MacMost: Video Podcast

Many of us have hundreds of app on our iPhone and iPad home screens. Keeping them organized can be a chore. But you can use techniques like app folders and searching by keyword to help. It is also a good idea to delete apps you rarely use, knowing you can download them again easily. When organizing apps, you can drag more than one at a time.

If you want to go beyond the title text feature in iMovie, you can create your own styled text in Keynote or any image editing tool and use the resulting image as an overlay. Then you can use picture-in-picture keyframes in iMovie to animate the text popping in from one side or scale as it moves. You can use this technique with any transparent image for a variety of effects.

There are two ways to highlight text in Pages on the Mac. The first has to do with editing and revisions, and is usually used when collaborating on a document with others. But you can also highlight text purely as a style, placing a solid color behind characters. To make things easier, you can create character styles for different text highlight colors and even assign keyboard shortcuts to them.

In addition to using the Emoji Viewer to type special characters, or holding a key to add accents, you can also learn some special keyboard combinations using the Keyboard Viewer. These allow you to type some symbols like degrees, pi, the Apple symbol and accent marks using standard keystrokes with the help of the Option and Shift keys. The Keyboard Viewer allows you to see exactly which key combinations match which characters. This is dependent on the type of keyboard you own.

If you are designing a Numbers spreadsheet to give to users that allows them to enter values then you may want to prevent them from entering values outside of a range. You can use conditional highlighting to change the color or style of a cell if the user enters a bad value. You can use a formula in another cell to indicate a bad value, plus instructions. You can also use sliders, steppers and pop-up menu cell formats to limit values.

Do you use the Shift, Command and Option keys on both sides of your keyboard? If not, you can reassign the ones you don't use to perform a more useful function like triggering Mission Control. You can also set the Caps Lock key to become another modifier key, the Esc key or turn it off completely to prevent accidental use.

The new image fill feature of text in Pages and Keynote allows you to create some beautiful graphics with very little effort. In this tutorial you'll learn how to create a retro-style postcard image using some of your photos. You can apply a single image fill to all of the text or a separate image for each letter. You can post these graphics online or use them in documents or videos.

You can customize your Finder sidebar to include the folders and locations you most often use. You can click on a sidebar item to go to that location, and also drag and drop items into those locations. You can customize the sidebar in Finder, Preferences, and also by dragging and dropping items into and around in the sidebar. Tags and Smart Folders can be used to make the sidebar even more useful.

If you are buying a used Mac there are many things you need to check out before you complete the purchase. You can run hardware diagnostics and check out battery and hard drive health. You should carefully inspect the screen, keyboard and other parts. It is also very important that you check for a firmware password and see if the Mac is connected to iCloud. The best place to buy is from Apple's refurbished store, but you can also find used Macs at some well-known resellers as well as eBay and CraigsList. Be very careful to avoid scams and protect yourself. Once you get your new old Mac, be sure to wipe it and start fresh.

It is fairly easy to compress a single file or multiple files and folders into a ZIP file archive on your Mac. You can also decompress any ZIP file by simply double-clicking it. This is useful for sending files online or to store files you no longer need. The Archive Utility is used invisibly for both commands, but you can run this app by itself and choose from more options when compressing or decompressing ZIP files.

Apple's new lineup of MacBooks simplifies your choices by removing the 12-inch MacBook and older MacBook Pro models. But you still have 8 base models of MacBook Pro and MacBook Air. Which one is the right one for you. But looking closely at the specifications and purchase options, there is really one one MacBook Air model and two 13-inch and two 15-inch models. For most people, it comes down to a low-end but light MacBook Air, a mid-range MacBook Pro 13-inch and a high end MacBook Pro 15-inch. Find out which models you should consider to match how you use your MacBook.

Instead of storing your videos in the Photos app with your pictures, consider storing them as files in a folder in the Finder. You can place this folder on your iCloud Drive, on your local drive only, or on an external drive. You can organize them using file names, subfolders, tags and comments. You can use the Gallery view to look through your videos almost as if they were in a special video management app.

Many people overuse the minimize button to get applications and windows out of the way. In most cases, it is more efficient to use the Hide command to simply hide the app. Hidden apps can be quickly and easy brough back and you won't clutter your Dock with minimized windows. Today using tabs in windows and autosave to easily quit and relaunch apps means you should rarely need the minimize button.

If you would like to precisely position your application windows without using any third-party tool, you can build a versatile script in Automator to snap windows to portions of your screen. You can give yourself multiple options such as the Left Third, Right Two-Thirds, corners or anything you can come up with. Then you can put the workflow into the Services menu where you can quickly trigger it with a keyboard shortcut. The framework in this JavaScript/JXA script can be used to develop your own customizable window organizing tool.

When you Mac's hard drive is almost full, you can investigate and figure out what is using the space by simply using the Finder. There is no need to buy a third-party app to manage your hard drive. You start at the top and view all of your folders, digging down to see what is using the most space. Then you'll need to make some decisions about what to remove from yoru drive, being care to only remove files you don't need.

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.