Just like iOS, the Mac has some great features hidden inside the accessibility section of the System Preferences (aka. Settings) app. Today we’re going to see how to tweak the Mac’s display to make it easier to use, for anyone. You can adjust the colours, make page elements easier to see, and even turn everything B&W. Let’s see what’s what.
Spotlight for Mac. Isn’t it that little magnifying glass icon in the menubar, the one that you click when you’ve given up trying to find that document you swear is somewhere on your Mac? Well yes, it is. But if you know these Mac Spotlight tips, it can be so much more than that.
You can use it to find a document, even if you can only remember a snippet of text from inside that document. But you can also use it to do math, launch apps, open folders, and even check the weather. These Mac Spotlight tricks will let you get the most out of this underutilized feature.
We’ve written a lot about the Focos photo app here on Cult of Mac, because it’s like the Photoshop of focus. The universal iOS app lets you edit the focus of your Portrait mode photos in crazy depth (pun intended). But v2.0 just launched, and it’s hands-down amazing.
Focos 2 uses machine learning to calculate the depth of any photo, and then apply portrait-style blur to it. That means you can take portrait photos on the iPad and, wildest of all, you can apply a portrait background blur to photos you’ve saved from the internet.
In the olden days, when you wanted to replace your hard drive with a bigger one, you’d run a “secure erase” on it to completely remove any personal data. This would write zeros to the entire disk, overwriting anything already there.
But now, thanks to advances in storage tech, this no longer does the trick. (Not that you can change your own Mac SSDs now anyway.) The new secure-erase, says Apple, is to just encrypt your disk.
With big discounts to be had on Apple Watch Series 4, it’s an ideal time to upgrade — and sell off your old model.
It might seem like a relic now, but it’s probably still worth a small fortune — if you sell it properly. Here’s how to get the best price for your old Apple Watch and ensure you get paid fast.
My real wallet is a shrine to minimalism. A bit of cash, a few cards, and zero old receipts or spent metro tickets. I keep it slimline, even with the aggressively European coin pocket included therein. My Apple Wallet, on the other hand, is as cluttered as the horizontal surfaces in my mother’s house, covered as they are with crystal animals, photo frames and lace doilies.
The problem is twofold. First, Apple Wallet never gets thicker, no matter how many cinema tickets and boarding passes you stuff in there. Second, how do you remove all those passes anyway? One at a time, with a swipe and a tap and a confirmation for each? No thanks.
Fortunately, there’s a (slightly) quicker way.
Apple’s Mail app — the Mac one, not the iOS one — has a secret weapon for automatically cleaning up your inbox. It’s called Rules, and you can use it to process all arriving emails, so you don’t have to.
Mail rules can be used to get custom alerts, to automatically file invoices, to save newsletters out of the inbox, to block senders, and lots more. Today we’re going to check out a few of the most interesting Mac Mail rules so you can get started cleaning up your inbox.
Apple added full transcript search to its podcast directory in iOS 13. Even though you can’t actually read the podcast transcripts, this is still huge. You can search across the content of podcast episodes the way you can search websites with DuckDuckGo (or other search engines) today.
Did you know that Home Depot shares your “name, address and transactional information … with third party companies”? Or that Marriott Hotels discloses “Personal Data and Other Data with select Strategic Business Partners”?
What about this snippet from The New York Times’ privacy policy: “If you are a U.S. print subscriber, we may exchange or rent your name and postal mailing address.”
The bad news is, pretty much anytime you share your data with a U.S. company, it will sell that data to somebody else. The good news is that you can opt out. And the even better news is that there’s one place to get all the information you need to do it.
The Apple Card isn’t just another credit card. Apple is a hardware company, after all, so its card is special, mkay? If Jony Ive hadn’t disappeared from the Apple lot, then we’d probably even have a Making Of video, with Whispering Joni1 burning with quiet passion about how this is the thinnest, strongest card that Apple has ever made. How Apple’s designers needed to invent an entire new production process to recycle titanium plates reclaimed from broken legs. Etc.
So, if you have an Apple Card, Apple wants you to treat it with respect. And that’s why there is now an official support document telling you how to clean it.
The iPhone’s incredible Portrait mode does a great job of blurring the backgrounds of photos, making the subject stand out from busy backdrops. (Apple also uses this depth information for its truly awful Portrait Lighting effects — has anyone ever gotten a good result from the Stage Light filter? — but that’s another story.)
What if you could use the depth information inside Portrait photos to get rid of the background entirely? Wouldn’t that be something? Well, yes it would. And if you have the right app, it’s really easy to remove photo backgrounds.
The Apple Card is now potentially available to anyone in the U.S., so you’ll soon be able to use your (tough titanium) credit card to defeat locks, scrape paint, and open beer bottles. But it’s not all good news. Your Apple Card contract includes something called arbitration, and that’s a very bad thing. The silver lining is that you can easily opt out. Here’s how to opt out of Apple Card arbitration, and why you definitely should.
