Downloading Books

To shop the Books bookstore, open the Books app. Click Book Store in the upper-left corner; the app becomes the literary equivalent of the App Store, complete with the icons across the top. The links here offer everything you’d need in your bibliographic quest: Bestsellers, Read It Before You Watch It (movie tie-ins), and so on. You can also search by name or click Purchased to see what you’ve bought.

Once you find a book that looks good, you can click Get Sample to download a free chapter, read ratings and reviews, or click the price itself to buy the book and download it straight to the Mac.

If you see a book cover bearing the icon, that’s a book you own—it’s available in your online locker—but you haven’t downloaded it to this Mac yet. Click to download.

ePub Files

Apple’s bookstore isn’t the only way to get books. You can also load up your ebook reader from your computer, feeding it with ePub files.

Actually, ePub is the normal Books format. It’s a very popular standard for ebook readers, Apple’s and otherwise. The only difference between ePub documents you create and the ones Apple sells is that Apple’s are copy protected.

To add your own ePub documents to your Books library, just drag their icons off the desktop and into the Books window. Or choose File → Add to Library.

And where are you supposed to get all these files? Free (and not free) ebooks in ePub format are everywhere. There are 53,000 free downloadable books at gutenberg.org, for example, and over a million at books.google.com—oldies, but classic oldies, with lots of Mark Twain, Agatha Christie, Herman Melville, H.G. Wells, and so on. (Lots of these are available in the Free pages of Apple’s own Books store, too.)

PDF Files

Books can display and catalog PDF documents, too. PDFs are everywhere—people send them as attachments, and you can turn any document into a PDF file. (For example, on the Mac, in any program, choose File → Print; in the resulting dialog box, click PDF → Save as PDF.) You bring them into Books by dragging them into its window, or with File → Add to Library.

When you double-click one, though, it doesn’t open in Books; it opens into Preview. Which is, after all, a program expressly designed for reading PDF documents.

You’ve been warned.

Your Library

When you open Books, you see your own personal library represented as little book covers (Figure 11-1). Mostly what you’ll do here is click a book to open it. But there are all kinds of other activities waiting for you:

• You can reorganize your bookshelf. Use the Sort By pop-up menu to choose Most Recent or Title—or Sort Manually, which means you can drag books around into any order you like.

• You can view your library as a compact list. Click List at the top to switch the book-cover view to a much more boring (but more compact) list view. The column headings let you sort the list by author, title, category, and so on. And there’s a search box, too, which lets you search your books’ titles—helpful if you have an enormous library.

• To delete a book, click it and then press the Delete key; confirm in the warning box. Of course, deleting a book from the Mac doesn’t delete your safety copy on your other gadgets or online.

• Organize your books into folders. In Books, the “folders” are called collections, but it’s the same idea. You might have one for school, one for work, and a third for somebody who shares your Mac, for example.

  To see your collections, click Collections; the Collections list opens at the left side. Make a new collection by clicking the + button (or choose Use File → New Collection); type to name it.

  Now, to file your books away, select them (you can press as you click to select multiple books); then choose File → Add to Collection and choose the name of the collection you want them in.

Figure 11-1. Your Books library is more than just book covers. Stamps at the top-right corner indicate which are new, which are free samples, and which are actually online, waiting to be downloaded ().
In the Sort By pop-up menu (upper right), you can choose Show Title & Author to add that information beneath the book covers.

Reading

But come on—you’re a reader, not a librarian. Here’s how you read an ebook.

Open the book by double-clicking the book cover. Now the book opens, ready for you to read. Looks great, doesn’t it (Figure 11-2)? If you’re returning to a book you’ve been reading, Books remembers your place.

In general, reading is simple: Just read. Turn pages like this:

• Press the space bar. (Add Shift to turn back a page.)

• Tap the key. (Press to turn back.)

• Point to the right margin; click the > button that appears. (Left margin to go back.)

• Swipe two fingers across the trackpad—to the right (to go forward) or left (to go back a page).

Figure 11-2. Here’s a composite shot showing all kinds of Books features: a Note open (left), the highlighting palette (middle), and the navigation bar (top).
Ordinarily, the reading experience is much quieter.

You should also take a moment to adjust your reading environment. For example:

• Enter Full Screen mode for the biggest, least distracting view of your book (see “Full Screen Mode”).

• Specify either a one-page or a two-page spread (use the Single Page or Two Pages commands in the View menu). In Full Screen mode, Single Page isn’t available.

• Adjust the type size using the button. That’s a huge feature for people with tired or over-40 eyes. And it’s something paper books definitely can’t do.

  The same pop-out panel offers a Fonts menu, where you can choose from eight typefaces for your book.

• Adjust the background color. The button also offers a choice of four page-background colors: white, sepia (off-white), brown (with white text), or black (for nighttime reading).

While you’re reading, Books makes all the onscreen controls fade away so you can read in peace. But if you move your mouse to the top of the window, a row of additional controls appears (Figure 11-2):

• takes you back to the bookshelf (Library view).

• opens the Table of Contents panel. The chapter or page names are “live”— you can click one to jump there.

• opens the Notes panel, described next.

• opens the search box. It lets you search for text within the book you’re reading, which can be extremely useful.

• adds a bookmark to the current page. This isn’t like a physical bookmark, where there’s only one in the whole book; you can use them to flag as many pages, for as many reasons, as you like. (The same button appears on your Touch Bar, if you have one.)

  Once you’ve accumulated a bookmark or two, use the next to the menu to see a list of them—and to jump back to one.

Notes, Highlighting, and Other Options

Here are some more stunts that you’d have trouble pulling off in a printed book. If you double-click a word, you get a graceful, elegant page from Books’ built-in dictionary. You know—in the unlikely event that you encounter a word you don’t know.

If you drag across some text to highlight it, you get a few surprise options (Figure 11-2):

• Highlight. Click one of the colored dots to add tinted, transparent highlighting, or underlining, to the word you clicked. (To remove highlighting, click inside a highlighted area and click Remove Highlighting.)

• Note. When you click Add Note, Books creates highlighting on the selected passage and opens an empty, colored sticky note so you can type in your own annotations. When you click outside the note, it collapses down to a tiny Post-it square in the margin. Click to reopen it.

  To delete a note, click the highlighted text. Click Remove Note or Remove Highlight & Note.

• Copy copies the highlighted text, ready for pasting in some other program.

In the More menu, a few additional options lurk:

• Search Book opens the same search box you’d get by clicking the icon—except that this time the highlighted word is already filled in, saving you a bit of typing.

