Do you want to change the way the sidebar looks on your Mac when you open a new Finder window? This is done by customizing the Finder Preferences according to your liking. Apple offers several ways to customize the Finder sidebar on macOS computers.
Uninstalling and removing apps is a necessary task on any computer, and the Mac is no exception. One of the benefits of MacOS is that it makes uninstalling applications pretty easy, and there are several ways to go about participating in the removal of apps from your Mac computer. One of the handiest ways to uninstall Mac apps is also one of the simplest, and that is by using System Settings in macOS Sonoma and macOS Ventura.
Other than being super simple, the benefit to using System Settings to uninstall apps is that you can see exactly how much storage space the Mac app is taking up, and therefore how much storage capacity you will recover by removing the app from macOS. This approach is a relatively new feature that has been implemented in MacOS, so if you’re unfamiliar you’re certainly not alone. Just read along and you’ll be up to speed shortly, removing apps quickly.
Apple has set an online event for 7:00AM PST on Tuesday, May 7, for the early birds on the west coast, or mid-morning east coast folks.
While Apple offers only a vague hint of what’s to come with the event artwork, the rumor mill speculates that updated iPad models will be revealed that feature the M2 or M3 processor, perhaps alongside an updated Apple pencil, and new Magic Keyboard accessory case. One of the event artwork pieces shows a hand holding and twirling an Apple Pencil, which is obviously suggestive of the iPad and Apple Pencil, providing a distinct clue as to the events focus.
Since the Apple Watch is tied to your iPhone, you’ve likely noticed that phone calls can be made or answered on your wrist. While you might know how to answer or reject phone calls on the Apple Watch, did you know that you can silence or mute a call to your Apple Watch too? These are important tricks to know so that if your wrist starts buzzing and chiming and making a ringing sound while you’re either in a public place, or wanting some peace and quiet, you can quickly mute the Apple Watch.
We’re going to show you two different ways to mute and silence calls on your Apple Watch, and they’re both a little different but equally useful to know.
A unique third party Mac app allows you to turn any web page, including YouTube videos and links to animated GIFs, into your Mac desktop wallpaper. Sound like fun? Well it definitely is, and depending on how creative you want to be, you can accomplish some really fascinating wallpaper experiences on the Mac with this free tool, called Plash.
GPT 4 is an extremely advanced large language model with immense AI capabilities, and DALL-E 3 is a wildly impressive AI image generator that creates pictures from text descriptions. Both of these tools are incredibly powerful and impressive, and while you can access them for a fee through the parent company who developed the models, OpenAI, it turns out that you can get free use of GPT 4 and DALL-E 3 image generation on iPhone or iPad with the help of the free Copilot app, from Microsoft.
Whether you’re relatively new to AI, or just curious, or maybe you’re specifically looking for a way to use GPT 4 for free, or DALL-E 3 for free, read along and you’ll be dialed in shortly with the help of Copilot on iPhone or iPad.
The second beta versions of iOS 17.5, iPadOS 17.5, MacOS Sonoma 14.5, tvOS 17.5, watchOS 10.5, and visionOS 1.2, have been made available by Apple to participants in the beta testing programs for Apple system software.
Both developer and public beta testers are able to access the new builds on any enrolled device that is compatible with the system software version.
One way that you can navigate apps quicker and more efficiently is by using, learning, and mastering keyboard shortcuts, and Mail for Mac is no different. You can speed up your routine tasks in Mail app (and elsewhere) with the help of keyboard shortcuts. Rather than using your mouse or trackpad to perform certain actions, pressing a combination of keys can be easier and faster in a lot of different scenarios. When it comes to the Mail app, you can use keyboard shortcuts to reply to emails, forward messages, mark items as junk, and much more.
The default Mail app is used by a lot of Mac users to manage, send, receive, and check important emails no matter what email service provider they use. Many prefer Mail app over third-party email clients since it’s integrated into the Mac operating system, plus it has a simple user interface which makes things nice and easy.
We’re going to dive into 15 different handy keyboard shortcuts for Mail app on the Mac, try them out the next time you’re using Mail app in macOS and see how you like them.
Hover Text is an interesting macOS accessibility feature that magnifies the text that’s displayed on your screen. This can be any regular text, a menu item, or a button. As the name suggests, when you hover your mouse cursor over the text, macOS will magnify and display a high-resolution zoomed version of the text in a separate window. This makes reading content a whole lot easier, whether the font size is tiny, or even if the screen is far away from where you’re seated.
This is an accessibility feature, but really anyone who use computers with high-resolution displays can potentially find utility in this capability. Anyone who has used any modern device knows how difficult it can be to read tiny text sometimes, so having the ability to magnify text is obviously helpful. Sure, you can increase system text size by using a scaled display resolution, but that’s not always practical, or even possible. Whether you have a multi-monitor setup, are using a display that’s at a range (as is often the case when giving presentations or using a TV as external display), or even if your eyesight is less than perfect, this is exactly where Hover Text comes in handy on the Mac.
Bulk image editing can be a tedious task, but the Photos app for iPhone and iPad has a fantastic feature that makes editing a series of images a lot easier. Essentially how this works is that you make edits to one photo, and then you copy those edits, and paste them to other photos that you want to apply the same edits to. It works great, especially if you’re applying the same type of adjustments to many photos. You can use this to apply the same type of micro adjustments to tons of images, or even major image edits like converting tons of photos to black and white, or bulk apply filters, and much more. How complex the edits are that you want to apply to groups of images is entirely up to you.
