MacMost: Video Podcast

Here's a preview of what Siri on the Mac will look like. The latest beta of macOS Sierra lets you use Siri for most things that you can do on iOS. In addition, you can search your files, photos, the Web and System Preferences. You can send messages and post to social media. You can save Siri answers to Notifications Center and multitask while Siri is on the screen.

You can add a magnifying loupe to an image or PDF in Preview. These loupes can help you point out something in an image or enhance the effect of an image that you plan to share. You can also use loupes to annotate images and PDFs during collaborations.

If you want to silence your iPhone at night or while in meetings, you can use the Do Not Disturb mode to temporarily disable audible alerts. You can turn this on manually, or set a daily start and stop time.

Conditional Highlighting in Numbers lets you color a cell based on the contents of that cell. If you need to set a cell to highlight based on the contents of other cells, you can use the IF function first, and then the conditional highlighting based on the results of that IF function.

If you accidentally record video on your iPhone in vertical mode, you end up with two ugly black bars on either side of the video when viewing it on a TV. You can use iMovie to fill in those sides with an animated background, or a blurry copy of the same video. Take a look at a variety of techniques for dealing with vertical video in iMovie.

You can use Spotlight for more than just basic addition. You can use a full set of functions including powers, roots, trigonometry, logs, parenthesis and a variet

You can easily set up a guest wi-fi network with an Apple base station. Using a guest network allows you to share you connection with guests to your house without endangering your main network with all of your devices. It appears as it you have two separate wi-fi base stations instead of one. You can change the guest network password frequently without needing to re-enter the password for your own devices that are connected to your main network.

An app in the Mac App Store allows you to edit photos from the Photos app using any editor on your Mac. By installing this app and enabling its extension, you can jump from Photos to an editor of your choice and back again without creating any temporary files or wasting time.

Sometimes you have non-consecutive data in Numbers that you wish to chart. For instance, you may have skipped dates or large gaps in time. However, you want to graph the data with a consistent timeline at the bottom of the graph even if all of the dates are not represented. Here is one method for doing that, using a second hidden table that is automatically populated from the main table.

You can use QuickTime Player for very simple video editing without setting up a whole project in iMovie or Final Cut Pro. With QuickTime Player, you can combine trimming, appending more clips, and splitting clips to arrange and export edited movies.

If you need to hand your iPhone or iPad over to a child, consider using Guided Access to lock them into a single app and restrict what they can do. Guided Access allows you to turn off buttons and controls and even set time limits. You can regain access to your device with a password or Touch ID.

You can have a lot of fun using your iPhone's camera and various photography apps. In this example, take a look at using the 360 Panorama app from Occipital. You can easily capture an image that includes everything around you, then view it later on your iPhone or any other device. You can also share these via email or social media.

Trend lines can help you find meaning in what could seem like random data. One example looks at daily sales for a store and finds an upward trend over the course of a year. Another example looks at physics data and converts it to a mathematical formula.

When you get junk email, you should never trust the from field to be accurate. It is easy to fake the from field making the email appear to come from anyone, even people you know. Spammers will use this to fool people into opening their email. If someone gets spam that appears to come from you, most likely it is not because your computer or email account have been compromised, but simply that your email address is being spoofed.

With Safari in El Capitan you can subscribe to news feeds in the left sidebar and see an aggregated list of items that update automatically. You can also include Twitter and LinkedIn feeds. This allows you to see the news from your favorite sources all in one place without needing to go to individual web sites.

When you need to upload a photo to a web page, you are first given the option to select a file. But you can use the Media, Photos option to instead select a photo from your Photos Library. This saves you the steps of needing to export the photo and then delete the file later.

If you are trying to read an article online and the font is too small, too light, or other page elements are too distracting, you can use Safari's Reader View to focus on just the text and other primary elements of the article. It is easy to turn Reader View on and off. Once on, you can adjust the font, font size and background color.

You can record your Mac's screen using only the QuickTime Player app that comes with OS X. It is easy to record and then you get to preview the result before saving.

You can use Google Forms to create simple online surveys for just about anything. You can use them for business or personal projects. You can ask multiple choice or open-ended questions and include a variety of other The results can be viewed her response, or as a spreadsheet.

You can add more fonts to your Mac which you can use in Pages and other apps. You can get fonts online, but you need to be careful and think about font licensing and copyrights. Adding a font is ask easy as double-clicking on the right file once you have download the font files. The Mac app Font Book will launch and install the font.