MacMost: Video Podcast

Putting your MacBook to sleep it critical when you are not using it, even for a few minutes. There are many ways to quickly and easily put it to sleep, from keyboard shortcuts to gestures to physical actions. Find one that works for you to get the most from your MacBook's battery.

The Freeze Frame feature in iMovie allows you to easily stop the action and create several seconds of a still image in the middle of your video. You can use this for dramatic effect. You can also cut out the freeze frame portion and apply a filter or other effect.

There are many ways to quickly get to your most recently-opened files on your Mac. You can use the Apple Menu, the open dialog from within the app, the Dock, and also the Go menu in the Finder.

If you need to see your stored Safari passwords while on the go, you can get to them on your iPhone. While they are automatically inserted when using Safari on your iPhone, to use the passwords on another device you can go to the Settings app and view them there.

Use Character Styles to style words throughout your document and then easily be able to change the style of all of these words at once. Character Styles can be applied to single words, characters, or groups of words.

The People function in Photos for Sierra will recognize faces in your pictures and with some curation will allow you to label all of the people in your photos. There are many ways to assign faces to names.

If you would like to know whether your Mac can upgrade to the latest version of macOS, there is an easy way to check using Apple's special page on the subject. You can also jump right from that page to the Mac App Store page on Sierra.

Starting today, MacMost.com will become a community-supported website using Patreon. The regular tutorials and newsletter will still be free, but there will be additional extras for contributors. Find out what Gary has in store, including a club for top supporters and more rewards. https://patreon.com/macmost

In a medical emergency it is important for medical professionals to know as much about you as they can. The Medical ID function of the Health app in iOS 10 can be used to store important information that can then be accessed on the lock screen of your iPhone, such as allergies, blood type, medications and emergency contact information.

You can create new shapes by using a set of four commands in Pages, Numbers and Keynote. These commands will combine one or more shapes to make a new shape. This is often easier than drawing your own shape from scratch.

If you have a file you need to access quickly and easy every day, you may be tempted to put it on the Desktop. But you can use a variety of methods to leave the file in its proper place in your Documents folder, and still access it easily. You can place an alias on the desktop, put a shortcut to it in the Dock, or add it to one of two places in every Finder window.

Login Items allows you to set applications to start automatically when you first log in to your Mac. They are used by many apps to run supporting apps in the background. You may have some items there added by apps and not realize it. You can also add your own apps. It is important to understand what the checkboxes next to the apps in the list do. If you want to stop an app from automatically launching, unchecking it won't do that. You need to remove the app from the list.

When you type and email address in Mail, you will get some suggestions that include your Contacts and also a list of previous recipients. Some of these addresses may be old or ones you don't wish to see anymore. You can delete them using the Previous Recipients list in Mail.

Split View on the iPad lets you show two apps side-by-side. But there is a special Split View mode that lets you show two Safari windows side-by-side. You can even have multiple tabs and move them between the two sides.

You can save, rename and move files using the title bar while the file is open and you are working on it. There is no need to use the File menu for the most common file functions. You don't need to close a file to rename or move it.

You can sort rows in Numbers using a trick with the rand function. You can also sort or shuffle a single column by copying that column to another table, performing the sort, and then copying it back to the original table.

You can use Automator with a bit of AppleScript to schedule a text message through iMessage or SMS. The message can be attached to a Calendar event. There are some catches and further customization will require some programming skill.

If you find the Ally My Files view in the Finder to be useless, you may want to consider getting rid of it, or perhaps taming it by using the Arrange By options in the Finder. You can set the Finder so new windows show the Documents folder or somewhere else by default. You can also use Arrange By Last Opened Date to make the All My Files list something that is actually useful.

While many Mac users know about using Split View for sharing the screen with two apps, you can also use it to split the screen between two windows of the same app. You can put two safari windows on either side of your screen and still have access to tabs and the toolbar of each.

You can decide whether you want your hard drive, external drives, CDs and networked drives on your Desktop. Some users prefer to not have these items on the Desktop since they are easy to access through the Finder. Others may find they miss these but don't know how to get them back.