Big Sur Articles

Article / Updated 03-22-2021

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. Those shortcuts and features have been around since time immemorial. When you take a screenshot using your old-school shortcuts — Command  +Shift+3 or Command  +Shift+4 — a thumbnail of the screenshot appears in the lower-right corner of the screen. If you do nothing, the thumbnail disappears after about 5 seconds, and then the screenshot is saved on your desktop. To see additional options, right- or Control-click the thumbnail and choose from the shortcut menu, as shown. Or just single-click the thumbnail before it disappears and the image opens in a window with Markup tools so you can annotate the image before you save it. When you have finished annotating, click Done to save the screenshot and annotations to the desktop, or click Revert to close the overlay without saving your annotations. If you don’t want to save a file at all, add the Control key to the keyboard shortcut (Command+Shift+Control+3 or Command+Shift+Control+3). Instead of saving the screenshot to a file, it will be sent to the clipboard, so you can paste it into any document that will accept an image from the clipboard. But it gets even better with one more fabulous screen-shooting shortcut that provides even more control over screenshots and adds the capability to record screen movies. This magical shortcut is Command  +Shift+5, and it’s the only shortcut you really have to memorize because its floating toolbar, shown, includes all the functionality of the Command  +Shift+3 and Command  +Shift+4 shortcuts and more. Notice the Options pop-up menu, which lets you do the following: Change the destination for screenshots from Desktop (the default) to Documents, Clipboard, Mail, Messages, Preview, or Other Location Set a timer for shots Turn on and off the floating thumbnail Remember the last selection you made (or not) Show or hide the mouse pointer After configuring the options, you capture screenshots by clicking the Capture icon. If you’ve chosen one of the movie options — Record Entire Screen or Record Selected Portion — the Capture icon becomes the Record icon; click it to begin recording. When you do, the Stop Recording icon appears in the menu bar. Click it to end your recording. Bottom line: Memorize Big Sur’s one keyboard shortcut to rule them all — Command  +Shift+5 — and use it for all of your screen-capturing needs. Dynamic desktop images When you choose your desktop picture, you’ll find a pair of dynamic desktop options above all the normal desktop pictures in the Desktop & Screen Saver System Preferences pane. Because a picture is worth a thousand words, take a gander at this figure, which explains it all. Recently used apps in the dock A relatively new feature to the dock is the Recently Used Apps section, which displays icons for the last three apps you’ve launched, regardless of whether their icons are in the dock permanently. Mentions of Gallery view Gallery view is great for browsing folders full of images. Click an image and then use the arrow keys to see the next or previous image; click the Markup, Rotate, or More icon to edit the current image. And that retires the side, at least as far as features in Big Sur’s Finder are concerned. Onward!

Article / Updated 03-22-2021

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 … . Wouldn’t it be nice if your Mac had a narrator to provide a blow-by-blow account of what’s happening on your screen? Or your eyes are tired from a long day staring at the monitor, but you still have a lengthy document to read. Wouldn’t it be sweet if you could sit back, close your eyes, and let your Mac read the document to you in a (somewhat) natural voice? Both are possible with macOS Big Sur: the first scenario with VoiceOver, and the second with Text to Speech. VoiceOver Big Sur’s VoiceOver technology is designed primarily for the visually impaired, but you might find it useful even if your vision is 20/20. VoiceOver not only reads what’s on the screen to you but also integrates with your keyboard so you can navigate around the screen until you hear the item you’re looking for. When you’re there, you can use Keyboard Access to select list items, select check boxes and radio buttons, move scroll bars and sliders, resize windows, and so on — all with just a simple key press or two. To check it out, launch the System Preferences application (from Launchpad, the Applications folder, the Apple menu, or the dock), click the Accessibility icon and then click VoiceOver or press Command  +Fn+F5 on MacBook models and most Apple keyboards (or try Command  +F5). After VoiceOver is enabled, you can turn it on and off in the Accessibility System Preferences pane or by pressing Command  +Fn+F5 or Command  +F5. While VoiceOver is on, your Mac talks to you about what is on your screen. For example, if you click the desktop, your Mac might say something along the lines of “Application, Finder; Column View; selected folder, Desktop, contains 8 items.” It’s quite slick. Here’s another example: When you click a menu or item on a menu, you hear its name spoken at once, and when you close a menu, you hear the words “Closing menu.” You even hear the spoken feedback in the Print, Open, and Save (and other) dialogs. VoiceOver is kind of cool (talking alerts are fun), but having dialogs actually produce spoken text becomes annoying fast for most folks who aren’t visually impaired. (Those who are visually impaired, however, rave about VoiceOver and say it lets them do things they couldn’t easily do in the past.) In any case, I urge you to check it out. You might like it and find times when you want your Mac to narrate the action onscreen for you. The VoiceOver Utility The VoiceOver Utility lets you specify almost every possible option the VoiceOver technology uses. You can adjust its verbosity; specify how it deals with your mouse and keyboard; change its voice, rate, pitch, and/or volume; and more. You can open the VoiceOver Utility by clicking the Open VoiceOver Utility button in the Accessibility System Preferences pane or in the usual way: by double-clicking its icon (which you find in your Utilities folder). Of course, you might get the machines-are-taking-over willies when your Mac starts to talk to you or make sounds — but if you give it a try, it could change your mind. I wish I had the space to explain further, but I don’t. That’s the bad news. The good news is that VoiceOver Help is extensive and clear, and it helps you harness all the power of VoiceOver and the VoiceOver Utility. Text to Speech The second way your Mac can speak to you is via Text to Speech, which converts onscreen text to spoken words. If you’ve used Text to Speech in earlier versions of macOS, you’ll find that it’s pretty much unchanged. Why might you need Text to Speech? Because sometimes hearing is better than reading. For example, I sometimes use Text to Speech to read aloud to me a column or page I’ve written before I submit it. If something doesn’t sound quite right, I give it another polish before sending it off to my editor. You can configure this feature in the Accessibility System Preferences pane: Open System Preferences (from Launchpad or the Applications folder, dock, or Apple menu), click the Accessibility icon, and then click Spoken Content in the list on the left. In the System Voice pop-up menu, choose one of the voices to set the voice your Mac uses when it reads to you. Click the Play button to hear a sample of the voice you selected. Use the Speaking Rate slider to speed up or slow down the voice. Click the Play button to hear the voice at its new speed. I really like Alex, who says, “Most people recognize me by my voice.” My second favorite is Fred, who sounds like the Talking Moose and says, “I sure like being inside this fancy computer.” (Optional) To make your Mac speak the text in alert boxes and dialogs, select the Speak Announcements check box. You might hear such alerts as “The application Microsoft Word has quit unexpectedly” or “Paper out or not loaded correctly.” (Optional) To make your Mac speak text you’ve selected in a document, select the Speak Selection check box. The default keyboard shortcut for Speak Selection is Option+Esc, but you can assign any key combo you like by clicking the Options button and typing a different keyboard shortcut. (Optional) To make your Mac describe whatever is below the pointer, select the Speak Items Under Pointer check box. (Optional) To make your Mac speak whatever you type, select the Speak Typing Feedback check box. (Optional) To explore additional options for the previous four items, click its Options button. Now, to use Text to Speech to read text to you, copy the text to the Clipboard, launch any app that supports it (I usually choose TextEdit or Pages), paste the text into the empty untitled document, click where you want your Mac to begin reading to you, and then choose Edit → Speech → Start Speaking. To make it stop, choose Edit → Speech → Stop Speaking. Another great place Text to Speech is available is in the Safari web browser. It works the same as TextEdit but you don’t have to paste — just select the text you want to hear and choose Edit → Speech → Start Speaking. If you don’t care for the sound of the default voice, choose a different one in the Accessibility System Preferences pane. First click Spoken Content in the list on the left, and then choose a new voice from the System Voice drop-down menu or choose Customize to download additional voices.

