Big Sur: Expert Guides and Resources

With VoiceOver and Text to Speech, your Mac, running macOS Big Sur, can both narrate what's happening on your screen and read documents to you.The camera pans back. A voice tells you what you’ve just seen. And suddenly it all makes sense. Return with me now to those thrilling days of the off-camera narrator … .

macOS Big Sur includes several enhancements, such as a nifty mechanism for capturing still and video images from your Mac screen, desktop pictures that change to reflect the time of day, the recently used apps section of the dock, and using Gallery view as a photo browser. Shooting screens If you’ve used a Mac for long, you probably know that you can grab a picture of what’s on your screen by using the shortcuts Command  +Shift+3 for the whole screen or Command  +Shift+4 to select a window or part of the screen.

Icons and windows are the units of currency used by the macOS Big Sur Finder and the desktop. Start with a quick overview of some of the icons you’re likely to encounter as you get to know Finder and the desktop. Belly up to the toolbar In addition to the sidebar and some good old-fashioned double-clicking, the macOS Finder window offers additional navigation aids on the toolbar — namely, the Back and Forward icons, as well as the extra-helpful view icons.

Views are part of what makes your Mac feel like your Mac. Big Sur offers four views so you can select the best one for any occasion. Some people like one view so much that they rarely (or never) use others. Other people memorize the keyboard shortcuts to switch views instantly without reaching for the mouse. Try ’em all, and use the one(s) you prefer.

Voice Control enables your Mac to recognize and respond to human speech. The only thing you need to use it is a microphone, which most of you have built right into your Mac (unless it’s a Mac Mini or Mac Pro as noted previously).Voice Control lets you issue verbal commands such as “Get my mail!” to your Mac (running macOS Big Sur) and have it actually get your email.

The macOS Big Sur desktop is the backdrop for Finder—everything you see behind the dock and any open windows. The desktop is always available and is where you can usually find your hard drive icon(s). If your desktop doesn’t display hard drive icons and you wish it did, stay tuned. Explaining the Finder and desktop will be a whole lot easier with a picture for reference, so take a gander at this figure, which is a glorious depiction of a typical macOS Big Sur Finder.

Take a minute to look at the row of icons at the bottom of your display in macOS Big Sur. That row, gentle reader, is the dock (shown), and those individual pictures are known as icons. Note that the dock is chopped into two pieces here (with the left half on top) to make the icons bigger and easier to see. The dock and all its default iconsIcons in the dock and Launchpad are odd ducks; you activate them with a single click.

If you’ve been a Mac user for a while, you might have noticed that the venerable Screenshot (formerly Grab) app, the app you use to use to manage screen capture features including timed shots and cursor visibility, is no longer in your Utilities folder.In its place, Big Sur (like Mojave before it) has more and better screen-shooting capabilities than any version of macOS before it.

Out of the box, macOS Big Sur comes with a preset collection of beeps and controls. From the Sound System Preferences pane, however, you can change the way your Mac plays and records sound by changing settings on each of its three tabs: Sound Effects, Output, and Input.Three items appear at the bottom of the Sound Effects pane, no matter which of the three tabs is active: To make your Mac’s volume louder or softer, use the Output Volume slider.