After using Macs for years, I’ve come across several macOS features that most people overlook or quickly dismiss. But these incredibly useful Mac features have become an integral part of my daily workflow. They help me manage files, navigate my Mac more efficiently, breeze through repetitive text and more.
Even if you have been using macOS for years, chances are you are not using all of its features. And these should become part of your Mac repertoire.
Lil’ Finder Guy stands “barely an apple tall,” but the Apple mascot started as something even smaller: a sketch.
Offering a rare behind-the-scenes look at Cupertino’s creative process, an Apple art director revealed early sketches and a prototype behind Lil’ Finder Guy in a LinkedIn post on Thursday. Although the post quickly disappeared, the images showed just how much craft went into a character built to sell a budget Mac.
If you work on a Mac, these six useful apps can help you get that work done faster. And you don’t need to take time to download them or figure out if they’re worth the price — you already have these apps on your computer.
Stickies can help you stay organized with digital Post-It notes. Digital Color Meter is an essential tool for graphic design. Dictionary is the fastest way to look up words and synonyms. Screen Sharing can remotely control other computers on your network. Grapher is a highly advanced plotting tool. And finally, Screenshot is an easy-to-use interface for taking screenshots and screen recordings.
I’ll walk you through how to use these useful Mac apps that you probably haven’t heard of.
iPhone has the Files app. Windows has File Explorer. macOS has … Finder? The Mac’s file manager got that odd name decades ago, and it made sense back then. Today, it’s an anachronism. It’s time to rename the macOS Finder to something less silly.
I’m not suggesting Apple remove the Mac’s file manager. There is a far better name for it, though.
Bloom is a Finder replacement that will completely change how you work with files on your Mac.
With a refined interface that makes it feel like a native Mac app, it offers advanced features like a customizable multi-pane layout and enhanced file operations. After using Bloom for several weeks, I’m hooked. It speeds up basic tasks and makes file management on my Mac much easier.
Here’s everything this productivity-boosting Finder replacement can do.
October 25, 2003: Mac OS X Panther arrives on Macintosh computers, bringing several useful new features and making Safari Apple’s default web browser for the first time.
The new Exposé feature in OS X Panther lets Mac users instantly view all open windows at once. And the new iChat AV allows people to talk with audio and video as well as text.
Mac keyboard shortcuts are a great way to speed yourself up when you’re using your computer. Mastering them means more time spent getting things done and less time spent moving your hands back and forth between keyboard and trackpad.
There are the basic Mac keyboard shortcuts like Command-C and Command-V for copy and paste; Command-B, Command-I and Command-U for bold, italics and underline; Command-Z and Shift-Command-Z for undo and redo. But for a lot of people, that’s where their knowledge ends.
You can do so much more than you may know. Here’s a guide to the best Mac keyboard shortcuts.
It’s easy to rename multiple files at once on a Mac using the Finder’s batch rename tool. If you have a big series of pictures, videos, screenshots or documents in a series, you can use this feature to rename them all in a similar format and sequence.
You don’t have to take on such a tedious task by hand.
★★★★★
If you’re the right kind of person, the Untitled Folder Wallet by Nik Bentel is handy and practical while doubling as a funny visual joke. It’s a premium leather wallet that happens to look exactly like the New Folder icon in macOS.
It has three pockets for carrying cards, cash and coins. The leather is soft and the stitching holds strong. And best of all, it’s shaped like a tiny folder.
It’s a limited-run item of only 500 units, so if you want one, you’d best order now. I’ve been using it for about a week. Surprisingly, I fell in love with it.
Years ago I was a regular Mac user who switched to PC for a long time. When I fully re-immersed myself in the Apple ecosystem, an old annoyance came right back — all those unwanted apps launching for no apparent reason on startup, slowing things down.
Like many folks, I don’t restart my Mac very often these days because Sleep mode has its benefits. So having to close a bunch of apps is not a massive annoyance. But for anyone who wants a fix, there are easy ways to disable startup items.
And if those don’t work, you can try a couple of tricks to get rid of hidden launch agents.
Full-screen mode on a Mac is pretty great. Unlike Windows, where full-screen apps have been the default since forever, the Mac’s full-screen abilities are a fairly recent addition. And the default is still for apps to launch in smaller windows, which is the Mac Way. But what if you want those apps to launch in full-screen every time you open them? Well, by changing one setting — and abandoning an ingrained habit — you can have exactly that.
Bonus: Full-screen app launching will only apply to the apps you choose, leaving the rest of them to behave normally.
I have an app I use every day, but whenever I open it, it opens to a new, blank document, instead of the project I was working on when I closed the app. To open that project, I have to mouse up to my Mac’s menu bar, click on File > Recent Items…, and find it in there.
To fix this, I set out to find a way to easily access the last few projects from this app. What if I could put this list of recent projects into my Mac’s Dock? It turns out that you can easily do this, using a quick Spotlight search, a Smart Folder and a drag to the Dock.