• Search Web, Search Wikipedia hand off the highlighted text to Safari, which searches Google or Wikipedia.

• Mail, Messages, Notes opens the share sheet (“Does the file have the correct file name suffix?”) so you can send the highlighted material to somebody else by message or email, or add it to a Notes page.

• Speak reads the highlighted passage aloud.

Once you’ve added bookmarks, notes, and highlighting to your book, they’re magically and wirelessly synced to any other copies of that book—on other gadgets, like the iPad or iPod Touch, other iPhones, or other Mavericks-or-later Macs. Very handy indeed.

Furthermore, if you click the button, you’ll see the Notes pane. It presents a tidy list of all your bookmarked pages, notes, and highlighted passages. You can click one of the listings to jump to the relevant page.

Books Settings

If you’ve embraced the simple joy of reading electronic books, then you deserve to know where to make settings changes: in Books → Preferences. Here are the options waiting there.

Conversions

Calculator is more than a calculator; it’s also a conversion program. No matter what units you’re trying to convert—meters, grams, cubic inches, miles per hour, euros—Calculator is ready.

Now, the truth is, asking Siri to convert units for you, or typing (for example) 35 degrees in centigrade into Spotlight is simpler and quicker to open than this older Calculator feature.

But if you’ve already got Calculator open, here’s the drill: Type in the starting measurement. Then, from the Convert menu, choose the kind of conversion you want (Area, Currency, Temperature, or whatever).

In the dialog box, use the pop-up menus to specify which units you want to convert to and from, and then click OK. There’s your answer!

The next time you want to make this kind of conversion, you can skip steps 2, 3, and 4. Instead, just choose your desired conversion from the Convert → Recent Conversions submenu.

Calculator is especially amazing when it comes to currency conversions—from pesos to American dollars, for example—because it actually goes online to download up-to-the-minute currency rates.

Working with Views

When you open Calendar, you see something like Figure 11-4. By clicking one of the View buttons above the calendar, or by pressing -1, -2, -3, or -4, you can switch among these views:

• Day looks exactly like a day-at-a-time desk calendar. On the left side, you see today’s schedule on an hour-by-hour chart. On the right, you see the details of whichever appointment is selected.

  If you choose Calendar → Preferences, you can specify what hours constitute a workday. This is ideal both for those annoying power-life people who get up at 5 a.m. for two hours of calisthenics and for the more reasonable people who sleep until 11.

  Tip

  Calendar provides four quick ways to get to the current day’s date. Click Today (upper-right corner, between the and ), choose View → Go to Today, or press -T. Or tap Today on the Touch Bar, if your Mac has one.

• Week fills the main display area with seven columns, reflecting the current week. (You can establish a five-day workweek instead in Calendar → Preferences.)

  Tip

  If you double-click the date above the calendar, you open the Day view for that day.

• Month shows the entire current month. The time of each appointment is listed in gray off to the right of each square.

  If a Month-view square is too small to show everything you’ve got scheduled that day, you’ll see a notation at the bottom of the square, like “3 more…” Sometimes, making the window bigger (or full screen) helps make more room, or you can just double-click the date’s number to switch to Day view and see everything at once.

  Tip

  Month view scrolls endlessly vertically—and not necessarily a month at a time, either. You can park any week of the month at the top of the screen—not just the first week. That’s a refreshing change from paper calendars.

• Year view displays the date numbers for the entire year (Figure 11-5).

Figure 11-5. Year view shows the entire year. In Calendar → Preferences → Advanced, you can turn on “Show events in year view,” which actually means “Show me a ‘heat map’ to indicate how hectic my schedule is.”
You can single-click a date number to see a pop-out list of the appointments scheduled for that date.

In Week or Month view, double-click an appointment to see more about it, or even make changes to it.

Also, in any view, you can switch into Full Screen mode by clicking the green button (top left). See “Full Screen Mode” for more on Full Screen mode.

Making an Appointment

The basic Calendar is easy to figure out. After all, with the exception of one unfortunate Gregorian incident, we’ve been using calendars successfully for centuries.

Even so, there are two ways to record a new appointment: using the mouse, or using the Quick Event box.

The Quick Event way

In the Quick Event method, the program spares you the trouble of manually selecting dates, start times, and end times. Instead, the program understands notations like “7 pm Friday,” and puts your new appointment into the right time slot automatically.

To use this feature, press -N. Or click + (top left of the window) or choose File → New Event. The Quick Event box appears. Proceed as shown in Figure 11-6.

Figure 11-6. Left: Type a plain-English shorthand appointment. Press Return. Marvel as Calendar interprets the times you typed and inserts your meeting into the right time slot.

Note

Calendar proposes adding the new appointment to your default calendar—that is, the category you use most often (read on for details on these calendar categories). Supposedly, you’ve already told it which category is your preferred one by using the Calendar → Preferences → General → Default Calendar pop-up menu.

But as you add a new appointment this way, you can override that setting by holding down the + button. You get a pop-up menu of your calendar categories; only after you click one do you see the Quick Event box shown in Figure 11-6.

Into the Quick Event box, type the name of your appointment and its date and time. For example, you could type Report deadline Aug 12, or “Titanic 2: The Return” Sat 7 pm, or Cara date 11-11:15am. When you press Return, Calendar interprets what you typed, using these rules:

• If you didn’t specify an ending time, Calendar sets the appointment to one hour.

• If you didn’t enter any time information, Calendar just schedules your event for all day.

• If you typed breakfast or morning, Calendar sets the appointment to start at 9 a.m.; lunch or noon, it starts at 12 p.m.; dinner or night, it starts at 7 p.m.

• If you enter a weekday (for example, Chicago Monday), Calendar assumes you mean the very next occurrence of that day. (If that’s not what you want, enter the date, like Chicago Jul 3.)

• If you enter a time but not a date or day (for example, Fishing 3:30 pm), Calendar assumes you mean today.

The Quick Event system has a feature that saves you time and typos: As you type, Calendar displays a menu of similar appointments you’ve entered in the past (Figure 11-6, left). If you click one, Calendar fills in all the details of the new appointment in one fell swoop, copying them from the earlier event.

As soon as Calendar interprets your shorthand and turns it into a real appointment, its details balloon opens automatically (Figure 11-6, right), so you can clean up any errors and add more details.

What to Do with an Appointment

Once you’ve entrusted your agenda to Calendar, you can start putting it to work. Calendar is only too pleased to remind you (via pop-up messages) of your events, reschedule them, print them out, and so on. Here are a few of the possibilities.

