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Make Your Own Keyboard Shortcuts on the Mac

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Power users like keyboard shortcuts because it’s faster to press a couple of keys than to navigate lengthy menus. If you have trouble remembering shortcuts, check out KeyCue, which displays a concise table of all currently available shortcuts. But what about menu items that lack shortcuts? Make your own in System Preferences > Keyboard > Shortcuts > App Shortcuts. Click the + button, choose an app from the Application menu, fill in the Menu Title field, click the Keyboard Shortcut field, press your desired key combination, and click Add. You can even make shortcuts for Safari bookmarks, since they appear in the Bookmarks menu. If a shortcut doesn’t work, make sure you typed its menu title exactly right, including any punctuation like three periods for an ellipsis. To edit an item, double-click its title or shortcut in the list. If you no longer want an item, select it and click the – button.

(Featured image by Ilya Pavlov on Unsplash)

Make Your Mac More Useful by Managing Menu Bar Icons

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If your Mac is anything like ours, it’s suffering from an infestation of menu bar icons. Sure, the Wi-Fi menu is essential, and many others can be helpful. But if you have too many, or they’re in random order, finding one when you need it can be frustrating. You can employ two techniques to increase the accessibility of your menu bar icons:

  • Delete any Apple-provided status icon you don’t use by holding down the Command key and dragging it off the menu bar. (To put it back, select the “Show icon-name status in menu bar” checkbox in the associated System Preference pane.) Command-dragging to delete won’t work for most apps with a menu bar icon; for them, look for a preference in the app itself.
  • Rearrange the menu bar icons in an order that makes sense to you by Command-dragging them around. You can’t move the Notification Center icon or put anything to its right, but every other icon is movable.

(Featured image based on an original by Patrick Ward on Unsplash)

The Fastest Way to Change Wi-Fi Networks in iOS 13

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Historically, picking a new Wi-Fi network has required you to open the Settings app and tap Wi-Fi, forcing you to unlock your iPhone or switch away from what you were doing. In iOS 13, however, Apple added a better way to connect to a new Wi-Fi network. Open Control Center (swipe down from the upper-right corner on an iPhone X or later or an iPad; or up from the bottom on an earlier iPhone), press and hold on the network settings card in the upper-left corner to expand it, and then press and hold on the Wi-Fi icon to reveal a list of Wi-Fi networks. Tap one to switch to it.

(Featured image by Paul Hanaoka on Unsplash)

Did You Know You Can Save and Share Voicemail Files from Your iPhone?

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For many of us, voicemail replaced answering machines, so we don’t think of voicemail messages as being something we can save or share. But on the iPhone, every voicemail message is just an audio file. If you want to retain a message for posterity or share one with a friend or colleague, you can do that easily. While viewing a voicemail message, tap the share icon to bring up an activity sheet. In it, you can save the file to any app that can handle audio files, or share the file with AirDrop, Messages, Mail, or the like.

(Featured image by Travis Zimmerman from Pixabay)

Use Your Apple Watch to Unlock Your Mac, and Apps in Catalina

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If you’ve resisted requiring a password on your Mac after it wakes up or comes out of the screen saver because it’s too much work to enter repeatedly, an Apple Watch can make authentication much easier. In previous versions of macOS, just wearing an unlocked Apple Watch is enough to enter your Mac’s password; in Catalina, the Apple Watch can also enter your password when prompted by apps. First, make sure your Apple Watch has a passcode (in Watch > Passcode), is on your wrist, and is unlocked. Then, in System Preferences > Security & Privacy > General, select “Use your Apple Watch to unlock apps and your Mac.” From then on, most of the time your Mac or an app wants your password, your Apple Watch will provide it automatically. (This feature requires that the Mac dates from mid-2013 or later, that all devices use the same iCloud account, and that the Apple ID uses two-factor authentication instead of two-step verification.)