Article / Updated 03-22-2021

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. You can also create AppleScripts and Automator workflows, and Finder Quick Actions, and trigger them by voice. If you’ve enabled Voice Control, you can use speech commands to instruct your Mac. To see a list of commands your Mac will understand if you speak them, open the Accessibility System Preferences pane, click the Voice Control tab, and then click the Commands button. A sheet appears, in which you can enable or disable the available dictation commands, as shown. If you have a laptop or an iMac, you may get better results from just about any third-party microphone or (better still) a headset with a microphone. The mic built into your Mac is okay, but it’s not great. To select a third-party microphone, first connect the mic to your Mac. Then open the Sound System Preferences pane and select it from the list of sound input devices in the Input tab. Below the list is an input volume control (not available with some third-party mics) and a level meter, as shown. Adjust the Input Volume so that most of the dots in the Input Level meter darken (11 of 15 in the figure). You can also choose an external mic in the drop-down menu below the microphone in the Dictation tab of the Keyboard System Preferences pane. However, you’ll need to use the Sound System Preferences pane if you want to adjust your input levels. To give Voice Control a try, press Fn twice (or whatever shortcut you set earlier) and speak one of the items from the list of Voice Control commands, such as “Open TextEdit.” If the command is recognized, it will appear in text above the microphone icon, as shown. This technology is clever and kind of fun, but it can also be frustrating when it doesn’t recognize what you say, which occurs too often, if you ask me. And it requires a decent microphone even though the mic built into most Macs works okay. The bottom line is that I’ve never been able to get Voice Control to work well enough to continue using it beyond a few minutes at best. Still, it’s kind of cool (and it’s a freebie), and I’ve heard more than one user profess love for it — which is why it’s included here.

Article / Updated 03-22-2021

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. Moving through folders fast in Column view Column view is a darn handy way to quickly look through a lot of folders at once, and it’s especially useful when those folders are filled with graphics files. The Column view is my favorite way to display windows in Finder. To display a window in Column view, shown, click the Column view icon on the toolbar (as shown in the margin), choose View → As Columns from Finder’s menu bar, or press Command  +3. Here’s how I clicked around in Column view to see the list of folders and files you see in the figure: When I clicked the Documents icon in the sidebar, its contents appeared in the column to the right. When I clicked the folder titled A Folder Full of Pictures in this column, its contents appeared in the second column. When I clicked A & J.jpg in the second column, the contents of that file appeared in the third column along with information about the file, such as its size (159KB) and the date and time it was created, modified, and last opened. The third column is displaying a Preview, a feature available in all views by choosing View→ Show/Hide Preview. You can modify the information you see in the Preview by choosing View → Show Preview Options and enabling the items you want displayed in the Preview column. Here are some helpful tips when you’re poking around Column view: You can have as many columns in a Column view window as your screen can handle. Just drag any edge or corner of the window to enlarge it so new columns have room to open. You can also click the green Zoom (Maximize) button to make the window fill the screen. (Hint: To get out of full-screen mode, press Esc or move your cursor to the top of the screen and click the green Zoom button that appears near the top-left corner.) If you Option-click the green Zoom button, the window will expand just enough to display all columns with content in them. You can use the little column divider lines at the bottom of every column to resize the column width. You’ll see the resizer cursor when your mouse pointer is directly over a column divider line, as shown. To be specific: If you drag the resizer left or right, the column to its left resizes. If you hold down the Option key when you drag a divider line, all columns resize at the same time. If you double-click a divider line, the column to its left expands to the Right Size, which is the width of the widest item in the column. If you right- or Control-click a divider line, you see a pop-up menu with four or five options: Right Size This Column, Right Size All Columns Individually, Right Size All Columns Equally, and Set Desktop Picture. You’ll see the fifth option, Import from iPhone or iPad, only if an iPhone or iPad is connected to your Mac. The preview column displays information about the highlighted item to its left, but only if that item isn’t a folder or disk. Why? Well, if it were a folder or disk, its contents would be in this column. For many items, the picture you see in the preview column is an enlarged view of the file’s icon. You only see a preview when the selected item is saved in a format that Quick Look can interpret (which is to say, most image file formats, including TIFF, JPEG, PNG, GIF, and PDF to name a few, as well as many other file formats, including Microsoft Word and Pages). If you don’t like having the preview displayed in Column view (but want it to remain in all other views), choose View → Show View Options and deselect the check box for Show Preview Column. You can do the same for any other view, or turn the preview off in all views by choosing View → Hide Preview. Perusing in Icon view Icon view is a free-form view that allows you to move your icons around within a window to your heart’s content. To display a window in Icon view, click the Icon view icon in the toolbar, choose View → As Icons from Finder’s menu bar, or press Command  +1. The best part of Icon view, at least in my humble opinion, is the Icon Size slider in the lower-right corner of Icon view windows (or in the top-right corner if the sidebar and toolbar are hidden). Listless? Try touring folders in List view Now I come to my second-favorite view, List view (shown). I like it so much because of the little angle bracket to the left of each folder. These angle brackets, which were called disclosure triangles in earlier macOS releases, let you see the contents of a folder without actually opening it. This view also allows you to select items from multiple folders at once and move or copy items between folders in a single window. Finally, it’s the view used to present Spotlight search results. To display a window in List view, click the List view icon on the toolbar, choose View→ As List from the Finder menu bar, or press Command  +2. When you’re in List view, the following tips can help you breeze through your folders to find what