• November 4, 2021

    Need to Resize Images in Various Ways? Give Preview a Try

    Even those of us who don’t work with graphics professionally often find ourselves needing to resize images. Perhaps you have a large square headshot, but the site to which you’re uploading requires it to be exactly 100 by 100 pixels. Or maybe you have an iPhone 13 Pro photo that’s 4032 by 3024, but you need the long side to be 1280 pixels and the short side to be 800 pixels. You might even need... Read more
  • August 10, 2021

    The Mac’s Magic Shortcut to Trashing Files and Photos Quickly

    Sure, you could select a file in the Finder and choose File > Move to Trash or drag it to the Trash in the Dock. Similarly, you can trash selected photos in Apple’s Photos app by choosing Image > Delete X Photos, or by pressing the Delete key, but both of those methods result in a dialog asking if you’re sure. The easiest way of trashing a file in the Finder or a picture in Photos ... Read more
  • July 6, 2021

    Reduce Your Email Load with Three Features in Apple’s Mail: Mute, Block, and Unsubscribe

    Complaining about getting too much email is like complaining about bad traffic—we brought it upon ourselves, and while it’s impossible to escape entirely, it’s worth knowing how to reduce it. Apple is fully cognizant of the issue, too, and has built features into the last couple versions of Mail—on the Mac, iPhone, and iPad—to help out. Here are three that you might find useful in different sit... Read more
  • May 25, 2021

    Learn How to Paste Text So Its Style Matches the Surrounding Text

    When you copy text from a Web page, PDF, or word processing document, macOS usually includes the associated formatting, so the words you paste may end up in 68-point blue italic if that was what the source text looked like. That’s often undesirable. More commonly, you want the text to take on the styling of the text where you’ve pasted it. In most Mac apps, there’s a quick trick to achieve this... Read more
  • May 11, 2021

    Nine Reasons to Put Your Mac’s Pointer in a Corner

    Nine Reasons to Put Your Mac’s Pointer in a Corner

    If your Mac is like ours, it’s a busy place, with oodles of open windows and lots of icons lying around. If you want to display the Desktop or see a single app’s windows, you may find yourself clicking around or using keyboard shortcuts, but did you know that you can access many of the Mac’s special views with just a flick of your wri... Read more
  • April 29, 2021

    Not a Fan of Big Sur’s Translucent Menu Bar? Here’s How to Disable It

    In macOS 11 Big Sur, Apple went back to a design direction from the earliest days of Mac OS X: a translucent menu bar. Since its color changes depending on the desktop picture, many people aren’t enamored of it (left, below). Luckily, reverting to the traditional opaque menu bar is simple. Open System Preferences > Accessibility > Display and select Reduce Transparency. That will turn the... Read more
  • April 27, 2021

    Work with iOS App Updates in Your Account in the App Store

    If you’ve turned on automatic App Updates in Settings > App Store on your iPhone or iPad, you might wonder how you’d know if an app was updated or what changed. To find that information, open the App Store app and tap your avatar icon in the upper-right corner. Scroll down and you’ll see an Updated Recently list. If you pull down on the screen, that will force it to refresh, and you may see ... Read more
  • April 6, 2021

    Make Better Documents and Edit More Easily with Show Invisibles

    Some of the trickiest editing and proofreading problems are related to characters you can’t typically see on the screen: spaces, tabs, and returns. Just because they’re invisible doesn’t mean they don’t affect the look of a document, often in negative ways. For instance:
    • An extra space can cause an awkward jump from one word to the next, or it could push punctuation away from the f... Read more
  • March 25, 2021

    Having Trouble Finding Files on Your Mac? Here’s How to Reset Spotlight

    For the most part, Spotlight works well. Press Command-Space or use the Search field in a Finder window, and it finds everything that matches your search term. Sometimes, however, Spotlight fails to turn up a file that you know is present, likely due to index corruption. To fix the problem, you can force Spotlight to rebuild its index. (Don’t do this unless it’s necessary since reindexing can t... Read more
  • March 18, 2021

    Choose Your Preferred Default Web Browser and Email App in iOS and iPadOS 14

    Since the earliest days of the iPhone, Apple’s Safari and Mail have been the default Web and email apps for iOS and, later, iPadOS. There was no way to choose alternatives that would be used whenever an app wanted to open a Web page or create an email message. That has now changed with iOS 14 and iPadOS 14. To switch to a different Web browser (such as Read more