Does that little number over the Mail icon in the Dock taunt you and make you feel bad that you are losing the battle with your inbox? You can turn it off by going to System Preferences, Notifications and then looking for Mail in the list. Turn off “Badge app icon.”
In System Preferences, Dock there is a setting “Prefer tabs when opening documents.” Set that to “Always” and many standard apps, like Pages, will open documents in a tab instead of a new window. Provided, of course, that there is already a document open. This is handy if you greatly prefer tabs.
If you have some work to do in System Preferences, there is no need to go back to the main icons screen each time you want to just to a new section. Instead, click and hold the Show All button at the top (looks like a button with 12 dots) and a list with each System Preferences category will appear. Select one to jump right to it.
Using Airport Utility 6.x there is a “summary” screen that lists the devices connected and information about them. To get to it, click on the Airport device icon so you see its basic information and the “Edit” button. Then hold the option key down and quickly double-click the Edit button. This brings up the same window as normal, but with an additional Summary screen.
The Mac Dictionary app in Sierra lets you open multiple windows and tabs. Use File, New Window or New Tab (Command+N, Command+T). This lets you look up a word and leave it on the screen while you look up another word. You can even use the dictionary in one window and the thesaurus in the other. If you Command+click on any word in a definition it shows it in a new tab. Command+Option+click shows it in a new window behind, and Command+Option+Shift+click shows it in a new window on top.
If you are using a MacBook, Sierra can show you which apps are using the most battery. Just click on the Battery icon in the menubar and one of the things it shows you is a list of apps that are using significant energy. Select any item listed and it takes you to the Activity Monitor with the Energy tab selected so you can see details.
When you buy an app in the Mac App Store you can download it to any Mac you own, as long as you are using the same Apple ID. Just click the Purchased tab at the top of the App Store app, and you can see all of the apps you own. Then use the Install button to the right to install it on the Mac you are currently using. If you have a fast Internet connection, it is sometimes worthwhile to remove apps you don’t plan on using for a while, and then install them again when you need them.
Need to keep track of the time as you near an appointment or deadline? Just ask Siri on your Mac “What time is it?” You’ll get the answer, plus a clock much larger than the one in the menu bar. This clock continues to update so just leave it on the screen as you work. This is great for counting down the last minutes until the end of a work day or a scheduled phone call.
There are many ways to reopen a recently closed tab in Safari, including looking it up in the History menu. But by Control+clicking the + button in the tab bar you can quickly access the list of recently closed tabs. This makes it almost as easy to go back to a closed tab as it does to go to a tab currently open.
You can easily sort files in Finder List view by clicking on the column headings. But it doesn’t appear that you can do this in Column view. However, you can if you hold the Option key down, then choose View, Sort By. The Sort By menu choice appears in place of Arrange By only when the Option key is held down. Note the keyboard shortcuts shown in the menu if you want a faster way to do it.
A new Sierra option in System Preferences, Keyboard, Text allows you to skip the Shift key when typing sentences. By turning on Capitalize Word Automatically you will get an uppercase letter after typing a period and space.
Want to know all of the technical details about the model of Mac you are using? In macOS Sierra, go to the Apple menu and choose About This Mac. Then go to the Support tab. Then click on Specifications. This will take you to a webpage with all of the details about your model.
With Siri in macOS Sierra, you can set the volume to a very exact amount. Just tell Siri: “Set the volume to 57 percent” and she will set it to exactly that.
If you minimize windows often by clicking the yellow button at the top left corner of a window, you could end up with a lot of minimized windows listed on the right side of your Dock. Instead of having them all listed there, you can turn on the “Minimize window into application icon” option in System Preferences, Dock. You can still access these minimized windows by Control+clicking on the app in the Dock and selecting the window name.
If you ever see a window with no Close button at the upper left, but a Cancel button somewhere at the bottom, you can also close it by pressing the Esc key on your keyboard. Examples are: Print dialogs and Open dialogs. But Esc also works in some other places even when there is a close button, like the Preferences or About windows in apps.
If you choose the Apple Menu, then Recent Items, you get a list of recently used applications and files. If you hold the Command key down while viewing this list, each item changes to “Show X,” allowing you to go to that item in the Finder instead of launching or opening it.
A new feature in iOS 10 lets you remove stock apps like Weather, Maps, Reminders and even Mail. All of these are now available as free downloads in the iOS app store, so you can add them back easily if you delete them accidentally. So if you don’t care about the stock market, you can finally get rid of that Stocks app on your iPhone now.
When editing in TextEdit, you can use Edit, Find, Select Line to select a line by number. The keyboard shortcut is simply Command+L. Better still, you can use a range like 9-15 to select a range of lines.
If you use the default Finder tags, like Red, Orange, Blue, etc, and want to name them something that is more helpful, go to Finder, Preferences, Tags. Then Control+Click on a tag and choose Rename. Not only will the tag names show up in file information, but you can search for them in the Finder by tag name, or tag:name to only see files with that tag.
If your hands are on the keyboard and you quickly want to go to a folder in the Finder, you can use Shift+Command+G to open up a “Go to the folder” dialog, then type the path to the folder, and then press Return to go. But this may not seem like much of a shortcut if you have to start by typing /users/username at the start of each path. You can skip that by using the ~/ shortcut. So type ~/documents and you go to the Documents folder. Notice also that you do not need to worry about case.