you’re looking for: To disclose a folder’s contents, click the angle bracket to its left or, if it’s selected, press the right-arrow key. The figure shows the result of either clicking the angle bracket to the left of the Novels folder or selecting (highlighting) the Novels folder and pressing the right-arrow key. I pressed Option+→ in the figure, so all the Novels folder’s subfolders (the Finished Novels and Unfinished Novels folders in this case) also expanded. And if either of these subfolders (or any other subfolder in the Novels folder) had subfolders, they too would have been expanded when I pressed Option+→. To close an open folder, click the angle bracket again or select the folder and press left-arrow. To close all open folders in a List view window, choose Edit → Select All (or press Command  +A) and then press Option+←. The angle brackets don’t appear if you’re using groups. To see the angle brackets, choose View→Use Groups or the keyboard shortcut Command+Control+0 (zero). These are toggles, and will turn groups off if they’re enabled or on if they’re disabled. You could also choose None from the Group icon/menu in the toolbar. Disclosure angle brackets and groups are an either/or situation—you either have disclosure angle brackets or groups but not both at the same time (in the same window). Click the column header to sort items in List view. Note the little upside-down v at the right edge of the selected column (the Name column in the figure). That’s the column’s sorting indicator. If the v points upward, as it does in the figure, the items in the corresponding column are sorted in alphabetical order; if you click the header (Name) again, the triangle will flip upside down and point downward and the items will be listed in the opposite (reverse alphabetical) order. This behavior is true for all columns in List view windows. You can change the order in which columns appear in a window. To do so, press and hold down on a column’s name, and then drag it to the left or right until it’s where you want it. Release the mouse button, and the column moves. The exception (isn’t there always an exception?) is that the Name column always appears first in List view windows; you can move all other columns about at will. In fact, you can even hide and show columns other than Name if you like using the View Options window. It’s even easier to hide or show columns by right- or Control-clicking anywhere on any column header (as shown below the Date Modified column in the preceding figure). Column names with check marks are displayed; column names that are unchecked are hidden. You can fine-tune all four views and the desktop by using the View Options window. Just choose View→ Show View Options or press Command  +J. The options you see apply to the active window or the desktop. Click the Use as Defaults button to apply these options to all windows in that view (that is, Icon, List, Column, or Gallery). To widen or shrink a column, hover the cursor over the dividing line between that column and drag left or right. When your cursor is over the dividing line in the header, it changes to a double-headed resizer. Hangin’ in the Gallery (view) Gallery view is the latest iteration of Cover Flow view in High Sierra and earlier. To display a window in Gallery view, click the Gallery view icon on the toolbar, choose View→ As Gallery from Finder’s menu bar, or press Command  +4. This figure shows Gallery view. Although Gallery view is useful only for folders with documents or images, it does offer at least three cool features: The selected item (Writers Write Pen.png in the figure) appears in a preview in the top part of the window. The Preview column displays additional information about the selected item. You can quickly flip through the previews by clicking the images to the left or right of the current preview image or by pressing the left- or right-arrow keys. What’s next on the (View) menu? The Finder View menu offers several commands in addition to the four views. These commands might help you peruse your icons more easily: Use Groups: Active window only. When enabled, it subdivides the items in the active window into groups, as shown, which is grouped by Date Last Opened. Group By: This submenu offers nine options for grouping items in the active window: Name (shortcut: Command  +Control+1) Kind (shortcut: Command  +Control+2) Application (strangely, there’s no shortcut for this command) Date Last Opened (shortcut: Command  +Control+3) Date Added (shortcut: Command  +Control+4) Date Modified (shortcut: Command  +Control+5) Date Created (strangely, there’s no shortcut for this command either) Size (shortcut: Command  +Control+6) Tags (shortcut: Command  +Control+7) Clean Up: Clean Up is available only in Icon view or on the desktop when no windows are active. Choose this command to align icons to an invisible grid; you use it to keep your windows and desktop neat and tidy. (If you like this invisible grid, don’t forget that you can turn it on or off for the desktop and individual windows by using View Options.) If no windows are active, the command instead cleans up your desktop. (To deactivate all open windows, just click anywhere on the desktop or close all open windows.) If any icons are selected (highlighted) when you pull down the View menu, you see Clean Up Selection rather than Clean Up. If you choose this command, it moves only the icons that are currently selected. Clean Up By: This command combines the tidiness of the Clean Up command with the organizational yumminess of the Sort By command,. This command sorts the icons by your choice of criteria, namely: Name (shortcut: Command  +Option+1) Kind (shortcut: Command  +Option+2) Date Modified (shortcut: Command  +Option+5) Date Created (no shortcut) Size (shortcut: Command  +Option+6) Tags (shortcut: Command  +Option+7) Clean Up By is similar to the Sort By command, but unlike Sort By, Clean Up By is a one-time affair. After you’ve used it, you can once again move icons around and reorganize them any way you like. Sort By: This command rearranges the icons in the active window in your choice from among nine ways, which happen to be the same nine options (ten, if you count None) in the Sort By pop-up menu. Unlike Clean Up By, which is a one-shot command, Sort By is persistent and will continue to reorganize your icons automatically. In other words, you can’t move icons around manually in an arranged window. One last thing: The Clean Up and Clean Up By commands are available only for windows viewed as icons. The Sort By command is available in all four views and remains in effect if you switch to a different view or close the window. To stop Finder from arranging icons in a window, choose None from the View→Sort By submenu or Option + click the toolbar’s Group pop-up menu and choose None. If you’re like me, you’ve taken great pains to place icons carefully in specific places on your desktop. If so, the Clean Up By and Sort By commands will mess up your perfectly arranged desktop icons. And alas, cleaning up your desktop is still not something macOS lets you undo.

