I find audible feedback helpful in my digital workflows and I love using sound effects to signal various actions and notifications on my devices. Sadly, over the years, Apple has become more restrictive about what actions welcome custom alert sounds. For over a decade until around 2011, I was able to use Xounds, an [...]
What are your screen habits when you wake up? Do you pick up your iPhone before you get out of bed? How close to your eyes do you hold it? How bright is the screen and how bright is your room? There are a number of reasons to consider not sleeping next to your [...]
In Take Control of Windows, I wrote about Mission Control and how to use it to organize and switch among windows on the screen. In that post, I briefly mentioned the ability to also segregate windows in separate spaces, but provided no instruction to do so. macOS offers Spaces as a way to declutter [...]
In Share Anything With Siri, I wrote about how to use Siri to share webpages and screenshots. Siri is also useful for reading those webpages to you, or really any text on the screen, selected or not, depending on your preference. Exploring these features last week, I discovered that you can toggle on or [...]
Once upon a time, computers couldn’t remember what documents/windows were open the last time you used a given application. Browser tabs were easily lost unless you had bookmarked them. And it was generally difficult to pick up where you left off after restarting your Mac. In 2011, OS X Lion introduced the ability to [...]
macOS Sonoma brings some welcome features and also some unexpected settings that may confuse on first use. Overall, I’ve been happily using the new OS for the last two weeks and so far it’s working well for me. However, I’m aware of a couple of bugs related using Gallery View in the Finder and [...]
Mac Mondays was born on August 13, 2018. Unrelatedly, its birthday is now also my wedding anniversary. The first entry was about System Preferences, the Mac application for specifying system-wide user experience settings. To date, I’ve published 235 editions of Mac Mondays using a Mac that contained System Preferences. I really appreciate how Apple [...]
The last couple months of the Gregorian calendar year are a popular time to get a new Apple product. Perhaps you’re getting a good deal for yourself around Thanksgiving; receiving a gift for Christmas, Hanukkah, or another holiday near the winter solstice; or making a year-end capital investment for your business that you can [...]
When you type on a Mac, how attentive are you to the characters your computer spits out? If you touch type, are your fingers aware of the pips that help them find their home on the keyboard? The Home Row On a U.S. English QWERTY keyboard layout, typing professionals encourage users to place [...]
If you’ve been following Mac Mondays for a while, you might realize this is my first post about Apple Watch. Apple made a significant shift to the user experience in watchOS 10, so this feels like a good opportunity to help users get acquainted. With the new version comes more consistent interaction with an [...]