(Featured image based on an original by Christin Hume on Unsplash)

The iPhone 11 Camera App’s Shutter Button Works Differently—Here’s How

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With the iPhone 11, iPhone 11 Pro, and iPhone 11 Pro Max, Apple changed the way the Camera app’s shutter button works in ways that could cause confusion. Tapping it once still takes a single still photo, but if you press and hold on the shutter button, it now captures a quick video. (Previously, pressing and holding on the button took photos in burst mode; to do that on the iPhone 11 models, slide the shutter button to the left.) Once you’ve started taking a quick video, slide your finger to the right to lock recording, so you don’t have to keep holding the button down. Tap the white shutter button to take a still image while recording; tap the red record button to stop recording. For even easier quick video recording, press and hold either of the volume buttons; a single press still takes a photo. Note that quick videos always record with mono sound and at a resolution of 1920-by-1440; for stereo sound and the resolution set in Settings > Camera, use the Camera app’s Video mode.

(Featured image by Agê Barros on Unsplash)

Need to Import Photos from a non-iPhone or Want to Keep Images out of Photos?

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Most Mac users rely on iPhones and iPads to take photos and store them in the Photos app, which happens automatically for those who use Apple’s iCloud Photos syncing service. But what if you want to import photos from a device other than an iPhone or iPad—say a Samsung smartphone running Android—and what if you don’t want those images in Photos? Turn to Apple’s Image Capture app, which has shipped with macOS for ages and is stored in your Applications folder’s Utilities folder. To use it, connect your device to your Mac via USB, launch Image Capture, and click the device in the sidebar. Choose a destination from the Import To pop-up menu, and then either select some photos and click Import or click the Import All button to get everything.

(Featured image modified slightly from an original by Al ghazali on Unsplash)

Did You Know You Can Drag the Scroll Bar in iOS 13?

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In previous versions of iOS, a scroll bar would appear on the right edge of the screen while you were swiping through a long Web page, email message, or document. But the scroller was merely an indicator of where in the page you were and how much content there was (the bigger the scroller, the less content). In iOS 13 and iPadOS 13, however, Apple has made the scroll bar more helpful, and you’ll want to use it to scroll long pages more quickly than you can with swiping. To use the scroll bar, swipe slightly to make it appear, press and hold the scroller, and drag it to scroll. The only hard part is that it can be tricky to grab since it disappears a few seconds after you stop scrolling, and it’s a thin target to hit with a thick finger. But give it a try since it makes scrolling in long pages so much easier.

(Featured image background by Paweł Czerwiński on Unsplash)

Use the Driving ETA Feature in iOS 13’s Maps App to Share Your Arrival Time

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A small but welcome new feature of iOS 13 is Driving ETA, which helps you share your estimated time of arrival with a contact whenever you’re navigating with the Maps app. To use Driving ETA, start navigating to a destination in Maps, tap Share ETA at the bottom of the screen, and pick the person with whom you want to share your location and arrival time. (You’ll share in Maps with iOS 13 users and via Messages with everyone else.) The other person will receive a notification of your ETA and if you’re delayed, updated times. You do have to start navigation in Maps to use Driving ETA, so it’s a little inconvenient when you already know the route, but it’s a brilliant feature for long-distance trips.

(Featured image by Dan Gold on Unsplash)

Do You Put Dates in Filenames? Use This Format for Best Sorting

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There are plenty of situations where it makes sense to put a date in a filename, but if you don’t use the right date format, the files may sort in unhelpful ways. For instance, using the names of months is a bad idea, since they’ll sort alphabetically, putting April before January. And although the Mac’s Finder is smart enough to sort filename-3 before filename-20, most other operating systems are not (because 2 comes before 3). So, to make your life—and the lives of everyone with whom you share files—a little easier, use this date format, which is guaranteed to sort correctly everywhere: YYYY-MM-DD. That translates to a four-digit year, followed by a two-digit month (with a leading zero if necessary), and a two-digit day (again, with a leading zero if need be).

(Featured image by Henry & Co. on Unsplash)