Article / Updated 03-22-2021

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. You can find other handy features on the Go menu. In case you didn’t know, the toolbar is the area at the top of all Finder windows, which (among other things) displays the window’s name. On the toolbar you’ll find icons to navigate quickly and act on selected icons. To activate a toolbar icon, click it once. You say you don’t want to see the toolbar at the top of the window? Okay! Just choose View →Hide Toolbar or use its keyboard shortcut (Command  +Option+T), and it’s gone. (If only life were always so easy!) Want it back? Choose View → Show Toolbar or use the same keyboard shortcut: Command  +Option+T. Alas, hiding the toolbar also hides the useful sidebar. If only you could choose to hide them independently… . I find this fact annoying because I use the sidebar a lot but don’t use the toolbar much. To make matters worse, View →Hide Sidebar (shortcut: Command  +Option+S) lets you hide the sidebar without hiding the toolbar. It’s been like this for a long time, and for whatever reason, you still can’t hide the toolbar while keeping the sidebar visible! Boo. Hiss. When you hide the toolbar, opening a folder spawns a new Finder window. The default, which is probably what you’re used to, is for folders to open in place, displaying their contents in a tab in the current window. The toolbar’s default icons are shown in the preceding figure. So, if you customized your toolbar by choosing View→ Customize Toolbar, yours won’t look exactly like what's shown. Here is the lowdown on the toolbar’s default icons, from left to right: Forward and Back icons: Clicking the Forward and Back icons displays the folders that you’ve viewed in this window in sequential order. It's a lot like using a web browser. Here’s an example of how the Back icon works. Say you’re in your Home folder; you click the Favorites icon, and a split-second later, you realize that you actually need something in the Home folder. Just a quick click of the Back icon and — poof! — you’re back Home. As for the Forward icon, well, it moves you in the opposite direction, through folders that you’ve visited in this window. Play around with them both; you’ll find them invaluable. The keyboard shortcuts Command  +[ for Back and Command  +] for Forward are even more useful (in my opinion) than the icons. View icons: The four View icons change the way that the window displays its contents. You have four ways to view a window: Icon, List, Column, and Gallery. Some people like columns, some like icons, and others love lists or galleries. To each her own. Play with the four Finder views to see which one works best for you. For what it’s worth, I usually prefer Column view with a dash of List view thrown in when I need a folder’s contents sorted by creation date or size. And the Gallery view is great for folders with documents because you can see the contents of many document types right in the window, as I explain shortly. Don’t forget that each view also has a handy keyboard shortcut: Command  +1 for Icon view, Command   +2 for List view, Command  +3 for Column view, and Command  +4 for Gallery view. Group By/Sort By: Click this icon to see a pop-up menu with options for grouping this window’s contents. Hold down the Option key to change the sort order (within the selected group). Note that the Group By/Sort By menu works in all four views. Share: Click here to share the selected items with others. A pop-up menu lets you choose to share via Mail, Messages, AirDrop, or Notes. Big Sur’s extensible architecture lets you add other services (such as Vimeo or LinkedIn) and apps (such as Photos and Aperture) to your Share menu. To manage these extensions, choose More from the Share pop-up menu. Alternatively, you can launch the System Preferences application, click the Extensions icon, and then click the Share Menu item on the left side of the window. Add Tags: Click here to assign one or more colored tags to selected items. Action: Click this icon to see a pop-up menu of all the context-sensitive actions you can perform on selected icons, as shown. If you see angle brackets (>>) at the right edge of the toolbar, at least one toolbar item is not visible. Click the angle brackets and a menu displays all hidden items (Group By, Share. Add Tags, and Action). Or expand the window so it’s wide enough to display all the items in the toolbar. Search: Click the little magnifying glass and the Search box appears. This is a nifty way to quickly search for files or folders. Just type a word (or even just a few letters), and in a few seconds, the window fills with a list of files that match. You can also start a search by choosing File --> Find (shortcut: Command  +F). What is an icon? What’s an icon? Glad you asked. Each Finder icon represents an item or a container on your hard drive. Containers — hard drives, USB thumb drives, folders, CDs, DVDs, shared network volumes, and so on — can contain a virtually unlimited number of application files, document files, and folders (which can contain an unlimited number of application files, document files, and folders). Icons on the dock and the sidebar of Finder windows are not the same as the Finder icons. They’re simply convenient pointers to actual Finder icons. Technically, dock and sidebar icons are aliases. Anyway, working with icons is easy: Single-click to select. Double-click to open. Click and drag to move. Release mouse button to drop. But enough talk. It’s time to see what these puppies look like. The Finder icons in the wild Although icons all work the same, they come in different kinds, shapes, and sizes. When you’ve been around the Mac for a while, you develop a sixth sense about icons and can guess what an unfamiliar icon contains just by looking at it. Here are the major icon types: Application icons are programs — the software you use to accomplish tasks on your Mac. Mail, Safari, and Calendar are applications. So are Microsoft Word and Adobe Photoshop. Application icons come in a variety of shapes. For example, application icons are often square-ish, diamond-shaped, rectangular, or just oddly shaped. The first row of icons displays application icons of various shapes. Document icons are files created by applications. Letters created with TextEdit are documents. This article began life as a document created in Microsoft Word. And spreadsheet, PDF, video, image, and song files are all documents. Document icons are often reminiscent of a piece of paper, as shown in the second row of icons. If your document icons are generic, like the first three icons in the second row of the following figure, but you’d prefer icons that reflect their contents, like the last three icons in the second row, open View Options or use the Command  +J shortcut, and then select the Show Icon Preview check box. Folder and disk icons are the Mac’s organizational containers. You can put icons — and the applications or documents they stand for — in folders or disks. You can put folders in disks or in other folders, but you can’t put a disk inside another disk. Folders look like, well, manila folders (what a concept) and can contain just about any other icon. You use folders to organize your files and applications on your hard drive. You can have as many folders as you want, so don’t be afraid to create new ones. The thought behind the whole folders thing is pretty obvious: If your hard drive is a filing cabinet, folders are its drawers and folders (duh!). The third row in the following figure shows some typical folder icons. And while disks behave pretty much like folders, their icons often look like disks, as shown in the last row of the figure. Alias icons are wonderful — no, make that fabulous — organizational tools. If you’re looking for details about how to organize your icons in folders, move them around, delete them, and so on, hang in there.

Article / Updated 03-22-2021

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. If you’re not familiar with Finder and its desktop, here are a few tips that will come in handy as you become familiar with the icons that hang out there: Icons on the desktop behave the same as icons in a window. You move them and copy them just as you would icons in a window. The only difference is that icons on the desktop aren’t in a window. Because they’re on the desktop, they’re more convenient to use. The first icon you need to get to know is the icon for your startup disk (a hard drive or SSD). You used to be able to find it on the top-right side of the desktop, as mine is in the figure. Yours probably has the name Macintosh HD unless you’ve renamed it. (I renamed mine Big Sur in the figure.) You can see how selected and deselected hard or solid-state drive icons look in the following figure, too. Big Sur doesn't display the startup disk’s icon on the desktop by default. So, if you don’t see your startup (boot) disk’s icon on the desktop but you’d like to, select the check box for hard drives in Finder Preferences. Other disc or hard drive icons appear on the desktop by default. When you insert a CD or DVD or connect an external hard drive or a thumb drive, the disc or drive icon does appear on the desktop near the top-right corner. This feature is enabled by default; if yours isn’t enabled, just open Finder Preferences and select its check box. You can move an item to the desktop to make it easier to find. Simply click any icon in any window and then, without releasing the mouse button, drag it out of the window and onto the desktop. Then release the mouse button. This will move the icon from wherever it was to the desktop. You can now drag the icon elsewhere on the desktop if necessary. If you drag an item from an external volume to any location on your startup disk (including the desktop), the item is copied, not moved. Put another way, the item is moved if it’s on the same disk or volume, and copied if it’s on another disk or volume. Volume is the generic term for any storage container — a hard drive, solid-state drive, CD, DVD, disk image, or remote disk — that appears in the sidebar’s Locations section. At the bottom of the Finder window are two optional bars. The lower of the two is called the status bar; it tells you how many items are in each window and, if any are selected, how many you’ve selected out of the total, as well as how much space is available on the hard drive containing this window. And just above the status bar is the path bar, which shows the path from the top level of your hard drive to the selected file (which is Sample File on Desktop.jpg). You can show or hide the status bar by choosing View→ Hide/Show Status Bar and show or hide the path bar by choosing View →Hide/Show Path Bar. Finally, when the toolbar is hidden, the status bar moves to the top of the window (the path bar remains at the bottom of the window no matter what).