Lengthening or shortening events

If a scheduled meeting becomes shorter or your lunch hour becomes a lunch hour-and-a-half (in your dreams), changing the length of the representative calendar event is as easy as dragging the bottom border of its block in any column view (see Figure 11-9).

Tip

In Week view, if you’ve grabbed the bottom edge of an appointment’s block so that the cursor changes, you can drag horizontally to make an appointment cross the midnight line and extend into a second day.

Figure 11-9. You can resize any Calendar event just by dragging its bottom border. As your cursor touches the bottom edge of an event, it turns into a double-headed arrow. You can now drag the event’s edge to make it take up more or less time on your calendar.

Searching for events

When you type into the search box at the top right of the Calendar screen, you’re offered some “search tokens” that indicate where you want to search for that phrase (in the name of an event, in its notes, location, and so on). The right-hand column offers a clickable list of search results. Figure 11-10 has the details.

Figure 11-10. Left: Type into the search box; Calendar sprouts a list of suggestions (“Event contains ‘school,’ ” “Notes contain ‘school,’ ” and so on).
Right: Click one to create a search token exactly like the ones that Spotlight and Mail use. They let you build up complex searches, bubble by bubble. Double-click any row of the list to jump to the corresponding event on the calendar and open up its summary balloon.

The “Calendar” Category Concept

Calendar has calendars that let you organize appointments into subsets. One person might have calendars called Me, Spouse ’n’ Me, and Whole Family. A small business could have categories called Deductible Travel, R&D, and R&R.

And now, the Calendar Tip-O-Rama:

• To create a calendar, choose File → New Calendar. You now have to specify where you want this category to live: On My Mac (meaning on your Mac), or on one of your online accounts, like iCloud, Google, Yahoo, or Exchange. Type a name that defines the category in your mind.

  Note

  When you set up an iCloud account either in System Preferences or when you first run macOS, Calendar automatically transfers your On My Mac categories to iCloud. You can no longer create categories that live only on your Mac. (There’s one exception: If you created your iCloud account in Calendar Preferences, then you can have an On My Mac category.)

• To see your list of categories, click the Calendars button (upper left of the window). A Sidebar list appears, if it wasn’t already open.

• Hide or show an entire category of appointments at once by turning on or off the appropriate checkbox in the Calendars Sidebar.

• To change the color of a category, right-click or two-finger click its name in the Sidebar list. In the pop-up bubble, you choose a new color.

• To specify your default calendar, choose Calendar → Preferences → General. Choose from the Default Calendar pop-up menu. (The Default calendar is the category that every new appointment falls into unless you change it. It’s also the category that other apps‚ like Mail, propose putting new appointments into.)

• To assign a new appointment to a calendar, click the color swatch in the corner of its Info balloon.

• To change an appointment’s calendar category, right-click or two-finger click the appointment’s name and choose a calendar name from the shortcut menu.

• You may be able to make calendar groups, too. Those are containers that consolidate the appointments from several other calendars. For example, you could have a calendar group called Kids, containing the individual calendars for each of your offspring. Super-calendars like this make it easier to manage, hide, show, print, and search subsets of your appointments. (Sadly, this feature is available only for On My Mac categories, as described previously—not for online accounts.)

  To create a calendar group, choose File → New Calendar Group. Name the resulting item in the Calendar list; for the most part, it behaves like any other calendar. Drag other calendar names onto it to include them. Click the flippy triangle to hide or show the component calendars.

“Publishing” Calendars to the Web

One of Calendar’s best features is its ability to post your calendar on the web, so that other people can subscribe to it, which adds your appointments to their calendars. Anyone with a web browser—or only people you designate—can also view your calendar, right online.

For example, you might use this feature to post the meeting schedule for a club that you manage, or to share the agenda for a series of upcoming financial meetings that all your co-workers will need to consult.

Publishing

The steps for sharing a calendar depend on whether or not you have an iCloud account. Observe:

If you have an iCloud account: Proceed as shown in Figure 11-11. Note that you can specify whether each person can just see the appointments or be able to edit them, too. That’s a delightful, two-way collaboration—a terrific way for a couple or a family to coordinate everyone’s calendars, for example.

Behind the scenes, Calendar sends an invitation to the recipient. If she has a Mac, iPhone, or iPad, she’ll see a notification right in Calendar (); otherwise, she’ll get the invitation by email. Once she clicks the invitation and clicks Accept, your shared calendar shows up on her machine.

Later you can modify the settings (Figure 11-11, bottom). Or you can stop sharing with someone by clicking the next to a calendar name, clicking a person’s name, and then pressing the Delete key.

Tip

You can also share an iCloud calendar at icloud.com. Just click the icon beside a calendar’s name.

Figure 11-11. Top: Point to the name of the iCloud calendar you want to publish; click the “share” icon () that appears next to its name.
In the pop-out panel, enter the email address of the lucky recipient (it must be someone you’ve entered into your Contacts). You can invite several; just keep entering addresses.
The Public Calendar option means that the whole internet can see this calendar category (if they know the secret URL).
Bottom: Use the to specify whether a person can see your appointments (View Only) or make changes to them, too (View & Edit).
After the recipient has accepted the invitation, click the icon again; this time, a green checkmark appears next to the person’s name.

If you don’t have an iCloud account: If you don’t have iCloud, then you’ll need a website of your own, where your online calendar can be hung. And it has to be a WebDAV-compatible server (ask your web-hosting company). You know what? It might just be easier to sign up for a free iCloud account and do it that way.

In any case, begin by making sure that the Calendars list is open. Click the calendar you want to share. Choose Edit → Publish Calendar. (This command doesn’t appear if you have an iCloud account, since the sharing mechanism is so much simpler with iCloud.)

Tip

You have to perform this step individually for each calendar category. If you want to publish more than one calendar simultaneously, then create a calendar group, and publish that.

A dialog box appears. This is where you specify your web address, its password (if necessary), and how your saved calendar is going to look and work. If you turn on “Publish changes automatically,” then whenever you edit the calendar, Calendar connects to the internet and updates the copy there. (Otherwise, you can right-click or two-finger click the calendar’s name and choose Refresh whenever you want to update the web copy.)

When you click Publish, your Mac connects to the web and then shows you the web address (the URL) of the finished page, complete with a Send Mail button that lets you fire the URL off to your colleagues.

Tip

Whenever you want to send someone the subscription information, click the calendar category you’ve published and choose Edit → Send Publication Email. Calendar will prepare an outgoing email message containing details on subscribing to your calendar.