Service Station is the Mac app I didn’t know I was waiting for. It lets you customize the Finder’s right-click contextual menu to put essential functions just a click away. It’s also from the Mac App Store, and uses the official Finder Extension framework, so you don’t need to worry about running some weird hack on your machine.
Unfortunately, it only runs on macOS 10.14.4 or later, so I can’t use it on my old iMac. (That’s a sad-face emoji right there.)
On the Mac, you probably know all the tricks for sorting things in the Finder. You can choose icon, list and column views. And you can sort the files and folders in those windows by various dates (added, created, modified), size, name and lots more. Some, but not nearly all, of these sorting options are also available on iOS in the Files app. Let’s take a look.
There are two kinds of Mac users. The sad, harried folks who don’t know how to use this easy, essential, life-changing Command key trick. And the happy, efficient, relaxed people who learned it years ago. If you’ve seen the movie Back to the Future, it’s like the difference between the two 2015 versions of George McFly, before and after Marty screws around with the 1950s. This trick will change your life.
Are you ready?
If you’re at your Mac, go ahead and click a window for another app (don’t forget to come back right away). Clicking an app’s window brings it to the foreground, of course. But did you notice that only the window you clicked came forward. If that other app has any other windows open, they will stay hidden. It wasn’t always this way. In pre-OS X days, the default behavior was to bring all those windows to the front. And now, thanks to a new app called Front and Center, from John Siracusa, you can get this behavior on a modern Mac.
MacOS Mojave and Catalina both have Finder Quick Actions. These are buttons that sit in the preview panel of any file, and let you perform quick actions of the selected file with one click. Actions vary depending on whether you’ve selected an image, a video, and so on. The defaults let you rotate images, crop video, and turn most other things into PDFs. You can also add your own Quick Actions, using Automator.
But what about Macs running macOS High Sierra or earlier? Can you add Quick Actions? The answer is yes, kinda.
In macOS Catalina, iTunes has been replaced by separate apps, but none of those new apps takes on the tasks of syncing your music, books, photos and other data to your iPhone, iPod touch or iPad. That responsibility now falls upon the Finder.
So, does this means you can plug in your iPad and drag and drop all your apps’ files between it and your Mac? Of course not. In fact, apart from this functionality now being in the Finder, not much has changed at all.
Apple has slowly been turning up the dial on what iOS can do, trying to make it more and more “computer” like. With iOS 13, one of the points of frustration with computing on iOS – and especially on iPad – is finally being addressed thanks to changes in the Files app.
With iOS 13, the Files app is taking a huge leap toward the Mac model of file management. There’s a whole bunch of smaller changes, as well as some big upgrades that make it really compelling.
Dropbox is getting increasingly bloated and annoying — on the Mac, at least. When iOS 13 ships later this year, you’ll be able to share whole iCloud folders with other people, so you can ditch DropBox altogether. But how will you switch?
One thing you can’t do is just drag your Dropbox folder into iCloud Drive. iCloud just won’t let you. In fact, you can’t even create a new folder and name it “Dropbox.” WTF?
What happens if you’re working on a document and you realize you screwed it up? Maybe you deleted a few paragraphs without realizing. Or you’ve just been writing a bunch of nonsense for the past half-hour and wish you could go back to where you were before? On the Mac, you can easily do just that. It’s called versions, and it’s automatic.
Using versions, you can easily browse and restore previous versions of any document. Some apps have this built in, so you can do it right there inside the app itself. But the Finder also supports versions, so you can revert to a previous state of almost anything.
Slack is everybody’s favorite way to waste time when they’re supposed to be working. And today, the biggest conversation in Slack chats everywhere is Slack’s hideous new logo.
It’s dull. It’s ugly. It has none of the personality of the original logo, and it doesn’t look like the Slack hashtag even if you squint at it hard.
If you’re on iOS, tough. You’re stuck with this awful new corporate abomination. But if you’re on the Mac, there’s good news: You can keep the old Slack app icon.
Step one is DON’T UPDATE THE SLACK APP YET!
The Mac may be way older than the iPhone and iPad, but it still has some tricks. 2018 saw some fine updates to some of our favorite Mac apps, as well as some amazing new apps that migrated across from iOS.
Also, Apple injected so much new life into a tired old macOS staple in Mojave that it’s made our top 5 list this year. Can you guess which one it is?
It’s okay to use a PC alongside your Mac, but you’ll find that some of the best macOS features aren’t available in Windows. One of those is Finder’s awesome preview function, but you don’t have to live without it.
QuickLook is a free app that brings the same preview feature to Windows 10’s File Explorer.
AirDrop is a fantastic Apple feature. You can use it to share files of pretty much any size with anyone nearby, even in the middle of a desert with no Wi-Fi and no cellular. It Just Works, and once you get used to it, any other way of sharing files seems primitive.
Today, we’ll make AirDrop even easier to use on your Mac, by adding AirDrop shortcut to the Dock.