MacMost: Video Podcast

The menu bar icons on the right side of your screen are added there by System Preferences, system extensions and apps. You control what is there by looking at those various sources and switching them on or off in the preference screen or app that owns the icon. You can move them around by dragging with the Command key held down. Order can be important as the leftmost icons may not be visible when running some apps.

If you look on the back of your iPhone, iPad or Mac, you will see some tiny text and some symbols. There are usually just a statement of where the device was made, government regulatory numbers, and symbols from different regulatory agencies. See what can be found on a 2016 iPhone, iPad and MacBook Pro. You can use the FCC numbers to look up interesting public information about your device.

The way you access most commands in apps on your Mac is to use the Menu Bar. Unlike on Windows, the menu bar stays at the top of the screen at all times, but changes depending on which app you are using. The menus and commands change to reflect the capabilities of the app. You can access these commands with clicks, find them with the Help menu, and learn the keyboard shortcuts as you use them. Sometimes menu bar items are inactive because they can't be used at the moment.

You can connect a variety of standard wireless Bluetooth devices to your Mac, like headphones, speaker systems, keyboards, mice and trackpads. Setting up a new Bluetooth device requires that you look at the documentation that came with the device. Every device has a slightly different way to start the pairing process. On the Mac side, you use System Preferences to recognize and connect to the device.

You can rename a file many different ways on a Mac. In the Finder, you can click the file name after a file is selected, press the Return key, or choose File, Rename. You can also rename files in the app that you are using to view or edit it. You can click on the name in the title bar or choose File, Rename. You can rename files in the Finder or an app and the other will understand the change and follow along without a problem.

Apple has an official way to sell your old Mac and get an Apple gift card or cash. You can start at the Apple site and use their official buy-back partner to sell your Mac. You get a price estimate based on your Mac model and condition. If a model is too old or not working, you can also send it in for recycling.

You can use the address bar in Safari to search with your default search engine. In Safari Preferences you can set this to Google, Yahoo, Bing or DuckDuckGo. But you can browser to any search engine you want and use it outside of the address bar. You can also set your default search engine to almost any other site using Safari extensions.

The Dock is one of the primary elements of the macOS user interface. You can use it to launch apps. You can customize which apps appear in the Dock and in what order the appear. You can also play files and folders on the right side of the Dock. You've got several preferences you can set to change the Dock's appearance.

A new feature in Pages, Numbers and Keynote is the Preferences screen for Auto-Correct settings. You can customize things like automatic smart quotes and spell correction on a per-app basis. You can also add to a list of automatic text replacements and ignored spelling words for each app.

With the new version of Pages you can now create linked text boxes to make complex page layout documents. The linking system works differently than in older versions of Pages, using colors and numbers to denote which boxes link and in which order. You can flow text across multiple boxes, and also on multiple pages. This feature is also in the iOS version of Pages, but with a slightly different interface.

The new versions of Pages, Numbers and Keynote introduce hundreds of new shapes that you can use in your projects. You can change the color of the shapes, resize them and even edit their lines and break them apart. They could be useful in a variety of documents, presentations and spreadsheets. This feature is also in the iOS version of Pages, Numbers and Keynote.

Apple's new file system is a big part of the new macOS High Sierra and iOS 11. What is a file system and how is APFS different than the old Apple file system? What advantages will APFS bring to our Apple devices? Which devices will this affect and when? How will we upgrade our Macs, iPhones and iPads to APFS?

You can subscribe to Apple services like Apple Music as well as in-app services from various third-parties. You can see all of your reoccurring subscriptions in either iTunes on your Mac or in Settings on your iPhone or iPad. From there you can change the subscriptions to other plans offered, or cancel them. In many cases you can cancel a subscription but still use it until the next renewal date.

You can customize the toolbar in the Finder and many apps. You can add buttons, spaces and other controls. Some apps have a large selection of buttons you can add. You can also revert to the default set easily. See what is available in the Finder, Mail, Pages and other apps.

One formatting option missing in Mac mail is the ability to highlight text by adding a background color to a text selection. This is useful when you want to point out a passage in a response and is commonly using in Windows email clients. While there is no way to do it with standard text styling in Mail, you can create a custom style by copying and pasting an example from Pages, creating a style, and then applying that style later on in other messages.

Mission Control in macOS Sierra allows you to create multiple desktops with different windows on each. You can easily create these desktops and move between them with keyboard shortcuts. This allows you to go between apps and workspaces easily, saving you time and effort. You can also use full-screen apps as a desktop. This is handy for MacBook users in particular as screen space is limited.

A free way to convert scanned images to text documents on your Mac is to use Google Drive and Google Docs. With any Google/Gmail account you can upload a PDF or image file to Google Drive, then request to open it in Google Docs. The result will be a OCR (optical character recognition) conversion from image to editable text. Then you can export the text back to your Mac.

For writers, a good thesaurus can be more useful than a dictionary. Fortunately, your Mac has both. You can easily access the thesaurus while writing in Pages, Mail or almost any app. You can even have it appear above the dictionary.

The Slow Keys option will cause your Mac to wait for purposeful key presses before accepting input. This can help some users who have difficulty using keyboard. The option applies to modifier keys too, so each key needs to be pressed one at a time and held. You can also use this feature to give you audible feedback when you press a key.

If something is wrong with your Mac, either you or the tech repairing your Mac will need to access the special diagnostics mode. You can do this by restarting your Mac and holding the D key. The results could give you some insight into the problem. See https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202731 for details.