MacMost: Patreon Video

Apple just dropped new versions of the three iWork apps, both for Mac and iOS. Here's a quick video to go through the major new stuff. Nothing Earth-shattering, but some things we may find useful. Here are handy links to the new features pages: <a href="https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT207243" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">Pages</a>, <a href="https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT207244" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">Numbers</a>, <a href="https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT207247" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">Keynote</a>.

In the market for new speakers for your Mac mini, Mac Pro, or maybe even for something better for your MacBook or iMac? I needed to replace my aging speakers and did a bunch of research before going for the Logitech Z625. I'm really happy with them so far. These are my first speakers that allow me to use the optical connection on my Mac pro. I almost bought way more expensive ones, but I'm happy I went this route as they are definitely an upgrade over my old speakers. 

A lot of videos on YouTube use text-to-speech for narration, instead of a human voice. If you want to create that without any special software, it is easy to have your Mac speak something and then save that to a text file. Then you can drag and drop it into iMovie or another app for use. Oh, and BTW, you can type "say -v ?" in Terminal to see a list of all of the voices you have.

What happens when you drag and drop a reminder from the Reminders app to the Finder? You get a useful little Reminders files that you can use to re-create a reminder later on.

I use stock images for MacMost, my other sites, and my game apps too. I've used a few different source over the years, and never use images just from random image searches because of copyright. Here are the places I've used, the main site I use now, and some good places for free images too. What sources do you use?

So as I'm working to improve the MacMost tutorials, I finding a lot of good YouTube channels use background music. I'm wondering if I should as well. Now I know a lot of you are going to say: "Doesn't matter to me, I'm watching for the info!" But think for a minute about someone watching a MacMost video for the first time. Perhaps a little background music may make it seem more professional? I definitely want to raise the profile of MacMost (the site, podcast and YouTube channel) so I'm thinking that music may be one thing I need to do. What I'm talking about is very subtle and quiet. It is barely noticeable, in fact. You may have already watched some online video tutorials with background music and not even noticed. Check out this sample. It is the beginning of an upcoming video, first without music, and then with music. It comes in right after the opening titles. So you can watch the start, and then jump to 1:30 to hear it with music. I really value everyone's opinion on this, so I'm looking forward to hearing what you think. Thanks!

Here's an update on my search for perfect audio in the videos. Remember I got that Zoom mic and returned it? I tried a bunch of others and eventually got the AT2020USB mic, which is recommended by so many of my friends. And it does seem to be the best. Disappointingly, I am still getting some echo. But I'm going to start using it very close to my mouth and it seems that gets rid of most of it.

So here is a little bit about a great microphone, that I had to return. It is probably too good as it picks up too much besides me, including echos. I'm sure this would be a great mic in a larger space or to record multiple people or musicians. But for getting my voice it isn't as good as a simple lavalier or shotgun mic. It is a super-cool gadget and the gadget-lover in me found it really hard to return it.

So in looking to improve the audio in the show, I bought a bunch fo stuff. The most interesting is a $22 item. It is a simple lavelier mic that plugs into the iPhone. You need to use the Lightning audio adapter with it, which is probably a good thing since the official Apple adapter is the only one that seems to work well anyway. And then it works great, better than any other mic I could find. Here is the product link: <a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01AG56HYQ" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01AG56HYQ</a>  And here is the app I mentioned: <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/promovie-recorder/id1076481548?mt=8" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">ProMovie Recorder</a> 

I've been trying out some cheap video podcast lights and I'd thought you might want to take a look.

So I had this crazy idea of building a slot machine game in Numbers. Yep. And it works. What good is this? Well, not much. You can certainly learn some Numbers skills from it. And maybe it can be used in a class on probability too.

Been thinking about doing some videos on Bookmarklets in Safari. Here's a practical example of one that smoothly scrolls a web page. I could use this while making some of my videos. Maybe you have a use for it too.

We all get a lot of spam email. But did you know that websites also get spam? Comment spam is when bots and people post unwanted comments to posts trying to push their products, links and other nonsense. MacMost gets a tons of this. But not as much as just a few years ago. Check out some of the stats and learn a bit about what I do to combat comment spam at MacMost.

I've read in a few places that you can use .nosync in a filename to mark a file or a whole folder as something that iCloud Drive should not sync. This could be handy as it means you can keep folders full of unimportant temporary files together with your regular files in your Documents folder, and not worry about them taking up space or bandwidth.

It is interesting to see the locations that your iPhone has recorded. A seemingly random list of locations is stored on your iPhone. Since this list in encrypted and shared with no one, there's really no privacy issue. It doesn't even leave your iPhone. But still, some people may not care for it.

You can export a web page as a PDF, but sometimes that gives you a print-styled version of the page. Here is a way to get an image capture of a long web page, without any third-party extensions.

Did you know there is a simple shutdown command you can use in the Terminal to put your Mac to sleep, restart it, or shut it down. Better yet, you can set this to happen at a specific time or at a certain number of minutes in the future. That could be very useful in some situations.

There are tons of special symbols and characters, and plenty of good ways to type them on your Mac. But as a coder, I couldn't help but wonder if there was a way to type a character by its unique number, rather than search for it in the special characters list. Turns out you can add a special Unicode input option on your Mac. Then you can hold the Option key and type the 4-character code for anything to produce that character. Geeky, I know, but I kinda like it.

This is something I actually did for a So you can send a message through the Terminal using a single-line AppleScript command. If you put that into a shell script file, you can then schedule it using the <strong>crontab</strong>. Unfortunately, you have to edit the crontab using the old <strong>vi</strong> editor, though I seem to remember there may be an easier way. Anyway, I used this to send a message at a schedule time recently. I don't think it is very reliable for important things. I'll bet your Mac has to be awake and it probably pays to test it a few times before using it for real as your permissions may be set differently than mine.

You know how you can't spell out out a word using Mac dictation? Well, you can create your own dictation commands. And you can simply assign a command to just paste in a letter. So if you create 26 of those, now you have an alphabet you can use in dictation. It doesn't work as well as it might, but it does give you something you can use.