MacMost: Video Podcast

Apple Music Connect is a free part of iTunes that lets you view posts from artists you like. The artists can post updates, pictures, music and video. You can like or comment on a post. Following artists can be tricky as you've got to use the Apple Music side of iTunes, not the iTunes Store.

The Digital Color Meter is a utility that comes with your Mac that lets you find the color of a pixel on your screen. This can be very useful for artists and developers. You can grab the color of a pixel from an image or web page. You can also get the average color of a group of pixels and get the exact pixel location of the cursor.

You don't have to settle for a ringtone as your iPhone's alarm sound. You can use any song in your music library. This means you can also record your own audio track, sync that through iTunes, and select that as your alarm sound. You can use that audio to give yourself reminders or other information upon waking.

Sharing videos via email, file transfer or using old technology like DVDs can be impractical. Uploading your videos to a service like YouTube that almost anyone can access is easy and useful. You can set these videos to be unlisted or private if you aren't interested in the general publicseeing them. YouTube videos can be viewed on computers, set-top boxes, TVs, tablets, phones. Plus, they can be high definition, giving them a big advantage over DVDs.

The best way to protect yourself against online scams is to learn about them. Here are three web sites that report scams. By browsing these sites a little each week, you will become knowledgable about these scams and learn to recognize when someone is trying to pull one on you.

You can record your voice and the timing between slides inside Keynote and play the recording back. You can also export the recording as a video. The recording does not have to show the slides in order. You can also record in sections, moving on to the next section after checking to make sure the previous sections are good. Once you export to video, you can bring the video into iMovie to add music.

If you find yourself stuck on a web page in Safari that is claiming that you are infected with a virus or that your computer needs to be scanned, it is a scam. But sometimes you can find that these pop-up warnings are hard to get rid of. Even if you quit and restart Safari, they reappear. It is easy to restart Safari without returning to the same page that starts the cycle all over again. You can also get help from Apple if you are infected with a more serious problem.

Learn the basics of starting with Apple Music. With Apple's streaming music service, you can access nearly all of Apple's music library at any time. You can add songs and albums to your music library and create playlists. You can also access the music offline for situations when you don't have an Internet connection.

You can alter the existing templates in Pages or create new ones from scratch. Templates make it easy to get started when creating documents you often need. Your can alter a stationary template to create your own version and save time. You can also create a blank template that includes styles you often need.

When you buy a USB Flash Drive, also called a Jump Drive, Thumb Drive, USB Stick or one of many other names, it usually comes formatted for Windows computers. If you plan to use the drive only for your Mac, then you can easily reformat it in Mac OS Extended format using Disk Utility. Flash Drives also sometimes come with specialized Windows software that Mac users don't need. Formatting cleans off these files to get it ready for you to use.

If you want music to automatically stop playing after a period of time, there is a sleep timer on the iPhone. But you won't find it in the Music app or in the Settings. Instead, you'll need to know where to look in the Clock app.

When you plug in your iPhone, iPad or digital camera, the Photos app and iTunes may launch automatically. If you would prefer to stop this behavior, you can easily turn off these options with selections in these apps. But you need to connect the device first and know where to look.

There are many ways you can organize your apps on your iPhone or iPad. You can move apps from page to page and set their positions inside each page. You can create and modify app folders and move apps around in those folders to different pages. You can also bring apps down to the bottom row of your home screen and even put app folders there. You can search for apps to launch them, instead of remember exactly where you put the app icon.

It is easier than ever before to add special characters like emoji or symbols to anything you type on your Mac. But just using a simple keyboard shortcut, you can browse and search through different types of characters and add them to your text. Recently, Apple added the ability to set the skin color for many emojis.

iCloud Photo Sharing is a quick and easy way to share photos with friends. You can create a share album that others can add to, or just view. You can also make the album available on the Web where people without the Photos app or even Macs can view the photos. It is easy to add or remove photos. However, the options are limited so you may need to use another service if you want more.

You can search for files using the Raw Query function in the Finder. This gives you the ability to use wildcards to search for files with specific file names. You can also use other file attributes and combine them for even more complex searches. Raw Query is also very fast and can search your entire drive in seconds.

If you want to add some text to a photo, you can do it with the Preview app that comes with your Mac. You can add some large text to create a funny or inspirational image to post to social media. Or, you can add a watermark to protect your images before uploading them to the web.

If you take a lot of HD video, you may end up with massive video files that you can't keep, but don't want to delete forever. You can compromise by compressing them. This will trade quality for file size, but in many cases this trade-off is the best way to keep your old video footage around. You can use Apple's Compressor app to do this quickly and easily.

MacBook keyboards and wireless keyboards no longer have Page Up, Page Down, Home and End keys. However, this functionary is still there if you know the correct keys to use to trigger these actions. In addition, you can also forward delete and find the location of the cursor with keyboard shortcuts.

Learn how to create smart albums in the new Photos app for Mac. Smart albums allow you to specify criteria like title, camera model, date and other things to build an album automatically. Smart Albums will automatically update as you add new photos to your library that match the criteria. You can combine Smart Albums and keywords to organize your photos.