MacMost: Patreon Video

I checked out OwlOCR from the Mac App Store and I was impressed. I have no need for OCR (getting text from scanned documents or photos) but if I did, I wouldn't hesitate to use this app for that.

It is usually about 12 hours after the snow stops that I remember to set up iPhones to take time lapses of snowstorms. But this time I remembered 12 hours <strong>before</strong>! I set up an old iPhone 7 at the back of the house, and an old iPhone 7 Plus at the front. Would have loved to use my current iPhone, but I couldn't be without it for that long. This is why I sometimes keep old iPhone instead of reselling or recycling them. So here are the two videos, combined. They both are just using the standard Time Lapse setting in the iPhone Camera app. Nothing special. No tricks or filters. You can see the reflections of the TV and lights in one of them. In the other the window gets fogged up. Actually the whole window was fogged up most of the time, but the heat of the iPhone cleared a spot most of the time. Neat how that worked out. And if you look at the second one closely, you can see how many time I shoveled, and there are even some frames that include me in them.

I had to compose an image for a thumbnail today. So I turned on the camera and screen recording so you can see what I did. It is a pretty basic example using Pixelmator Pro.

I've been playing around with the idea of using text replacements to quickly go to long URLS.

While looking into how you can do Spotlight searches in the Terminal, I found you can not only do them, but have them update as files change. Could be useful.

Apple provides this huge collection of symbols for developers to use, but anyone can download it and play around with these special fonts and symbols that are found throughout macOS and iOS. <a href="https://developer.apple.com/sf-symbols/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://developer.apple.com/sf-symbols/</a> 

I played around with how to do pass by transitions, also called masking transitions, in Final Cut Pro. Take a look. Next, I'd like to figure out how to do it with iMovie and Keynote for those that don't have Final Cut Pro!

I stumbled upon this page at Apple's site that lists all of the variations of keyboards throughout the world. <a href="https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201794" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201794</a>  So fascinating! But the page is also useful if you use multiple keyboard input sources and need a handy guide to figure out which keys map to which symbols.

I researching a potential MacMost video, I discovered there is a lot wrong with the Mac's Accessibility feature "Spoken Content." Take a look at what I found. Hopefully Apple pays some attention to this in the future. But there are still some parts that work and could be useful as it stands today.

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.