MacMost: Video Podcast

Many MacBook, MacBook Pro and MacBook Air owners want to know how to properly use and maintain their batteries. But there is a lot of bad information online. Learn what to expect from your MacBook's battery, what you should and shouldn't do to prolong battery life, how to tell if there is a problem, how to get a replacement and how much it may cost.

If you have a cluttered Desktop, you may want to occasionally hide the icons. You can do this with third-party apps or Terminal commands. You can also write a very simple shell script in Automator and save it as an app. Then you can toggle the Desktop on or off with a simple click in the Dock.

You can set up bookmarks in a Pages word processing document and then create links in other text to jump to those bookmarks in PDF readers. With a new feature in Pages 8.1, you can also create links in page layout documents to jump from text to a specific page in the document.

The new version of Numbers makes things easier for those that use filters. You can also link text to other sheets in the same document and there is better performance and calculation precision. Numbers also gets the same text fill improvements as Pages and Keynote, as well as inline images and face recognition for image cropping.

The new versions of Pages, Numbers and Keynote allow you to fill text using a gradient or an image. You can use linear or radial gradients of two or more colors, change the angle and other options. You can fill with an image stretching that image to fit the text or tiling it across the text. You can also use a new feature to outline text with a line, choosing the line color, style and size.

You can use the Ken Burns cropping effect to zoom in to a portion of your video in iMovie. However, this cropping effect will continue over the entire length of your clip. To zoom in starting at a certain point and then to stay at the same zoom level for a while afterwards, you need to split the clip at the right places and use a trick to keep the video zoomed out at the end.

Catalina is the name for the next version of macOS. Learn about the new features, features that will be removed from macOS, and other commonly asked questions. With iTunes being broken up into three apps, what will happen to your music library, TV shows and iPhone syncing? Can you run iOS apps on Catalina? When will it come out and how much will it cost?

Apple has produced a lot of different Macs with odd and interesting designs since 1984. Take a look at some of the most interesting, coolest and weirdest vintage Macs from 1984-2002. While some were commercial failures, most containted innovations that we still see as features in Macs today. Included are the Macinotsh XL, the Mac Portable, the Twentieth Anniversary Mac, the G4 Cube, the Titanium PowerBook and more.

You can use the Mac Photos app adjustment tools to make a blue sky in your pictures deeper and bluer. You can adjust pure blue, or select a color in the sky to make fine adjustments. You can also limit the range of the changes to keep other parts of your photo the same.

After updating to macOS Catalina, old 32-bit apps will not longer work. If you have an old 32-bit app, then before updating, you should update your app or switch to a new one. Most apps have newer versions that professionals should consider buying. If you are using the app for casual purposes, then consider getting a modern alternative to apps like Microsoft Word or Adobe Photoshop. These will be cheaper or free, and will probably be much better than using an old outdated pro app. You can also keep an old Mac around to run 32-bit apps. Experts can partition their drive, use an external drive, or a virtual machine to run Mojave or earlier in some situations.

You can use more than one microphone or input device with GarageBand on your Mac. Instead of buying more hardware, you can configure your Audio MIDI Setup utility to create an aggregate device that treats each mic like a track in a single input. Then you can set up multiple tracks in GarageBand to use those tracks so each mic records to a different track.

You can add captions to your photos right in the Photos app if you use the built-in Markup extension. You can add text and provide contrast between the text and the image. You can also add speech bubbles, lines and other elements. You can also do this to image files using Preview.

Here are 50 shortcuts that will make it quicker and easier to navigate around web pages and tabs. Learn how to use your keyboard to move around on a page, find information, and jump to different pages and tabs. Also find out about ways to click on links with modifier keys to open them in different ways and how to drag tabs and downloads.

Mail rules in the Mail app on your Mac are robust and powerful but they no longer work well in a world where we get email on multiple devices. Instead, use iCloud email rules, or filters you can set on your email server. These rules will be applied on the server before the messages get to yoru devices, so they will work properly and consistently.

The new iPod Touch is a modest update, but it does mean continued support from Apple for the foreseeable future. In a world with more capable iPhones, what are some good reasons to desire an iPod Touch? It could be a nice complement to a work-provided phone, a pre-phone gadget for a child, or a dedicated streaming music device. It can even be a decent alternative to a point-and-shoot camera, though many will disagree.

It is fairly easy to use a SUMIF function to find a total for rows that meet a condition. But there is no easy way to get the total for rows inside a range of dates. By using extra hidden columns, you can easily mark rows depending on whether they are in a date range, and then use SUMIF to get the total. Getting the maximum value in that range is a little trickier, but can be done with an additional column and the MAX function.

If you want to set a custom chime on your Mac you can do so by setting a crontab with the Terminal. You can set it to chime any any interval you wish. It can play a system sound, custom sound, or speak the time in a number of voices. You can even have it only work between certain hours of the day.

Here are some useful tips for getting even more from your iCloud service. You can backup and sync photos from cameras using just your iPhone, create family Calendars and shared Notes, you can even add funds to your Apple account so you don't have to pay a few dollars every month.

A new feature added to Dropbox is the ability to set files or folders to be Online-only. The ideal use for this would seem to be archiving your old files to Dropbox instead of vulnerable local hard drives. While it works for that, the process is rather clunkly, forcing you to set and reset an archive folder to be Online-only and also minding your settings on all of your devices as you add files to Dropbox.

It can be difficult to get text to look good in iMovie since you can only choose from a limited number of title options. But you can use a graphics app or Keynote to create any text you want, and then overlay that text on your video. By copying a frame of your video, you can adjust the text to look good in Keynote, and then export just the text as a transparent image. This text can fit the video perfectly, or be used as a resizable and moveable element to position in iMovie.