To stop publishing that calendar, click its name in the Calendars pop-up list and then choose Edit → Stop Publishing.

Google, Yahoo, and Facebook Calendars

If you maintain a calendar online—at Google, Yahoo, or Facebook, for example—you may take particular pleasure in discovering how easy it is to bring those appointments into Calendar. It’s one handy way to keep, for example, a husband’s and wife’s appointments visible on each other’s calendars.

Setting this up is ridiculously easy. Choose Calendar → Preferences → Accounts. Click + below the list. Enter your Google, Yahoo, or Facebook address (for example, [email protected]) and password. Click Create.

In a minute or so, you’ll see all your Google, Yahoo, or Facebook events show up in Calendar. (Each web calendar has its own heading in the left-side list.) Better yet: It’s a two-way sync; changes you make to these events in Calendar show up on the web, too.

Syncing Calendar with Your iPhone, iPad, and Other Computers

Here’s the real magic of Calendar, iCloud, and the rest of Apple’s software archipelago: Your calendar can be autosynced among all your machines, like your iPhone, iPad, and Macs. Add an appointment on your phone, change an appointment on your iPad, whatever—all your other gadgets are wirelessly and automatically synced to match. See “Meet iCloud” for details on this amazing setup.

Playing a Game of Chess

When you launch Chess, you’re presented with a fresh, new game that’s set up in Human vs. Computer mode—meaning that you, the Human (light-colored pieces) get to play against the Computer (your Mac, on the dark side). Drag the chess piece of your choice into position on the board, and the game is afoot.

If you choose Game → New, however, you’re offered a pop-up menu with choices like Human vs. Computer, Human vs. Human, and so on. If you switch the pop-up menu to Computer vs. Human, then you and your Mac trade places; the Mac takes the white side of the board and opens the game with the first move, and you play the black side.

On some night when the bowling alley is closed and you’re desperate for entertainment, you might also want to try the Computer vs. Computer option, which pits your Mac against itself. Pour yourself a beer, open a bag of chips, and settle in to watch until someone—either the Mac or the Mac—gains victory.

Chess Prefs

Choose Chess → Preferences to find some useful controls like these:

• Style. Apple has gone nuts with the computer-generated materials options in this program. You can choose all kinds of wacky materials for the look of your game board (Wood, Metal, Marble, or Grass) and for your playing pieces (Wood, Metal, Marble, or Fur).

• Computer Plays. Use this slider to determine how frustrated you want to get when trying to win at Chess. The farther you drag the slider toward the Stronger side, the more calculations the computer runs before making its next move—and, thus, the harder it gets for you to outthink it. At the Faster setting, Chess won’t spend more than five seconds ruminating over possible moves. Drag the slider all the way to the right, however, and the program may analyze each move for as long as 10 fun-filled hours. This hardest setting, of course, makes it all but impossible to win a game (which may stretch on for a week or more anyway).

• Speech. The two checkboxes here let you play Chess using the Mac’s built-in voice-recognition features, telling your chess pieces where to go instead of dragging them, and listening to the Mac tell you which moves it’s making. See “Speech”.

Studying Your Games

You can choose Game → Save to save any game in progress, so you can resume it later.

To analyze the moves making up a game, use the Moves → Game Log command, which displays the history of your game, move by move. A typical move would be recorded as “Nb8 – c6,” meaning the knight on the b8 square moved to the c6 square. With a Chess list document, you could recreate an entire game, move by move.

Placing a Call

The FaceTime experience often begins with a more old-fashioned communication—a phone call or a text message, for example. (“Want to FaceTime now?”)

In any case, FaceTime couldn’t be easier to fire up—in many different ways:

• From Contacts. If you’re in the Contacts app, and you’ve recorded the iPhone number or Apple ID of someone in your Mac’s Contacts program, you’ll see the button next to that person’s name. Click it to place a video call. Or, to place an audio call, click , and then click FaceTime Audio.

• From the FaceTime app. This app presents a list of your recent FaceTime calls (Figure 11-14, top left). Click the button next to a name to place a video call. For an audio call, click next to the person’s name.

• From Messages. If you’re chatting away with somebody by text and you realize that typing is no longer appropriate for the conversation, then click Details at the top of the screen. Click (for a video call) or and then FaceTime (for a FaceTime audio call).

At this point, the other guy receives an audio and video message inviting him to a chat. If he clicks Accept, then you’re on. You’re on each other’s screens, seeing and hearing each other in real time. (You appear on your own screen, too, in a little inset window. It’s spinach-in-your-teeth protection.)

Once the chat has begun, here’s some of the fun you can have:

• Resize the window. Drag any window edge, or choose Window → Zoom.

• Go Full Screen. Click the button (or the green button) (or the Full Screen button on your Touch Bar, if you have one [“The Complicated Story of the Function Keys”]) to make the window fill your entire screen. Click it again to restore the window.

• Move the inset. You can drag the little picture-in-picture window showing you to a different corner of the video window, if you like.

• Rotate the screen. FaceTime works in either portrait (upright) or landscape (widescreen) view. Turn Video → Use Landscape on or off to choose, or click the curved arrow in the inset that shows your face. (If you’re calling someone using an iPhone or iPad, your Mac picture rotates automatically when your partner’s gadget rotates. You don’t have to turn the monitor 90 degrees.)

• Mute the mike. Either choose Video → Mute, or click the button at the bottom of the video window. The video continues. This is handy when you have to make throat-clearing sounds or yell at your kid in the background.

• Pause the call. You can also mute (black out) the video, for use when you have to perform small acts of personal grooming. To do that, click .

When you and your buddy have had quite enough, click to terminate the call. And marvel that you were alive to see the day.

Group FaceTime

Well, it took eight years. But FaceTime, at last, can connect more than two people at once in a video chat. In fact, it can connect up to 32 people simultaneously, creating a video party line—as long as everyone concerned has macOS Mojave 10.14.1 or later, or iOS 12.1 or later on an iPhone or iPad.

During the call

In regular FaceTime calls, the other guy’s image fills the screen. How are you supposed to conduct a call with dozens of people?

Each face occupies its own rectangle; the more people who join, the smaller the rectangles get (Figure 11-15).

Figure 11-15. On a group FaceTime call, your icon always appears at lower right. The small icons at left, from left to right, mean: Hide/show call list; Mute microphone; Hang up; “Mute” camera; and Full screen.

