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 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.
These come with every Mac, and you can locate them in the Applications and Utilities folders. If you’re in the Finder, just hit Shift-Command-A (⇧⌘A) or Shift-Command-U (⇧⌘U) to find them.
I’ll walk you through a few of the more useful Mac apps hiding there that you probably haven’t heard of.
Keyboard shortcuts are a great way to speed yourself up when you’re using a Mac. 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 basics 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.
★★★★★
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.
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.
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 in 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.