By using commands in your Mac’s built-in Terminal app, you can quickly change settings you probably didn’t even know existed.
Some of these Mac settings are just shortcuts — you can enable them in the usual way, using the mouse. But Terminal makes things simple. Instead of opening the System Preferences app, then finding (or remembering) a setting you want to change, and then searching further until you actually find the right checkbox, you can just type (or paste) a command, then hit return.
Most of these are secret settings, though. They are impossible to change without Terminal. Let’s check them out.
On a podcast this week, I heard the hosts complaining that they get all kinds of spam notifications from Apple. Their iPhones pop up promotional alerts about Apple Pay, apps, Apple Music, Apple Pay, podcasts and more.
“WTF?” I thought, because I don’t get anything like that. I checked through my notification preferences, sure that I’d find something in there, but no. So why wasn’t I getting all this Apple spam?
Because Apple hid the setting. You can turn off all those junky Apple spam notifications. You just have to know where to look.
Mac laptops made in the last few years have an annoying/convenient feature. Open one up, and it powers on. MacBooks have woken from sleep when you open the lid for years, but now they boot from cold, too. Want to clean the keyboard without turning the thing on? Tough.
Or is it? If you want to stop this behavior, it’s easy. Here’s how.
Are you enjoying your new Apple Card? Isn’t running up debt great when it is accompanied by a titanium card and a stylish app? But what you might not be enjoying are the Apple Card notifications that started to pop up on your iPhone.
Here’s how to stop them. But beware: It’s an all-or-nothing proposition that clearly illustrates an annoying problem with iPhone notifications.
“Distraction-free” apps are ridiculous. They don’t help at all. In fact, if you have trouble focusing on the task on hand, then the problem isn’t the app. The problem is you.
Removing clutter from an app’s interface won’t stop you from flipping to Twitter every five minutes. A carefully chosen font won’t stop you from whipping your iPhone from your pocket every time a question pops into your head.
The problem is not even distraction. The problem is overstimulation, and it’s going to take some effort for you to fix it.
The Mac’s Terminal is at once scary and powerful. It’s like a whole other computer living underneath the pretty interface of macOS. Sometimes, it’s convoluted. Other times, it seems laser-focused, offering a much quicker way to get things done. Instead of clicking and dragging your way through multiple screens, you just type a line of text.
However, the Mac Terminal is pretty intimidating if you’re not used to it. Today we will learn five super-useful Terminal tricks that make getting around much easier.
The Apple Card is here, and it looks like a pretty good credit card (as these things go). But far more interesting than the MasterCard interest rates, or the minimal design of the card, is the software behind Apple Card.
You manage all aspects of the card — from payments to Daily Cash summaries — through the Wallet App you already have on your iPhone. You can even download a PDF of your transactions. Let’s check it out.
Think about your music library for a second. Which of the songs in your library come from Apple Music? Which ones did you add to the library yourself? And which ones have you added to iTunes Match, but haven’t actually made it to your iCloud library yet?
These things are a little confusing. The beauty of Apple Music, and the iCloud Music Library, is that all of your music is there, in one place. But this simplicity also makes it hard to see what’s going on. Happily, iTunes is still more than up to the task, and can even split these songs into individual playlists. Let’s check it out.
Invitations to get an Apple Card are trickling out, but even before you make the first purchase with your shiny new credit card, you should reject its arbitration provision.
If you don’t, you give up the right to benefit from any class-action lawsuits brought against Goldman Sachs, the bank backing Apple Card.
This may seem like a frivolous how-to. But seeing as I couldn’t work out how to switch off shuffle Apple Music tracks on my iPhone in iOS 12, I think it’s worth a look — if only so dummies like me can look it up.
BTW, you can find the Apple Music repeat and shuffle controls in iOS 12 by swiping up on the Now Playing panel to reveal the buttons at the bottom, if you need to know.
So, let’s take a look at how Apple changed things in the iOS 13 Music app.
Phone calls are so 20th century. Apart from a knock at the door, when else can another person decide to bug you, and then bug you right away, at their own convenience, without getting your permission first?
In the 21st century, we have a name for these people: entitled. Fortunately, it’s easy to bump their presumptuous invasions, and let them know who’s the boss1.
Here’s how to decline iPhone calls (or mute them if you’re feeling particularly passive-aggressive).
You know how you can add an avatar to pretty much any social app ever, and all your friends, family, contacts, etc., will see it? Well, in iOS 13 you can finally do the same for iMessages.
No longer will you have to hope that your contacts use a nice photo of you, or worry that your boss is using a picture of a cute pig or pussycat to represent you in the group chat. Now you can add and share your own avatar, or even a Memoji. Let’s see how.
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?