When someone is talking, FaceTime brings that person’s rectangle front and center (and makes it bigger) automatically. In a lively conversation, therefore, the four main boxes seem to be constantly inflating and deflating to reflect who’s talking.

But even if someone’s not speaking, you can bring him to the front on demand, with either of two degrees of prominence:

• Click his box once. It comes to the front, gets slightly larger, and reveals his name or iCloud ID.

• Double-click his box. Now it gets much bigger, shamelessly covering up everyone else’s boxes. This is for when you really want to focus on this one person. (Click again to enshrink the box again.)

Tip

If you’ve clicked once, you can click the little icon to zoom that slightly enlarged box into the fully enlarged version.

FaceTime Audio Calls

Video calling is neat and all, but be honest: Don’t you find yourself making regular phone calls more often? Video calling forces us to be “on,” neatly dressed and well behaved, because we’re on camera. Most of the time, we’re perfectly happy (in fact, happier) with audio only.

To place an audio call, you start out exactly as you would when making a video call, as described earlier: in the FaceTime app, Contacts, or Messages. Click , and then click FaceTime Audio (as opposed to whatever phone numbers are listed there).

When you place an audio FaceTime call, the other person’s phone, tablet, or Mac rings. If she accepts your call, it’s better than being on a phone call in two ways. First, you don’t have the usual lag time that throws off your comic timing. And, second, the audio quality is amazing—more like FM radio than cellular. It sounds like the other person is right next to your head; you hear every breath, sniff, and sweater rustle.

Receiving Calls

Life is even simpler when somebody calls you. A notification bubble appears on your screen, and you hear an incoming-call sound. (Which ringtone? That’s up to you; in the FaceTime app, choose FaceTime → Preferences → Settings. Use the Ringtone pop-up menu.) If iTunes is playing music, it pauses automatically. Sweet.

If the Mac is asleep, it wakes; you can even answer the call on the Lock screen, without having to enter your password.

Click Accept to start the call, or Decline if now is not the time. (In that case, the caller will be told you’re not available.)

FaceTime doesn’t have to be running for you to receive a call. That’s generally a cool feature—but if you really don’t want to be interrupted, you can hang up a digital “Do Not Disturb” sign in any of these ways:

• In FaceTime, choose FaceTime → Turn FaceTime Off.

• Use the Do Not Disturb feature (“Insta-Respond to Bubbles”).

• Sign out of FaceTime. (Choose FaceTime → Preferences → Settings, and then click Sign Out.)

Import To:

Use this pop-up menu to specify what happens to the imported pictures. Image Capture proposes putting photos, sounds, and movies from the camera into your Home folder’s Pictures folder. But you can specify any folder (choose Other from the pop-up menu).

Furthermore, there are some other very cool options here:

• Photos. Neat that you can direct photos from your camera to Photos via Image Capture. Might come in handy when you didn’t expect to want to load photos into your permanent collection, but you change your mind when you actually look them over in Image Capture.

• Preview opens the fresh pictures in Preview so you can get a better (and bigger) look at them.

• Mail sends the pix directly into the Mac’s email program, which can be handy when the whole point of getting the photos off the camera is to send them to friends.

• Build web page creates an actual web page of your downloaded shots. Against a dark-gray background, you get thumbnail images of the pictures in a web page document called index.html. Just click one of the small images to view it at full size, exactly as your website visitors will be able to do once this page is actually on the web. (Getting it online is up to you.)

  Note

  Image Capture puts the web page files in a Home folder → Pictures → Webpage on [today’s date and time] folder. It contains the graphics files incorporated into this HTML document; you can post the whole thing on your website, if you like.

  Image Capture automatically opens up this page in your web browser, proud of its work.

• Make PDF. When you choose this option, you wind up with what looks like a Preview window, showing thumbnails of your photos. If you choose Save right now, you’ll get a beautiful, full-color PDF of the selected photos, ready to print out and then, presumably, cut apart with scissors or a paper cutter. But if you use the Layout menu, you can choose different layouts for your photos: 3 × 5, 4 × 6, 8 × 10, and so on.

  And what if a photo doesn’t precisely fit the proportions you’ve selected? The Crop commands in the Layout menu (for example, “Crop to 4 × 6”) center each photo within the specified shape and then trim the outer borders if necessary. The Fit commands, on the other hand, shrink the photo as necessary to fit into the specified dimensions, sometimes leaving white margins.

  Note

  The “crop” commands never touch the actual downloaded photos. The downloaded image files themselves retain their full sizes and resolutions.

• Other. The beauty of the Image Capture system is that people can, in theory, write additional processing scripts. Once you’ve written or downloaded them, drop them into your System → Library → Image Capture → Automatic Tasks folder. Then enjoy their presence in the Import To pop-up menu.

Import Some, Import All

Clicking Import All, of course, begins the process of downloading the photos to the folder you’ve selected. A progress dialog box appears, showing you thumbnail images of each picture that flies down the wire.

If you prefer to import only some photos, then select them first. (In list view, you click and Shift-click to select a bunch of consecutive photos, and -click to add individual photos to the selection. In icon view, you can both -click and Shift-click to select individual photos.) Then click Import.

Scanning

If you own a scanner, chances are good that you won’t be needing whatever special scanning software came with it. Instead, macOS gives you two programs that can operate any standard scanner: Image Capture and Preview. In fact, the controls are identical in both programs.

To scan in Image Capture, turn on your scanner and click its name in the left-side list. Put your photos or documents into the scanner.

Now you have a couple of decisions to make:

• Separate and straighten? If you turn on “Detect separate items” in the Scan Size menu, then macOS will perform a nifty little stunt indeed: It will check to see if you’ve put multiple items onto the scanner glass, like several small photos, as shown in Figure 11-18. (It looks for rectangular images surrounded by empty white space, so if the photos are overlapping, this feature won’t work.)

  If it finds multiple items, Image Capture automatically straightens them, compensating for haphazard placement on the glass, and then saves them as individual files.

• Where to file? Use the “Scan to” pop-up menu to specify where you want the newly scanned image files to land—in the Pictures folder, for example. You have some other cool options beyond sticking the scans in a folder; for example, you can send the resulting images to Photos, Preview, or Mail.

Once you’ve put a document onto or into the scanner, click Scan. The scanner heaves to life. After a moment, you see on the screen what’s on the glass. It’s simultaneously been sent to the folder (or post-processing task) you requested using the “Scan to” pop-up menu.

More power to you

As you can see, Apple has tried to make basic scanning as simple as possible: one click. That idiotproof method gives you very few options.

