MacMost: Video Podcast

When you are writing on your Mac, you don't want to have to take your fingers off the keyboard to move the cursor or select text. There are a variety of keyboard commands you can learn to make it easy to move the cursor by letter, word, line or paragraph, delete characters or words, and make selections.

Reader View is a special mode you can bring up in your web browser that gets rid of ads and other page elements and lets you focus on the text of an article. In Safari on your Mac you can bring it up with the click of a button or a keyboard shortcut. You can also set a website to always show Reader View when possible, though this can cause problems. Firefox also has a Reader View, but Chrome's version is difficult to get to and doesn't work as well. Safari on iOS and iPadOS also has Reader View.

When you scan in documents with your iPhone or other device you sometimes end up with files too large to store or send in an email. You can easily compress a PDF using the Preview app on your Mac. However, the default compression setting is too high for most uses. Learn how to customize the compression with your own quartz filter and then use it in Preview or turn it into a Quick Action using Automator for one-step PDF compression.

Dwarf Fortress is a complex strategy game where you control a group of dwarves as they build an underground fortress and mine the area. You can play it on your Mac but it is tricky to install and get working in macOS Catalina. Then you are going to want to add a custom tileset to make it look decent. I go through these setup steps, and then show you how to get starting with playing the game.

You can buy cheap NFC tags and use them to trigger Shortcuts and other actins on your iPhone. You can set up a Personal Automation that automatically runs when triggered by touching your iPhone to a tag. You can also write information to tags that can bring up web pages and request other actions from any iPhone or Android user with a recent device.

The latest update to macOS Catalina, version 10.15.2, brings back to beloved features of the old iTunes app. You can now view your songs library in the Music app using the Column Browser and control music playback on your Mac with the iPhone app iTunes Remote.

When a new Windows user switches to Mac, they can be frustrated by the differences. Here are some of the most common questions and problems that new Mac users face and the solutions. There are some great tips here to get your transition moving forward quickly. Welcome to the world of Mac!

Most people use albums to organize their photos in the Mac Photos app. However, it makes more sense to use Keywords instead of albums. You can create a Smart Album with any Keyword. But instead of Smart Albums, which can't be seen on iOS, you can simply search for a Keyword to view those photos just as if they were an album. You can also search for words in titles and descriptions, making them useful for organizing as well.

The new Mac Pro is the most powerful Mac ever, but it comes with a huge price tag. But if you are looking for a pro-level Mac, you have other choices. You can get the iMac Pro, which is cheaper and comes with its own 5K screen. You can also get an upgraded regular iMac or MacBook Pro. A budget option is to get an upgraded Mac mini with an external GPU.

You can use JavaScript in Automator to fill in a web page form. If you make this a Quick Action you can access it from the menu bar or as a keyboard shortcut. This can help speed up situations where you need to fill in the same form every day.

As someone who has been helping people with their Macs for a long time, I see lots of things people do with their Macs that if they stopped it would solve a lot of problems. Learn from my past experience and years of teaching to prevent current and future problems.

The handoff feature of macOS and iOS allows you to use a Universal Clipboard to copy text, images, files or just about anything between your devices. You can use this to copy and paste text and images between documents while working with two or more devices. You can also transfer entire files this way, which is actually easier than using AirDrop in many situations.

New Mac users sometimes don't understand why the top row of keys on the keyboard don't work as expected. These keys are both the function keys and the special features keys, also knows as f-keys and media control keys. You toggle how these keys behave with the fn key. But a setting in System Preferences determines which mode is the default one and which requires the fn key.

With the new Voice Control feature in macOS Catalina you can control almost anything on your Mac with your voice. You can access menu commands, dictate text, click buttons and even click a specific point on the screen using grids. This functionality is critical for some, but for others it can also offer a nice hands-free alternative to using your Mac.

If you only use the Dock to launch apps, you missing out on one of the Mac's most powerful features. By adding folders to the right side of the Dock, you can have quick access to downloads, applications, files and more. You can create Smart Folders to view recent documents or documents from a single app. You can create folders full of aliases to get quick access to groups of applications or files.

Even if you don't have the bucks to buy someone a new MacBook Pro or iPhone, there are still plenty of greate gifts for Apple fans that are much cheaper. You may want to consider an Apple Battery Case, an Apple Pencil or a Series 3 Apple Watch, all which run under $200. You can also get gifts that aren't directly related to Apple but will run Apple services, such as an Amazon Echo to play Apple Music or a Roku TV box that plays Apple TV+. Other ideas include game controllers for Apple Arcade and two different types of Apple gift cards.

If you find yourself always changing the font and other styles in Pages after starting a new document, you may want to set up your own custom template to use as the default for new documents. This will save you time as every new document will begin with things set just as you like them. You can also set things like paragraph spacing and even headers and footers. While there is a new default font setting in Pages, creating your own blank template gives you far more control.

If you want to convert a group of JPG image files to a single PDF, you can use a variety of methods. Most people will tell you to use Preview. But there are other ways that are either simpler or more versatile. You can use a Quick Action to do it without even opening up an app. You can also use Pages and Keynote to create richer PDFs with border, text and other features. The best way may be to use Photos which offers a variety of printing options that can be used to create PDFs.

Version 13.2 of audioOS for the HomePod included two new features that could be useful if your HomePod is in the bedroom. You can now ask Siri to play a collection of endlessly looping ambient sounds, such as Forest, Stream, Fireplace, Night, Ocean, Rain and White Noise. This effectively makes your HomePod a white noise machine, one with amazing speakers. You can also ask Siri to set a sleep timer for these sounds, or any music you are playing.

Conditional highlighting in Numbers is simply a way to change the style of a cell based on the contents of that same cell. However, by using a trick you can have conditional highlighting affect other cells or an entire row.