Some Macs may be too old for screen recording, but not many. Photo: Charlie Sorrel/Cult of Mac
As a Mac user, you already know how to take a quick screenshot with the ⌘⇧3 and ⌘⇧4 shortcuts. But did you know that you can also capture a video recording of your screen? If you’re running macOS Mojave, making a Mac screen recording proves as easy as hitting a shortcut, just like grabbing a screenshot. Older Macs can do it, too, albeit with a little more futzing.
Don't let your photos take over your whole SSD. Photo: Charlie Sorrel/Cult of Mac
The Photos app on the Mac has two options for storing your photos. You can tell it to keep the full-size originals of everything, or you can have it self-manage, keeping your master library in iCloud and storing a mixture of full-resolution and low-res versions locally to save space.
The trouble is, even when you choose the “Optimize Mac Storage” option, the Photos app’s storage can metastasize and take over your whole drive. Today we’ll see how to cap this storage, giving Photos a hard limit on how much space it can use. For instance, if you have a MacBook with a 128GB SSD, you could choose to only use 30GB for Photos — and it will never, ever use more.
Dust off any old USB keyboard and get your Bluetooth back in action. Photo: Charlie Sorrel/Cult of Mac
You wake up or restart your Mac, and nothing is connected. Your Bluetooth keyboard does nothing. You wiggle your Bluetooth mouse or trackpad, and the on-screen pointer refuses to wiggle in response. The problem? You Mac’s Bluetooth is switched off. But how do you switch it back on without a mouse?
Today we’ll see how to activate Bluetooth on an iMac, Mac Pro or Mac mini 1 without having to touch a mouse or trackpad. All you need are a USB keyboard, Spotlight and one clever trick.
Imagine this, only more dynamic. Photo: Charlie Sorrel/Cult of Mac
The Dynamic Desktop is a great macOS Mojave feature. It changes the desktop image throughout the day, so your wallpaper always matches the time of day — nighttime images at night, shadowless glare at noon, and so on. Today we’ll see how to switch it on, and where to find new Dynamic Desktop images to add to the defaults.
There's no need to keep a zillion different versions of a file on the Mac. Photo: Phil Roeder/Flickr CC
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.
These 40 tips will make you love the Touch Bar (if you don't already). Cover: Graham Bower/Marty Cortinas/Cult of Mac
Some people love the MacBook Pro’s Touch Bar. Other people absolutely hate it. Bottom line is that the thin OLED strip can work wonders — if you use it right!
Get our top 40 tips for making the most of the Touch Bar in this week’s free issue of Cult of Mac Magazine. Get it now from iTunes — hey, the price is right! — or keep reading for the week’s best Apple news, reviews and how-tos.
You got the touch. Here's how to master your MacBook Pro’s Touch Bar. Photo: Graham Bower/Cult of Mac
The Touch Bar is one of Apple’s most controversial innovations of recent years. Located inconspicuously at the top of the MacBook Pro keyboard, where the function keys used to sit, some users ignore it altogether. Others actively hate it.
For pro users, like software developers, the lack of a physical escape key and function keys can be a real pain. And the Touch Bar’s touch-sensitivity makes it all too easy to trigger Siri by accident when you aim for the delete key.
But love it or loathe it, we’re stuck with the Touch Bar. Apple includes it on all its high-end laptops, without even offering function keys as a built-to-order option. So we might as well learn how to get the most out of it.
The good news is that once you get in touch with your Touch Bar, it turns out to have some genuinely useful time-saving features. Especially if you use apps that support it, like Adobe Photoshop and Microsoft Office. Here are my top 40 Touch Bar tips.
You almost certainly know the shortcuts for snapping quick screenshots on your Mac. It’s ⇧⌘3 to capture the entire screen, and ⇧⌘4 to get a crosshairs cursor to select a section of the screen.
Now, there’s a new screenshot shortcut in town: ⇧⌘5. And boy is this fella fancy. If this were a western movie, ⇧⌘5 would be the young upstart blowing into town with a couple of Uzis and a pair of Kevlar chaps1. Let’s check out Mojave screenshots.
Get your hands on the latest beta today. Photo: Apple
macOS Mojave just launched, bringing all kinds of neat new features to Apple’s desktop OS. Dark Mode, Dynamic Desktop, Stacks and a fantastically redesigned Finder are some of the highlights.
If you are planning on upgrading, you should do a little prep work first. Here’s how to get ready for your sweet, free macOS Mojave upgrade.