If you click Show Details before you scan, though, you get a special panel on the right side of the window that’s filled with useful scanning controls (Figure 11-18).

Here are some of the most useful options:

• Resolution. This is the number of tiny scanned dots per inch. 300 is about right for something you plan to print out; 75 is standard for graphics that will be viewed on the screen, like images on a web page.

• Name. Here you can specify how you want each image file named when it lands on your hard drive. If it says Scan, then the files will be called Scan 1, Scan 2, and so on.

• Format. Usually, the file format for scanned graphics is TIFF. That’s a very high-res format that’s ideal if you’re scanning precious photos for posterity. But if these images are bound for the web, you might want to choose JPEG instead; that’s the standard web format.

• Image Correction. If you choose Manual from this pop-up menu, then, incredibly, you’ll be treated to a whole expando-panel of color-correction tools: brightness, tint, saturation, a histogram, and so on.

Figure 11-18. When you use the Show Details button, you get a new panel on the right, where you can specify all the tweaky details for the scan you’re about to make: resolution, size, and so on. See how the photos have dotted lines around them? That’s because Detect Separate Items is turned on. These will be scanned into two separate files.

Opening the Details panel has another handy benefit, too: It lets you scan only a portion of what’s on the scanner glass. Once you’ve put the document or photo into the scanner, click Overview. Image Capture does a quick pass and displays on the screen whatever is on the glass. You’ll see a dotted-line rectangle around the entire scanned image—unless you’ve turned on “Detect separate images,” in which case you see a dotted-line rectangle around each item on the glass.

You can adjust these dotted-line rectangles until you’ve enclosed precisely the portion of the image you want scanned. For example, drag the rectangles’ corner handles to resize them; drag inside the rectangles to move them; drag the right end of the line inside the rectangle to rotate it; preview the rotation by pressing Control and Option.

Finally, when you think you’ve got the selection rectangle(s) correctly positioned, click Scan to trigger the actual scan.

Note

These instructions apply to the most common kind of scanner—the flatbed scanner. If you have a scanner with a document feeder—a tray or slot that sucks in one paper document after another from a stack—the instructions are only slightly different.

You may, for example, see a Mode or Scan Mode pop-up menu; if so, choose Document Feeder. You’ll want to use the Show Details option. You may also be offered a Duplex command (meaning “Scan both sides of the paper”—not all scanners can do this).

Your Stuff

The key to understanding iTunes’ layout is the pop-up menu at top left. It lists the kinds of files iTunes can manage: Music, Movies, TV Shows, Podcasts, and Audiobooks.

To see what files are on your Mac, choose one of these file types, and then click Library at top center.

The list at left lets you view your files grouped in different ways. For example, if you’re viewing Music, you can see them sorted by Recently Added, Artists, Albums, Songs, Genres, or Videos.

You may see wildly different things in the main window, depending on which of those groupings you’ve chosen. For example, if you click Songs, you see a huge alphabetical list; if you click Albums, you see a square grid of album covers.

Four Ways to Fill Your Library

iTunes gives you at least four ways to get music and video onto your computer—ready for transferring to your devices, if you want:

• Let iTunes find your files. The first time you open iTunes, it offers to search your Mac for music files and add them to its library.

• Pay for Apple Music. For $10 a month, you can listen to, and download, all the music you want from Apple’s multimillion-song catalog.

• Visit the iTunes Store. Another way to feed your library is to shop at the iTunes Store, buying songs to own them, as described starting in “iTunes Store”.

• Import music from a CD. iTunes can also convert tracks from audio CDs into digital music files. Just start up iTunes and then stick a CD into your Mac’s CD drive, if you have one. The program asks if you want to convert the songs to audio files for iTunes. (If it doesn’t ask, then click the CD icon at the top of the window.)

  The program downloads song titles and artist information from the CD and begins to add the songs to the iTunes library. (For more control over this process, choose iTunes → Preferences → General. Click “Import Settings” to see your options.

Playlists

A playlist is a list of songs you’ve placed into a set to play sequentially. For example, if you’re having a party, you can make a playlist from the current Top 40 and dance music in your library. Some people may question your taste if you, say, alternate tracks from La Bohème with Queen’s “A Night at the Opera,” but hey—it’s your playlist.

To create a playlist in iTunes, press -N or choose File → New → Playlist. A new playlist, called “Playlist,” appears in the lower-left list (“Music Playlists”), highlighted so you can rename it.

Type a name for it: “Cardio Workout,” “Shoe-Shopping Tunes,” “Hits of the Highland Lute,” or whatever. Press Enter.

At this point, you’ve created a list, but there aren’t any songs in it yet. The easiest way to fix that is to click one of the Library headings at left (like Songs or Artists), and drag song or album names onto the name of your empty playlist.

When you drag a song title onto a playlist, you’re not actually moving or copying the song. In essence, you’re creating an alias or shortcut of the original, which means you can have the same song on several different playlists.

iTunes even starts you out with some playlists of its own devising, like “Top 25 Most Played” and “Purchased” (a convenient place to find all your iTunes Store goodies listed in one place).

Smart playlists

Smart playlists constantly rebuild themselves according to criteria you specify. You might tell one to assemble 45 minutes’ worth of songs you’ve rated higher than four stars but rarely listen to, and another to list your most-often-played songs from the ’80s.

Tip

To rate a song, click the Songs heading at left; make the window wide enough that you can see the Rating column. (If you don’t see this column, right-click or two-finger click any column heading and choose Rating from the list of options.) Then just click the Rating column for a selected song. The appropriate number of stars appears—one, two, three, four, or five—depending on the position of your click. You can change a song’s rating as many times as you like—a good thing, considering the short shelf life of a pop hit these days.

To make a smart playlist, choose File → New Smart Playlist (Option--N). The dialog box shown in Figure 11-20 appears. The controls here are designed to set up a search of your music database. Figure 11-20, for example, illustrates how you’d find up to 74 minutes of Beatles tunes released between 1965 and 1968—that you’ve rated three stars or higher and that you’ve listened to no more than twice.

Figure 11-20. A smart playlist is a powerful search command for your iTunes database. You can set up certain criteria, like the hunt for particular Beatles tunes illustrated here. The “Live updating” checkbox makes iTunes keep this playlist updated as your collection changes, as you change your ratings, as your play count changes, and so on.

Apple Music

The Apple Music service, which debuted in 2015, is a rich stew of components. For $10 a month (or $15 for a family of six), you get all of the following:

• Unlimited streaming music. You can listen to any band, album, or song in the Apple Music library of 30 million songs—on demand, no ads. It’s not like listening to a radio station, where someone else is programming the music; you program the music.