Article / Updated 03-22-2021

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. It’s now called Screenshot and its functionality is woven into the fabric of Big Sur itself. Furthermore, Screenshot has been updated in several useful ways since it was known as Grab. I’ll tell you about all the newish features and where to find them in just a moment. But I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out that all of your old favorite keyboard shortcuts for screen capture—the ones you’ve known and loved on the Mac since time immemorial—still work the same as always: To capture the entire screen: Press Command  +Shift+3. There is no Step 2. To capture part of the screen: Press Command  +Shift+4. Move the pointer (crosshair icon) to where you want to start the screenshot. Press the mouse or trackpad button, then drag over the area you want to capture. Release the mouse or trackpad button to capture the selected area. To cancel, press Esc before you release the mouse button. To capture a window or the menu bar: Press Command  +Shift+4 and then press the spacebar. Move the pointer (camera icon) over the area you wish to capture; when it is highlighted, click to capture the selected item. To cancel, press Esc before you click. To capture a menu and its title: Open the menu to display the menu commands. Press Command  +Shift+4. Drag the pointer (crosshair icon) over the entire menu. If you want to exclude the menu’s title, press Command  +Shift+4, press the spacebar, move the pointer (camera icon) over the menu to highlight it, then click. Big Sur screen-shooting 101 In addition to the old, familiar screenshot shortcuts, Big Sur has another keyboard shortcut that includes everything you can do using the other shortcuts and more. That fabulous shortcut is Command  +Shift+5, and you’d be wise to memorize it because, like the other two screenshot keyboard shortcuts, it doesn’t appear in any menu or application. If you’re going to memorize only one shortcut for screen captures, it should be Command  +Shift+5, which will open the floating palette of screen-shooting options shown. To capture your screen as a still image, first click the appropriate icon: Capture Entire Screen, Capture Selected Window, or Capture Selected Portion. When everything is the way you want it, press Enter (or Return) on your keyboard. What happens next, before the screenshot appears on your desktop (by default), is a relatively new thing (introduced in macOS Mojave). That new thing is a floating thumbnail that appears in the lower-right corner of your screen. If you do nothing, the floating thumbnail will disappear after a few seconds and the screenshot will appear on the desktop by default. But click the floating thumbnail before it goes away and a wonderful new thing happens: A window appears with a bevy of useful tools for modifying images. These tools are known as Markup — a systemwide set of tools for annotating PDF and image files. The tools aren’t restricted to the Mail app — you’ll also find them in the Preview app, Finder’s Quick Look windows, in the Preview pane of Finder windows (if enabled), and in Finder shortcut menus. These same tools also appear if you click the floating thumbnail of a screenshot before it disappears. These powerful editing tools enable you to annotate screenshots in ways never before possible without a third-party graphics app. Now you can easily add circles, boxes, arrows, and text to your screenshots, image files, and PDFs without even launching an app. When you’ve finished annotating and editing your screenshot, click Done in the upper-left corner of the window. Big Sur screen-shooting options If you want to change the location where your screenshots are saved, click the Options menu, which is available after you press Command +Shift+5. The Options menu also allows you to select a timer of None (the default), five seconds, or ten seconds. Finally, the Options menu lets you enable or disable the floating thumbnail, show or hide the mouse pointer, and remember the last selection you made (for your next screenshot). Another set of options appears when you right- or Control-click the floating thumbnail, as shown. Note that selecting Markup is the same as clicking the floating thumbnail — it opens the Markup window so you can annotate your screenshot. Big Sur screen recording Screen recording — movies of your Mac (or iDevice) screens — has been around for a few years on the Mac, but it’s been buried in the QuickTime Player app. (If you want to make a movie of your iDevice screen, you’ll still need to use QuickTime Player.) Anyway, to make a movie of all or part of your Mac screen, begin by pressing Command +Shift+5. Then click either the Record Entire Screen or Record Selected Portion. If you click Record Entire Screen, the recording begins immediately; if you click Record Selected Portion, you need to drag the onscreen handles to select the area you want to record, and then click the Record icon. To end the recording, click the Stop Recording icon in the menu bar, as shown. When the floating thumbnail appears in the lower-right corner of your screen, you can right- or Control-click it for additional options, or do nothing to have the screen recording saved in your default location.

Article / Updated 03-22-2021

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. You can also change or mute the volume with the designated volume and mute keys found on most Apple keyboards. Select the Mute check box to turn off all sound. Select the Show Volume in Menu Bar check box to add a volume control menu to your menu bar. A shortcut to the Sound System Preferences pane is to press Option while pressing any of the volume keys (usually the F11 and F12 keys on newer laptops and keyboards and F4 and F5 keys on older ones). Change sound effects On the Sound Effects tab, choose an alert (beep) sound by clicking its name; set its volume by using the Alert Volume slider control. Finally, a long-overdue feature arrived in Big Sur. If your Mac can play a startup sound, you can enable or disable that sound with the Play Sound on the Startup check box. YEA! You can also specify the output device through which sound effects play (if you have more than one device) by choosing it from the Play Sound Effects Through pop-up menu. The Play User Interface Sound Effects check box turns on sound effects for actions, such as dragging a file to the Trash. The Play Feedback when Volume Is Changed check box tells your Mac to beep once for each key press when you increase or decrease volume. Choose output and input options If you have more than one sound-output device (in addition to the built-in speakers), you can choose it on the Outputs tab. The Balance slider makes one stereo speaker — left or right — louder than the other. If you have more than one sound-input device (in addition to the built-in microphone on many Macs or an iSight camera, which contains its own mic), you can choose it on the Inputs tab. The Input Volume slider controls the Input Level (how loud input from that device will be), which is displayed as a row of blue dots. If the dots light up all the way to the right side, your input volume is too loud. Ideally, the input level should light up with about three-fourths of the little blue dots — and no more. Some input sources (microphones) don’t let you adjust their level in the Sound System Preferences pane. Finally, you can choose to have Big Sur flash the screen when an alert sound occurs, or have stereo recordings play back in mono, or both by enabling these options in the Audio tab of the Accessibility System Preferences pane.

