6 Unique Tips to Make the Most out of Your macOS Experience
Whether you had just started using a Mac or you have owned one for a few years now, you surely realized that one of its biggest benefits is that you don’t need to install a ton of third-party apps. Native software on a Mac helps you get a lot of things done intuitively, but there are a lot of tips and tricks most users ignore. In this article, I’ll be sharing 7 cool and useful features of macOS you have probably never used and some advanced options by the end.
1. Summarize texts
You can get your Mac to summarize texts for you with these quick steps :
- Go to Apple > Systems Preferences > Keyboard > Shortcuts
- Select “Services” from the list of shortcut options
- Click on the dropdown arrow next to “Text” if it is not already open
- Enable the “Summarize” option by checking the Box
You can then go back to Safari, select the text, and go on the browser’s menu: Safari > Services > Summarize and Voilà!
A window will appear that shows you a summarized version of the text you just highlighted. The amount of summarizing can be adjusted to offer more or less information.
2. Control someone’s screen remotely
To control someone else’s laptop, we often run to third-party Apps like TeamViewer. However, if you both are Mac users, there is one easy way to view their screen or even control their Mac. You can launch Screen Sharing by searching for it with Spotlight and then entering their Apple ID (you can find your ID in System Preferences > iCloud). They will be asked to permit you to access their screen and also to give you the ability to virtually, remotely to control their mouse and keyboard too.
3. Level up research with Spotlight
So, everyone knows that you can do basic research in Spotlight (Cmd+ Space Bar). But, you can also take a step further by using it to do calculations, unit conversions, search for weather, and more. It shows you the most likely answer you are looking for and also a handful of alternatives. Spotlight also supports logic operators, which allow it to include and exclude specific phrases in the search. These are words like “AND,” “OR,” and “NOT,” which can be used with multiple search strings to narrow down the search.
You can also locate the files you are looking for by holding the command key; it shows you the file’s path, and by pressing “R” it will open it inside the folder in the Finder.
4. Sign documents with Preview
Signing documents doesn’t sound like a hard task; open the file, print it out, sign it, scan it, attach it to an email, and send it back. But it’s not always convenient. The built-in feature in Preview for signatures comes in handy.
- Click on the “Create Signature” option in the “Sign” drop-down menu.
- You’ll be given the choice of whether to sign using the trackpad or by scanning your hand-written signature using your laptop camera.
- You can then place your signature anywhere on the current document, and also it stores it for further use.
5. Adjust the volume and brightness in smaller increments
The difference between one tap and the next while using the volume up and down keys can be pretty big — also for the brightness.
Hold down Option and Shift as you tap those keys, though, and the increments become much smaller.
6. Hide or quit using the App Switcher
Switching between apps when you have too many open is always a good feature to have. But moving around apps isn’t the only thing you can do with the switcher. You can also hide and quit an App by simply hovering the mouse over its app while holding Cmd+tab and pressing H or Q.
#. Bonus tip Using Terminal and Homebrew
The command line and HomeBrew are tools mainly used by developers. But they also offer some features that can be used by anyone.
First, if you haven’t used Xcode before, you need to set up it using this line of command on your Terminal :
xcode-select — installAnd then you install Homebrew using :
ruby -e “$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"As you may have noticed, you often find yourself looking for apps on the Internet since there aren’t many on the App Store. Here comes one of the most powerful utilities of Homebrew: Cask. It allows you to download, install, upgrade, uninstall apps without having to go through the whole process of searching, unpackaging, installing … Cask does that for you.
You can install it using :
brew install cask//Help:
brew cask help
Here is a list of commands that help you go through the catalog of apps you can download and install via Cask:
//Show all apps :
brew search — casks//Search for a specific app:
brew search (name of the app)//Install:
brew cask install (name of the app)//Update:
brew cask upgrade
You can find more utilities on the documentation: https://docs.brew.sh
That’s it! Those are some of the cool tips I’ve discovered while using macOS for the past years that I find most users ignore. So, how many of these features did you already know or used before?
