have it installed. I found six!
It looks like Ecosia is being added as a fifth option for a search engine in Safari on the iPhone and iPad. It is in the beta of iOS 14.3. Maybe it will be added to macOS too? Lets take a look at it and see what it is.
I wanted to do a video on how Shazam is now available in Control Center on the iPhone. But that feature isn't nearly as cool as the Auto Listen feature I discovered in the process. You can just let your iPhone listen as you drive/party/relax and it will build a playlist from what it hears. You can even replay it all using Apple Music. Oh, and after I made this video, as I was uploading it, I tried the <strong>Mac App and it works there too</strong>! That even makes more sense, to have your Mac listen if you work with a radio on or at a coffee shop. Less of a battery issue.
I briefly showed iOS apps running on the new MacBook Pro with the M1 processor in my <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fS9dayphjIs" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">current video</a>. But here's a deeper look at how to get them, how they look, some observations, and some good news and bad.
Apple surprised everyone with four amazing illustrated and dynamic backgrounds in the latest beta of Big Sur. I think these are going to be a hit.
In today's video, I show some keyboard overlays to illustrate where the keys I'm talking about are located. I think this is helpful instead of making people hunt for them. I've been using Affinity Designer for this. I have a template I created and though it seems like it would be a lot of work to make a new keyboard image for every shortcut I mention, it really only takes seconds to set up and export. I've really gotten to like Affinity Designer. It reminds me a bit of Adobe Fireworks. I used Fireworks for a majority of my graphics needs for years. I tried to move to Photoshop afterwards, but Pixelmator made more sense. Now I think AD is best for this sort of thing. I fact I'm using it to generate graphics for a new version of my Mah Jongg game too.
A new feature in Big Sur, and also iOS 14, is the ability to assign Reminders items to a person in a shared list. So if you share a list with people on your team at work, you can then add items and assign them to individuals that are sharing that list. Or, the people on the list can assign them to themselves, so people can "take on" a task.
Going to try live-streaming today for an hour. Starting at 11:00 my time (in 15 minutes). Link: <a href="https://youtu.be/ny9z1zpSXpA" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://youtu.be/ny9z1zpSXpA</a> Ask questions in the chat and I'll be screen sharing to demo stuff.
A new feature in Photos 6.0 in macOS Big Sur is that the Retouch tool uses machine learning to remove things like blemishes. So I tried it out, comparing virtually the same retouch actions in Photos 5.0 in Catalina with Photos 6.0 in Big Sur.
I'm excited about this. In Big Sur you'll be able to apply lighting effects, filters, crop and rotate VIDEOS in the Photos app. Basically, the same things you can do with Photos, you can do to an entire video. This means a lot of what people do with videos in iMovie and other tools can now be done right in Photos if you already have your videos stored there. This was added to Photos in iOS 13, but for some reason macOS was left out.
I think one of the weirdest things I do is to occasionally browse the Web with just the Terminal window. No images, not cursor, just plain HTML like it was 1990. I like to consume information like Wikipedia pages this way. Just sometimes. To do this, you've got to install Brew on your Mac (<a href="https://brew.sh" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://brew.sh</a>) and then W3M is the browser (<a href="http://w3m.sourceforge.net" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">http://w3m.sourceforge.net</a>).