Article / Updated 03-22-2021

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. Icons in the dock and Launchpad are odd ducks; you activate them with a single click. Most other Finder icons are selected (highlighted) when you single-click and opened only when you double-click them. So, dock icons (and their Launchpad brethren) are kind of like links on a web page; you need only a single click to open them. Here’s the rundown on what happens when you click dock icons: If it’s an application icon, the application opens and becomes active. If the application is already open, it becomes active, which brings its menu and all its windows to the front. If it’s a document icon, that document opens in its appropriate application, which becomes the active application. If that application is already open, it becomes the active application with this document in the front. If the item is an application or document and is already open when you click its dock icon, the app or document becomes active. If it’s a folder icon or disk icon, a stack, fan, or grid with its contents appears so you can choose an item. If you choose Show in Finder from this menu, the folder’s window opens in Finder. The default icons of the dock By default, the dock contains a number of commonly used macOS applications, and you can also store your own applications, files, or folders there. But first, look at the items you find in a standard macOS Big Sur dock. If they aren’t familiar to you, they certainly will be as you get to know Big Sur. I admit that I can’t do justice to all the programs that come with macOS Big Sur that aren’t, strictly speaking, part of the operating system (OS). Alas, some of the programs in the default dock are ones you won’t be seeing much more of. But I’d hate to leave you wondering what all those icons in the dock are, so the following list gives you a brief description of each default dock icon (moving from left to right onscreen). Finder: The always running application that manages the desktop, files, folders, disks, and more Launchpad: A display of all your applications on a grid that looks suspiciously like an iPad or iPhone Safari: A web browser Mail: An email program FaceTime: A video chat program Messages: A program for sending and receiving text and multimedia messages as well as transferring files to and from and remotely controlling other Macs Maps: A program with maps and driving directions Photos: A program for managing and editing photographs Contacts A contact manager application Calendar: A calendar program for managing appointments and events Reminders: A to-do list and reminder application Notes: A program for making notes Music: An audio player and store Podcasts: A podcast player TV: A video player and store News: A news reader Mac App Store: Where you buy Mac apps from Apple System Preferences: An application to configure the way many aspects of your Mac work Divider: The line that separates apps on the left and documents or folders on the right Downloads folder: A folder that contains files downloaded by Safari or Mail Trash: Where you drag files and folders to delete them, or drag removable media to eject it To get a quick look at the name of a dock icon, just move (hover) your pointer over any item in the dock. Like magic, that item’s name appears above it (like Safari). It’s likely that your dock won’t look exactly like the one shown. If you added icons to your dock before you upgraded to Big Sur, for example, you’ll see those icons. If you have Apple apps such as iMovie, GarageBand, Pages, Numbers, or Keynote installed, or you get a new Mac with Big Sur preinstalled, you may see their icons in your dock. And if you’ve deleted one of the default icons shown in the preceding figure from your dock under a previous version of macOS, it won’t come back when you upgrade to Big Sur. Trash talkin’ The Trash is a special container where you put the icons you no longer want to hang around on your hard drive(s). Got four copies of a document named Letter to the Editor re: Bird Waste Issue on your hard drive? Drag three of them to the Trash. Tired of tripping over old PDF and DMG files you’ve downloaded but no longer need? Drag them to the Trash, too. To put something in the Trash, just drag its icon onto the Trash icon in the dock and it will move into the Trash. As with other icons, when the Trash icon is highlighted you know that you’ve connected with the Trash while dragging. And as with other dock icons, the Trash icon’s name appears when you move the cursor over the icon. Two other ways to put items into the Trash are to select the items you want to dispose of and then choose File→ Move to Trash or press Command  +Delete (Command  +Backspace on some keyboards). If you accidentally move something to the Trash and want it back right now, you can magically put it back where it came from in two ways: Way #1 Choose Edit → Undo or press Command +Z. Finder usually remembers more than one action for Undo and can often undo the last few things you did in Finder. That’s the good news. The bad news is that it redoes things in reverse order, so don’t wait too long. If you perform several other file-related activities in Finder, you’ll have to Undo all those actions before you can Undo your accidental Move to Trash. In other words, as soon as you create or rename a folder, move a file from one place to another, drag a different file to the Trash, create an alias, or almost anything that affects a file or folder, choosing Edit → Undo or pressing Command +Z will undo that action first. You’ll find that some Finder actions — most of the items in the View menu, for example — don’t affect Undo. So, if you drag a file to the Trash and then switch views, Undo will still un-trash the file. Even if you do something and can’t use Undo, files you drag to the Trash aren’t deleted immediately. You know how the garbage in the can on the street curb sits there until the sanitation engineers come by and pick it up each Thursday? Big Sur’s Trash works the same way, but without the smell. Items sit in the Trash, waiting for a sanitation engineer (you) to come along and empty it. Way #2 So, if you miss the window of opportunity to use the Undo command, don’t worry; you can still retrieve the file from the Trash: To open the Trash and see what’s in there, just click its icon on the dock. A Finder window called Trash opens, showing you the files it contains (namely, files and folders put in the Trash since the last time it was emptied). To retrieve an item that’s already in the Trash, drag it back out, either onto the desktop or back into the folder where it belongs. Or use the secret keyboard shortcut: Select the item(s) in the Trash that you want to retrieve and press Command  +Delete. This technique has the added benefit of magically transporting the files or folders you select from the Trash back into the folder from which they came. And, unlike Undo, the secret keyboard shortcut will work on a file or folder at any time, or at least until the next time you empty the Trash. Try it — it’s sweet. And if that doesn’t work, you can right-click or Control-click a file and choose Put Back from the contextual menu. To empty the Trash, choose Finder →Empty Trash or press Shift+Command  +Delete. If the Trash window is open and files are in the Trash, you see an Empty button just below its toolbar on the right. Clicking the button, of course, also empties the Trash. You can also empty the Trash from the dock by positioning the pointer on the Trash icon and right-clicking (or Control-clicking) the Trash icon. The Empty Trash menu item pops up like magic. Move the pointer over Empty Trash to select it and then release the mouse button. Think twice before you invoke the Empty Trash command. After you empty the Trash, the files that it contained are pretty much gone forever, or at least gone from your hard drive. There is no Undo for Empty Trash. So my advice is: back up your hard drive at least once (several times is better). After you get proficient at backups, chances improve greatly that even though the files are technically gone forever from your hard drive, you can get them back if you really want to (from your backups). The Trash icon shows you when it has files waiting for you there; as in real life, Trash that contains files or folders looks like it’s full of crumpled paper. Conversely, when your Trash is empty, the Trash icon looks, well, empty. Finally, although you can’t open a file that’s in the Trash, you can select it and use Quick Look (shortcut: Command +Y) to see its contents before you decide to use Empty Trash and permanently delete it. And that’s pretty much all there is to know about the Trash. Application menus on the dock Single-clicking an application icon on the dock launches that application — or, if the application is already open, switches you to that application and brings forward all open windows in that application. But application icons on the dock — such as Calendar, Safari, and Music — also hide menus containing some handy commands. (Folder icons in the dock have a different but no less handy menu, which I discuss in a moment.) You can make menus for applications on the dock appear in two ways: Press on the icon and continue to hold down the mouse button. Right-click or Control-click. If you use a trackpad or a Magic Mouse, a two-finger tap should do the trick. Do any of the preceding and you’ll see a menu for that dock icon, as shown in the figure for the App Store icon. The Options submenu offers three choices: Remove from Dock: Removes that application’s icon from the dock (waiting until after you quit the application if it’s running). If an application is running and its icon isn’t already in the dock, you’ll see Add to Dock rather than Remove from Dock. Open at Login: Launches this application automatically every time you log in to this user account. This is handy for apps you want to keep running all the time, such as Mail or Safari. Show in Finder: Opens the enclosing folder (in this instance, that would be the Applications folder) and selects the application’s icon. The other options in the menu follow: Show Recents (if available): Displays recently used windows for this app if there are any. Open: Launches the application or opens the folder. So, there you have it: The default Options menu for applications, which is what you’ll see for most applications when they aren’t open. One last thing: When you right-click/Control-click the dock icon for an application that’s currently running (look for the little dot below its icon), you may see different menus, like the ones shown (clockwise from top left: Safari, Preview, System Preferences, TextEdit, and Music). As you can see, some open applications provide useful program-specific commands or options. Music has one of my favorite dock menus, letting me control my music from the dock with options such as Play/Pause, Next or Previous Track, Repeat, and Shuffle. Other programs, including Preview and Safari, offer you a list of open windows with a check mark to indicate the active window or diamonds (as shown) to indicate windows minimized to the dock. Finally, the items above the list of open windows for TextEdit are recently used documents. Dock icon body language As you use the dock or when you’re just doing regular stuff on your Mac, the dock icons like to communicate with you. They can’t talk, so they have a few moves and symbols that indicate things you might want to know. The following figure and the table should make those moves and symbols crystal clear. What Dock Icons Are Telling You Icon Movement or Symbol What It Means The icon moves up and out of its place in the dock for a moment. You single-clicked a dock icon, and it’s letting you know that you activated it. The icon does a little bouncy dance when that program is open but isn’t active (that is, the menu bar isn’t showing, and it isn’t the frontmost program). The program desires your attention; give its icon a click to find out what it wants. A dot appears below its dock icon. This application is open. An icon that isn’t ordinarily in the dock magically appears. You see a temporary dock icon for every program that’s currently open until you quit that application. The icon appears because you’ve opened something. When you quit, its icon magically disappears. Open files from the dock One useful function of the dock is that you can use it to open an application quickly and easily. The following tips explain several handy ways to open what you need from the dock: You can drag a document icon onto an application’s dock icon. If the application knows how to handle that type of document, its dock icon is highlighted, and the document opens in that application. If the application can’t handle that particular type of document, the dock icon isn’t highlighted, and you can’t drop the document onto it. I’m getting ahead of myself here, but if the application can’t handle a document, try opening the document this way: Select the document icon and choose File --> Open With, or right-click/Control-click the document icon and use the Open With menu to choose the application you want to open the document with. And if you hold down the Option key, the Open With command changes to Always Open With, which enables you to change the default application that opens this document permanently. You can find the original icon of any item you see in the dock by choosing Show in Finder from its dock menu. This trick opens the window containing the item’s actual icon and thoughtfully selects that icon for you.