Copying and pasting image edits is super easy but if you’re not familiar with how to perform these actions for bulk image editing on iOS and iPadOS, then you may not even know where to begin. Not to worry, we’re going to walk through the steps, and you’ll be applying those bulk edits in no time at all.
Did you know that your Apple Watch can be used as a viewfinder and shutter button for the camera on your iPhone? Sure, some of you may already know this, but a lot of new Apple Watch users aren’t aware of this nifty feature that can come in handy while taking photos in a variety of scenarios.
Microsoft Edge is a surprisingly good web browser with some unique capabilities, like direct and easy GPT 4 access, and it has been a fun browser to experiment with as my new default. But, like many Microsoft software products, the appearance can be a little cluttered if you’re accustomed to the more minimalist designs of browsers like Safari. For an obvious example which we’ll discuss here, when you launch Microsoft Edge, you’ll see there’s a prominent sidebar on the right side with a bunch of icons for things that you may not have any interest in using.
Let’s hide that sidebar in Microsoft Edge, giving you a cleaner and more streamlined user interface.
Cleaning the keyboard on a MacBook Air is an essential task, but it can be challenging if you’re trying to avoid unintended keypresses. If you don’t want to type out a bunch of nonsense gibberish from cleaning the keyboard, or accidentally activated a mystery keystroke, then consider using a Mac app to lock down the keyboard and temporarily disable keypresses. Sure, you could shut down your MacBook Air or MacBook Pro too, but that’s inconvenient, so instead we’re going to focus on using a free little utility called KeyboardCleanTool, and a slightly damp microfiber or cotton cloth. If you want to get the keyboard super clean, you’ll want to use a few other items too.
This article is aimed cleaning the internal built-in keyboard of Mac laptops like the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro, but technically the KeyboardCleanTool app would work with external keyboards as well. But if you have a desktop Mac, iMac, Mac mini, or otherwise, the easiest way to clean that keyboard would be to simply disconnect it from the Mac before starting the cleaning process. So without further ado, let’s get to cleaning the MacBook Air keyboard
ChatGPT defaults to using your chat history and chat interactions as training data for the ChatGPT service and AI model. One of the most obvious reasons for this is that prior interactions with ChatGPT can be used to refine the Large Language Model and to improve the service, but there are obviously some privacy and personal ramifications here too.
Essentially this means your chats and interactions with ChatGPT are not really private, since it’s possible that machine learning, AI, or perhaps even people, could be viewing and using your chat history and engagement with the chatbot LLM to train and improve the model.
If you have ever dug around in the ChatGPT settings for privacy and data controls, you’ve likely have noticed there’s a toggle for turning off the training data usage, however it comes with also disabling your ChatGPT chat history. This leads many users to think that you can’t have ChatGPT chat history while also opting out of using your chats as training data. But it turns out that’s not entirely true.
With a little-known privacy toggle that’s buried within the OpenAI privacy page, you can opt out of using your chats as training data, while simultaneously keeping your ChatGPT chat history enabled. We’ll show you how to do this.
One of the worst things about the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro is the shiny key issue. If you’re unfamiliar, the image above demonstrates the beginning stages of the shiny key development on my otherwise beautiful six month old MacBook Air, visible mostly on the shift key, but “A” and “S” are also beginning to display the hallmark worn key shine.
The shiny keys are unmistakable, and the wear occurs after routine use of MacBook keyboards. For some users they develop within weeks(!) and for others it can take a year or more to appear, but it seems that virtually every MacBook user who types on their built-in keyboard will eventually experience the shiny keys issue.
Many users assume the shiny key appearance is caused by skin oils or grime staining the keys, and then try unsuccessfully to clean them. But after digging into this a bit myself, it turns out the shiny keys are likely the result of physical wear to the plastic itself, whereby they’re getting polished and worn from continual usage. The shiny keys are basically the keys that are getting used the most.
I’ll cut straight to my opinion; the shiny keys look bad, marring the appearance of these otherwise beautiful, expensive, and premium Apple laptops. I think it gives the MacBook keyboards a cheap, dirty, sometimes even grotesque appearance since it makes it look like the keyboards are perpetually greasy from french-fry-munching fingers, and this simply shouldn’t be happening.
There are various ways to check the health of a hard disk drive (HDD) and solid state drive (SSD) that is used on a Mac with drives that support SMART, which stands for Self-Monitoring Analysis Reporting Technology. These options range from fairly simple using Disk Utility to check the SMART status of a drive, to much more complex with third party tools like DriveDX.
We’re going to introduce another excellent option for Mac users to monitor and analyze the health of their storage devices, using a command line tool called “smartctl”.
The smartctl utility will check SMART status self-assessments of drive health, provide the temperature of internal drives, as well as offer read and write information (which is relevant particularly for SSDs), and general drive health analysis.
Do Not Disturb is one of the most useful features for Apple Watch, and every other Apple device too for that matter. With Do Not Disturb, you can minimize distractions and interruptions, without completely silencing your Apple Watch or turning off all notifications completely.
Using Do Not Disturb on Apple Watch is one of those features you’ll want to know how to enable and disable, so that you can get the most out the functionality and its benefits. You can toggle it on and off at will, or, you can even run Apple Watch in constant Do Not Disturb mode, if you find the default Apple Watch alerts and notifications to be annoying and distracting.
If you’re a Mac user and you work with teams internationally, as many of us do nowadays, you can make your life a little easier by utilizing some handy tips and tricks to keep track of time zones, translate languages and overcome language barriers more easily, and to be aware of local holidays and customs so you don’t have scheduling mishaps.
Read along, let’s check out some of these useful tips for working with international teams with your Mac. And don’t forget to share your own tips and tricks for working with international colleagues too!