  On the other hand, this is not like Apple’s traditional music store, where you pay $1 per download and you own the song. If you ever stop paying Apple the $10 a month, the music stops. You’re left with nothing.

  If you do subscribe, you can tell Siri things like, “Play the top songs of 2005” or “Play some good running music” or “Play some Taylor Swift.”

  Nor are you obligated to do all your music programming manually. Apple Music comes equipped with ready-made playlists, prepared by human editors, in all kinds of categories. There are sets of starter songs by various singers (“Intro to Sarah McLachlan”), playlists by genre and era, and playlists for specific activities like Waking Up, Running, Getting It On, and even Breaking Up.

  You can freely mix the songs you’re renting with the music you actually own. You can even download songs you don’t own for playback when you have no internet connection (as long as you’re still paying your $10 a month).

• Beats 1 Radio. Apple has a “global, 24-hour internet radio station” called Beats 1. (It actually broadcasts live for only 12 hours a day and then repeats.) Listening is free, even to nonpayers.

  Live DJs introduce songs and comment on the singers, just as on FM radio stations. Of course, you have no input on the style of music you hear on Beats 1, and you can’t pause, rewind, fast-forward, or save anything you hear for later listening. It’s old-style radio, offering the magic of serendipity.

• iTunes Match. iTunes Match, which dates back to 2011, is a cloud-based version of your iTunes library, available to any of your Apple devices. You can stream Apple’s copies of any song files you actually own—ripped from CDs or even acquired illegally. The advantages: First, you save a lot of space on your phone. Second, you can play them on any Apple gadget you own. Third, the versions Apple plays are often of higher quality than your originals.

  iTunes Match continues as a separate service for non–Apple Music subscribers (the song limit is now 100,000 songs), for $25 a year. But if you do subscribe to Apple Music, in effect you get iTunes Match automatically.

Now: Two of iTunes’ top-of-window buttons are useful only to Apple Music subscribers: For You (Apple’s automated recommendations for new music you might like) and Browse (meander through Apple’s 30 million tracks, playing them at will).

If you’re not a subscriber, those two buttons are just taking up space. Fortunately, you can hide them: Choose iTunes → Preferences → General, and turn off Show Apple Music Features.

At this point, iTunes’ top-of-window buttons change to say Library, Connect, Radio (“Audiobooks”), and Store. You’re no longer compelled to look at the two tabs reserved for paying customers.

iTunes Store

The iTunes software’s third purpose is to be the face of Apple’s original online music store, the iTunes Store. It’s not like Apple Music, where you’re only renting your music. Here you pay per song (or per movie or TV show), and you can play it as many times as you like, for as long as Apple is in business.

To shop, click Store (the final button in the top-of-screen row of buttons). Now you can buy and download whatever file type you choose from the top-left pop-up menu: Music, Movies, TV Shows, Podcasts, Audiobooks, and so on. This material goes straight into your iTunes library, just a sync away from your i-devices.

Internet Radio

When Apple says “radio,” it could mean a couple of things.

It could mean the live, hosted Beats 1 radio station that debuted as part of Apple Music but is free to all. (To listen, open the Music Store and click Beats 1 Radio in the panel at right.)

Authorizing Computers

All movies and TV shows, and some old music files, are still copy protected. When you create an account in iTunes, you automatically authorize that computer to play copy-protected songs from the iTunes Store.

You can copy those songs and videos onto a maximum of four other computers. To authorize each one to play music from your account, choose Account → Authorizations → Authorize This Computer. (Don’t worry—you have to do this just once per machine.) It’s Apple’s way of making sure you don’t go playing those music tracks on more than five computers, which would greatly displease the music studios.

When you’ve maxed out your limit and can’t authorize any more computers, you may need to deauthorize one. On the computer you wish to demote, choose Account → Authorizations → Deauthorize This Computer.

Syncing an iPad or iPhone

Another function of iTunes is to load up, and back up, your iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch. You can connect it to your computer either wirelessly—over Wi-Fi—or with the white USB cable that came with it. (To save precious swaths of forest trees, the rest of this chapter refers to “iPhone” when it means “iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch.”)

Once the phone is connected, click the near the top-left corner of the iTunes screen. Now you can look over the iPhone’s contents or sync it (read on).

Playing with Playback

To play a song or video in iTunes, double-click it. Or click iTunes’ Play button () or press the space bar. The Mac immediately begins to play the selected files or playlists.

As music plays, you can manipulate the music and the visuals of your Mac in all kinds of interesting ways. There are even playback controls on your Touch Bar, if you have one (“The Complicated Story of the Function Keys”). Some people don’t move from their Macs for months at a time.

Keyboard control

You can control iTunes’ music playback using its menus, of course, but the keyboard can be far more efficient.

Here are a few of the control keystrokes worth noting:

Function	Keystroke
Play, Pause	space bar
Next song/previous song	, or ,
Louder, quieter	-, -
Rewind, fast-forward	Option--, Option--
Eject the CD	-E
Turn Visualizer on	-T
Turn Visualizer off	-T or mouse click
Full Screen mode	Control--F
Exit full-screen Visualizer	-T, Esc, or mouse click

Playing with the graphic equalizer

If you choose Window → Equalizer, you get a handsome control console that lets you adjust the strength of each musical frequency independently (Figure 11-21).

Figure 11-21. Drag the sliders (bass on the left, treble on the right) to accommodate the strengths and weaknesses of your speakers or headphones (and listening tastes). Or save yourself the trouble—use the pop-up menu above the sliders to choose a canned set of slider positions for Classical, Dance, Jazz, Latin, and so on. These settings even transfer to your i-gadgets.

Meet Maps

When you open Maps, you see a blue dot that represents your current location. You can manipulate the map in all the usual ways:

• Zoom in or out using the keyboard (press -plus or -minus), the mouse (double-click to zoom in, add the Option key to zoom out—or just click the + or — buttons), or the trackpad (pinch two fingers to zoom out; spread them to zoom in).

• Scroll around the map using the keyboard (press the arrow keys), the mouse (drag), or the trackpad (swipe two fingers in any direction).

• Rotate the map using the mouse (drag the small compass at lower right) or the trackpad (rotate two fingers). You can return the map to “north is up” by pressing -, by clicking the compass, or by double-tapping two fingers on the trackpad.