Article / Updated 03-22-2021

This article is for speed demons only. At some time in their Mac lives, most users have wished that their machines would work faster—even if their Macs have multiple cores or processors. I can’t help you make your processors any faster, but here’s where I cover some ways to make your Mac at least seem faster. Better still, at least some of these tips won’t cost you one red cent. Use those keyboard shortcuts Keyboard shortcuts (see the table for a nice little list of the most useful ones) can make navigating your Mac a much faster experience compared with constantly using the mouse, offering these benefits: If you use keyboard shortcuts, your hands stay focused on the keyboard, reducing the amount of time that you remove your hand from the keyboard to fiddle with the mouse or trackpad. If you memorize keyboard shortcuts with your head, your fingers will memorize them, too. The more keyboard shortcuts you use, the faster you can do what you’re doing. Great Keyboard Shortcuts Keyboard Shortcut Name What It Does Command+O Open Opens the selected item Command +. (period) Cancel Cancels the current operation in many programs, including Finder. The Esc key often does the same thing as Cancel Command +P Print Brings up a dialog that enables you to print the active window’s contents Command +X Cut Cuts whatever you select and places it on the Clipboard Command +C Copy Copies whatever you select and places it on the Clipboard Command +V Paste Pastes the contents of the Clipboard at your cursor's location Command +F Find Displays a Search window in Finder; displays a Find dialog in most other programs Command +A Select All Selects the entire contents of the active window in many programs, including Finder Command +Z Undo Undoes the last thing you did in many programs, including Finder Command+Shift+Z Redo Redoes the last thing you undid in many programs, including Finder Command +Shift+? Help Displays the Mac Help window in Finder; usually the shortcut to summon Help in other programs Command +Q Quit Perhaps the most useful keyboard shortcut of all — it quits the current application (but not Finder because it's always running) Command +Shift+Q Log Out Logs out the current user; the login window appears onscreen until a user logs in Command +Delete Move to Trash Moves the selected item to the Trash Command +Shift+Delete Empty Trash Empties the Trash Trust me when I say that using the keyboard shortcuts for commands you use often can save you a ton of effort and hours upon hours of time. Make a list of keyboard shortcuts you want to memorize, and tape it to your monitor until your brain and fingers memorize them. Improve your typing skills One way to make your Mac seem faster is to move your fingers faster. The quicker you finish a task, the quicker you’re on to something else. Keyboard shortcuts are nifty tools, but improving your typing speed and accuracy will save you even more time. As a bonus, the more your typing skills improve, the less time you’ll spend correcting errors. So you’ll finish everything even faster! The speed and accuracy that you gain have another bonus: When you’re a touch typist, your fingers fly even faster when you use those nifty keyboard shortcuts. The best and easiest way I know to improve your keyboarding skills is a typing training app for your Mac such as Ten Thumbs Typing Tutor ($25.95), any of the myriad typing-instruction apps in the Mac App Store (search for typing), or a free typing-instruction website such as TypingTest. Change your resolution A setting that you can change to potentially improve your Mac’s performance is the resolution of your monitor. Most modern monitors and video cards (or onboard video circuitry, depending on which Mac model you use) can display multiple degrees of screen resolution. You change your monitor’s display resolution in the Displays System Preferences pane. First, click the Display tab and then click the Scaled button, which makes a list of resolutions appear, as shown. Select the resolution you want to try from the list below the Scaled button. You see many more items on the screen at native resolution, but you can make everything bigger by switching to lower resolutions. Here’s the deal on display resolution: The first number is the number of pixels (color dots) that run horizontally, and the second number is the number of lines running vertically. It used to be that fewer pixels refreshed faster. But with LCD and LED (flat-panel) monitors and notebooks, this usually isn’t true — or if it is true, it’s almost unnoticeable. Furthermore, because you can see more onscreen at higher resolutions, a higher resolution reduces the amount of scrolling that you have to do and lets you have more open windows on the screen. Finally, the highest resolution is almost always the native resolution of that display, which means it will usually look the sharpest. So you could just as easily say that higher resolutions can speed up your Mac experience as well. On the other hand, if you can’t discern icons in toolbars and other program components, using a lower resolution may actually enhance your work speed. Choose a resolution based on what looks best and works best for you. If things on the screen are too big or too small at your current resolution, try a higher or lower resolution until you find one that feels “just right.” And, if you have a Retina display, try all available resolutions to see which you prefer. The highest resolution on a Retina display will make everything on the screen appear very, very small, which may or may not be desirable. Finally, check out the Accessibility System Preferences pane’s Zoom tab, where you can enable keyboard shortcuts to zoom in and out instantly, and Hover Text, a highly configurable mode that enlarges only what’s under your pointer. Purchase a faster Mac Apple keeps putting out faster and faster Macs at lower and lower prices, and all current Macs now ship with at least 8GB of RAM. Although 4GB may be enough RAM to run Big Sur, if you like to keep more than one or two apps running all the time, it’s not enough to run it at its best. Check out the latest iMacs and Mac minis — they’re excellent values. Or if you crave portability, MacBook Air, and MacBook Pro models are rocking good computers and have never been less expensive. You might even consider a used Mac that’s faster than yours. eBay has hundreds of used Macs up for auction at any given time. Shopping on eBay might just get you a better Mac at an outstanding price. Or try Craigslist if you prefer to see and touch the Mac before you commit. Another excellent option is to visit the Apple website’s refurbished and clearance section. You can frequently save hundreds of dollars by purchasing a slightly used Mac that has been refurbished to factory specifications by Apple. Another advantage to Apple refurbs is that they come with an Apple warranty. If you’re on a tight budget, definitely check it out. I always buy refurbished products when I can. In fact, it’s been over a decade since I bought any (major) Apple product for list price when a refurbished one was available for less. And I always buy as much RAM and the fastest processor I can afford because I think both help to extend the lifespan of the Mac. Add RAM You get a lot of bang for your buck when you upgrade your Mac’s RAM. Get an additional 4GB, 8GB, or even 16GB; you can never have too much. Your Mac will run better with at least 8GB of RAM, which will cost you less than $100 in most cases and can be installed by anyone. Yes, anyone — the instructions are right there in your User Guide booklet, or you can find them at the Apple Technical Support pages (search for RAM upgrade and your Mac model). Unless, that is, you own one of the many late-model Macs that aren’t user-upgradeable. These models are exceedingly difficult to open, and Apple frowns upon users opening some models these days. Plus, some Macs have RAM soldered to the motherboard and can’t be upgraded at all. If your Mac is upgradeable and you're uncomfortable with upgrading RAM yourself, opt for the services of an authorized, certified Mac cracker-opener. The bottom