MacMost: Video Podcast

Apple News+ is the new service from Apple where you can get the contents of about 300 magazines and other publications for $10 per month. But is Apple News+ worth it for you? A critical look finds it lacking in many areas: design, functions, and content. But there are some reasons you may still want to consider giving it a try.

New Mac users are often given bad advice that leads to mistakes when they first switch to the Mac. Don't listen to others when they advise you to immediately installer add-ons, or give you tips to customize your Mac. Learn to use macOS in its default configuration first, which is best for most users. Also avoid the habit of shutting your Mac down and instead let it sleep. And absolutely avoid installing maintenance or anti-virus apps. Most are useless and many are actually harmful.

Image glitching can be used to create unusual and random effects to an image. On your Mac, you can convert an image to a TIFF file and then import that data into the Audacity audio editor. You can then manipulate the bits as audio and export it out to create what looks like a corrupt image. This techinque requires a lot of experimentation and trial and error to get a good result.

When building Numbers spreadsheets it is important to remember that a row in a table is the equivalent to a record in a database. To build a billing system, you can put clients in one table and invoice items such as billable hours in another table. Then you can build a sheet with tables that use functions to populate an invoice. The requires some advanced functions like LOOKUP, INDEX, IF, AND, COUNTIF and more. But once you are done, you can easily add more records and create invoices.

Apple has updated the way podcasts appear on the web, allowing you to preview and listen to episodes right in your web browser without needing to jump into iTunes. This could provide a nice way to listen to one episode without much fuss. It could also mean that Apple is getting ready to break up the iTunes app.

You can add a motion effect to a 2D photo without buying expensive software. By using Preview to cut a photo into layers and Keynote to animate them, you can make a photo come to life. This simple parallax animation effect can be used on all sorts of photos to create interesting videos or animated GIFs.

Clearing the browser cache was simple in Safari, but the menu command is gone. However, you can still clear the cache, and do so more efficiently by clearing cache, cookies and other items on a per-website basis. You can also bring back the Empty Cache command. Clearing a website's cache and cookies is one way to fix things when a website starts misbehaving.

The opening and closing slides of a presentation are often on the screen for a while, so why not make them more interesting than just some text? You can easily add a video as a background to a keynote slide. With iMovie you can create a few different backgrounds that you can reuse.

Most Mac users know how to use Command+Tab to use the app switcher. But did you know you can also hide and quit apps with the app switcher? You can also use the cursor to select an app and even drag and drop documents onto apps. By using other keys, you can navigate to a specific window or even a recently-opened document.

A new feature of Keynote 9 is the ability to export as an animated GIF file. These are useful to upload to social media or send via text message. The exported GIF includes all transitions, animations and special effects.

A new feature of Pages 8.0 is the Table Of Contents View. This is an alternative to the thumbnails view that you can use to quickly navigate while writing and editing a large document. The Table Of Contents View is a separate feature from the Table Of Contents element that you can insert in your documents, though they have some similarities.

The Keyboard Panel Accessibility feature on your Mac lets you create sequences of keypresses that you can repeat by pressing a button. This could make some unusual tasks easier to perform. In this example we'll use a panel button to repeat an unusual search and style function in Pages.

You can combine two or more shapes from Apple's huge shape library to create your own unique shapes. You have four methods for combining shapes to add, subtract, exclude or find the union of the shapes. You can then save the shapes for later use.

If you are having trouble accessing a website, it could be because of a problem with your DNS cache. To reset your DNS cache on your Mac, you need to enter a command using the Terminal. In most cases, this will work, especially if you are using macOS Sierra, High Sierra, or Mojave. Earlier versions of OS X may need some additional commands as well.

If you need to print the list of files in a folder, you can do it using TextEdit, the Terminal or by using a special trick involving your printer. Using TextEdit is a simple drag-and-drop, but you must be working with a plain text document. By using the ls command in the Terminal, you can customize which information is included with the listing. You can also simply drag and drop a folder to an alias to your printer, but you must create that alias first.

When you download a file in Safari, the file is saved in the default location, usually the Downloads folder. You can select any location as the default in Safari Preferences. You can also have Safari ask you each time you download a file and then you can select the location and even change the filename. You can also bring up the context menu in most cases and decide whether to use the default location or a specific location each time.

The old Stationery function is gone in macOS Mojave, but you can still create email templates you can easily access. The trick is to build draft email messages and then move them to a custom mailbox. Then you can grab one of those messages and send it, customizing it as you see fit. In addition, you can use Pages instead of Mail to compose your templates as some features like tables are only available this way.

Since the iPhone X-series models have no Home button, new users sometimes struggle with how to exit apps and get back to the Home screen. The Home indicator line at the bottom of the screen is the key to doing this. However, it is important to realize that this line is at the bottom of the screen in any orientation. So it won't appear on the right when you are playing a game in horizontal mode, but at the bottom of the screen under the game or sometimes over the graphics at the bottom of the game.

It is important to check and adjust your recording level before recording audio for a voice memo, audio file, video, presentation narration or anything that uses your microphone. Your Mac has an overall system setting for recording level, but some apps also have their own recording level adjustments.

Need to convert a jpg image to a jpeg? Or an mov video to a mp4? Chances are you don't need to convert anything at all. You just need to change the filename. File extensions on a Mac are somewhat optional and often interchangeable. A jpg is the same as a jpeg file. Video files extensions aren't as important as the contents of the file as video file are really just containers.