line is that it’s best to order your Mac with as much RAM as you can afford in the first place. It will cost you a little more up front, but it’s worth it. Add a second display For almost as long as I’ve been using a Mac, I’ve used one with two displays. Almost all Macs today support a second monitor, and many Macs support a third and fourth monitor. In my opinion, screen real estate is among the biggest productivity enhancers you can add — right up there with typing faster. Screen real estate is the holy grail when working in multi-windowed or multi-paletted apps such as Photoshop, Final Cut Pro, and Logic Pro X. Two monitors are also great when you’re working with two or more programs at the same time. With sufficient screen real estate, you can arrange all the windows and palettes for all programs in the way that’s most expedient to the way you work. You don’t need an expensive 4K or 5K monitor. For a couple of hundred bucks, you can find a second display that will double your screen real estate. Or, if you have an iPad of recent vintage, read the next discussion. Finally, in the words of my esteemed tech editor Ryan, “Why stop at two?” Because many Macs support three or more displays, all you need are the proper cables and available ports. Use your iPad as a second display Catalina introduced a new feature known as Sidecar, which allows you to use a late-model iPad as a second screen for your late-model Mac. The official list of supported hardware was unavailable at press time but should be available by the time you read this (search for Sidecar). Or, just connect your iPad to your Mac with the USB cable and then open System Preferences. If you see an icon named Sidecar, your gear is new enough; if you don’t, it’s not. If you have an iPad handy, give it a try; if your Mac and iPad are up to the task, enable the Show Sidebar check box. If applicable, enable the Show TouchBar and Enable Double Tap on Apple Pencil check boxes as well. Then use the Displays System Preferences pane to arrange the iPad’s position relative to your other screen (or screens) — and you’re done. Hope you enjoy all that extra screen real estate as much as I do! Here’s a bonus tip: Some apps (Logic Pro X and MIMO Live come to mind) offer remote control apps so you can control them with your iPad (or iPhone)! Upgrade to a solid-state drive (SSD) The latest and greatest storage device to appear is the solid-state drive (SSD). It uses flash memory in place of a mechanical hard drive’s spinning platters, which means, among other things, that it has no moving parts. Another benefit is that an SSD performs most operations at up to twice the speed of mechanical drives. The bad news is that an SSD is more expensive — three or more times the price per gigabyte — of a mechanical hard drive or a hybrid drive with the same capacity. That said, most users report that it’s the best money they ever spent on an upgrade. I put the biggest one I could afford (1TB) in my MacBook Pro and I’ll never go back to booting from a hard disk. My MacBook Air’s internal SSD died halfway through writing macOS Catalina For Dummies. Because that’s the Mac I use for screen shots, I needed the fastest and easiest fix, so I bought a 500GB external USB 3 SSD (a Samsung T5) on sale at Fry’s Electronics for $90. I replaced an SSD with another SSD, but for those of you still booting from a hard disk, for under $100 you can speed up your Mac in a major way. Honestly, folks, if you’re only going to do one thing to make your old Mac faster, this is what you should do: Replace your hard drive with an SSD. If your Mac’s SSD can’t be upgraded, consider an external SSD as your boot disk (which is still what I use with my MacBook Air). After switching to an SSD startup drive — internal or external — your old Mac will feel almost new again. Get more storage Your Mac will run slower and slower as its startup disk gets fuller and fuller. If you can’t afford to replace your startup disk with a bigger SSD or purchase a bigger external SSD to use as a boot disk, another option is to get a big external hard disk (much less expensive per megabyte than an SSD) and move some of your data off your startup disk and onto the external disk. You can connect external hard disks (or SSDs) via USB 3 or Thunderbolt (or FireWire on older Macs). All three can be used to connect devices that require high-speed communication with your Mac — hard drives, SSDs, CD/DVD burners, scanners, camcorders, and such. Thunderbolt is today’s speed champ, but FireWire is often the fastest bus that an older Mac will support natively. The most recent Mac models that had FireWire used the type called FireWire 800, which has a different type of connector than does FireWire 400, which was available on older Macs. If you get a device that has only FireWire 400, and your Mac has only FireWire 800 (or vice versa), everything will work as long as you get a FireWire 400–to–FireWire 800 adapter cable, available at the Apple Store and many other places. Thunderbolt, which is available on Mac models introduced since 2012, is the fastest bus around by far. That said, there are still relatively few Thunderbolt peripherals at this writing. Furthermore, the Thunderbolt devices that are out there are somewhat more expensive than their USB 3 counterparts. Although Thunderbolt shows tons of promise, at present, Thunderbolt hard drives are significantly more expensive than either FireWire or USB 3 drives. And just to confuse things, all Macs since 2014 use USB 3 (Universal Serial Bus 3), which is many times faster than the previous generations of USB (and FireWire). If you’re buying an external USB drive, get one with USB 3. It shouldn’t be much more expensive than a USB 2 drive and will be much faster. If your Mac has USB 3 ports, you’ll be unhappy with USB 2 speeds. Even if your Mac doesn’t have USB 3 ports, you should get a USB 3 drive. It’ll run at the same speed as a USB 2 drive on your current Mac — and will run a lot faster on your new Mac when you upgrade. If you’re not sure what generation of USB your Mac has, choose Apple --> About This Mac, click the System Report button to launch the System Information application, and then click USB in the hardware list on the left. The good news is that whatever connection you choose for your new disk — USB 2, USB 3, Thunderbolt, FireWire 400 or 800 — you can usually just plug it in and start using it. Unless the disk is preformatted for a PC and requires reformatting, there’s nothing more you have to do! Speaking of which, don’t buy an external drive that's advertised as “for the Mac” or “formatted for the Mac.” You can often save $20 or more by purchasing the generic (read: Windows) version of the disk and reformatting it as HFS+ or APFS with Disk Utility. Almost every Mac sold today has at least one USB-C port, which is a kind of hybrid USB/Thunderbolt port that doesn't appear on Macs prior to 2018. To make things even more confusing, the same USB-C port also supports Thunderbolt 3 (the latest and greatest connection technology for storage and other devices requiring fast transfer speeds) and recharging. Because the port is incompatible with every other type of USB cable ever made, you’ll probably need a USB-C adapter (or USB-C hub or dock) to connect your USB devices to your new computer’s USB-C/Thunderbolt port. Whew. Now that you know all you need to know about your new external disk, the last step is to move some data from your startup disk to the new external disk. So copy the files or folders (your large files and folders are likely contained in your Pictures, Music, and Documents folders) to the new external disk; confirm that the files have been copied properly; make sure you have a backup, just in case; and then delete the files from your startup disk. Subscribe to my free newsletter Around once a month, I send out a short newsletter to my Working Smarter Insiders email list. In it, I offer hints, tips, techniques, humor, and advice on using your Mac better, faster, and more elegantly. Becoming an insider is free. I guarantee you’re going to like it, but if for some reason you don't, you can unsubscribe (which is also free).