• You can tilt into a 3D view, which makes it look more like you’re surveying the map at an angle instead of straight down. You can do that with the mouse (click the 3D button), keyboard (press -0), or the trackpad (press Option and drag with two fingers).

At any time, you can click Satellite (top right) for stunning aerial photos. Using the Show pop-up menu at lower left, you can choose Show Labels to add street names to the aerial views. There’s no guarantee that the Satellite view provides a very recent photo—the Maps database incorporates photography taken at different times—but it’s still very cool.

Finding Yourself

Don’t worry if you scroll away and can’t find yourself on the map again. Click the at the top left. A blue dot shows your current location.

Searching the Maps

You’re not always interested in finding out where you are; often, you know that much perfectly well. Instead, you want to see where something else is. Click in the search box and type what you’re seeking—or, if you spot what you want in the list of recently sought addresses, click it there. (If there’s already something in the box, then click to clear it out.) Here’s what Maps can find for you:

• An address. You can skip the periods (and usually the commas, too). And you can use abbreviations. Typing 710 w end ave ny ny will find 710 West End Avenue, New York, New York. (In any of these examples, you can type a zip code instead of a city and state.)

• An intersection. Type 57th and lexington, ny ny. Maps will find the spot where East 57th Street crosses Lexington Avenue in New York City.

• A city. Type chicago to see that city. You can zoom in from there.

• A zip code or a neighborhood. Type 10012 or greenwich village.

• A point of interest. Type washington monument or niagara falls.

• A business type. Type drugstores in albany ny or hospitals in roanoke va. (Figure 11-22 shows this idea.)

When Maps finds a specific address, an animated, red-topped pushpin comes flying down onto its precise spot on the map. A bubble identifies the location by name. Click outside the bubble to hide it. Click the map pin to bring the bubble back. Click Directions for instant driving directions.

Click the bubble to open the Location page; read on.

The Details Screen

Once you’ve found something on the map—your current position, say, or something you’ve searched for—you can drop a pin there for future reference. Choose Edit → Drop Pin. A purple pushpin appears. (You can drag the pin to move it, if your aim wasn’t exact.)

Red pushpins represent addresses you’ve looked up. And the tiny icons represent restaurants, stores, and other establishments in Apple’s (actually Yelp’s) database.

All of these pushpins and nano-icons are clickable. You get little labels that identify them. And, if you click the label, you open a details screen (Figure 11-23).

Bookmarks, Recents, Contacts

Maps is also plugged into your Contacts list, which makes it especially easy to find a friend’s house (or just to see how ritzy his neighborhood is).

When you click into the empty search bar at the top of the screen, the Bookmarks/Recents/Contacts menu appears; it can save you a lot of typing.

The list displays Recents (locations you’ve looked up recently—on your Mac or your iOS gadgets); Favorites (locations you’ve bookmarked); and Contacts (people whose addresses you’ve looked up).

When you click an entry in any of these lists, Maps drops a red, animated pushpin onto the map to identify that address.

Finding Friends and Businesses

That pushpin business also comes into play when you use Maps as a glorified national Yellow Pages. If you type, for example, pharmacy 60609, then those red pushpins show you all the drugstores in that Chicago zip code. It’s a great way to find a gas station, a cash machine, or a hospital in a pinch. Click a pushpin to see the name of the corresponding business.

As usual, you can click the pin’s bubble to open a details screen. If you’ve searched for a friend, then you see the corresponding Contacts card. If you’ve searched for a business, then you get a screen containing its phone number, address, website, and so on; often, you get a beautiful page of Yelp information (photos, reviews, ratings).

Remember that you can click a web address to open it or send the phone number to your phone to dial it. (“Hello, what time do you close today?”)

Figure 11-23. On the details screen that sprouts when you click a red pushpin, buttons let you bookmark the spot, get directions, or add the information to Contacts.
If the location is a restaurant or a business, you might get screens full of useful information: customer reviews, photos, hours of operation, delivery and reservation information, and so on.
Best of all, the button lets you share this location with other people—via AirDrop, email, text message, and so on—or with your other Apple gadgets.

Directions

The Directions panel opens when you click the Directions button (top left of Maps), or when you click the Directions button on any location’s information panel.

The Directions panel offers two search bars: Start and End. Plug in two addresses—the Start address may already say “Current Location”—and let Maps guide you from the first to the second.

When everything looks good, Maps displays an overview of the route you’re about to follow. In fact, it may propose several routes on the map, labeled with tags that show how long they’ll take: “1 hr 9 min,” “1 hr 15 min,” and “1 hr 28 min,” for example.

If you click one of these routes or tags, the top of the Directions panel lets you know the distance and estimated time for that option and identifies the main roads you’ll be on.

Now, nobody expects you to use your Mac as a portable GPS device. You’re not going to park it on your dashboard and have it tell you when to turn.

What you can do, though, is send your selected directions to an iPhone or an iPad and use that as your GPS. See Figure 11-23.

Or, if you’re just planning your trip, click any of the steps in the Directions panel; the map zooms in to that particular turn. Your route looks like it’s been drawn in with a highlighter.

Public Transportation

Once you’ve called up some directions, you can click Transit (just below the Start/End box) to see Maps’ suggestion of public-transportation methods to get there. Figure 11-24 shows the result.

Figure 11-24. Maps knows the complete bus, train, and subway schedules for an ever-growing number of cities. In those cities, click Transit to see your options.
Left: Here Maps is suggesting three different ways to get there using public transit. (Use the Leaving Soon pop-up menu to specify when you plan to travel.)
If you click Details, you’re shown the specifics of each rail, bus, or walking segment (inset, right).

Traffic

How’s this for a cool feature? Free, real-time traffic reporting. From the Show pop-up menu (bottom of the screen), choose Show Traffic. Now traffic jams appear on the relevant roads, for your stressing pleasure; orange dotted lines for slow traffic, and red ones for true stop-and-go nightmares.

If you don’t see any dotted lines, it’s either because traffic is moving fine or because Apple doesn’t have any information for those roads. Usually, you get traffic info only for highways, and only in metropolitan areas.

Tiny icons also appear, representing accidents, construction sites, closed roads, and general alerts. Click the icon to make a quick description tag appear (like “Accident, Park Ave at State St”); click that tag to read a full-screen account of what’s going on.

Flyover

You don’t need to be headed somewhere to use Flyover, the Maps app’s most dazzling feature; it has nothing to do with navigation, really. You can operate it even while you’re lying on your couch like a slug; see Figure 11-25.

Figure 11-25. Flyover is a dynamic, interactive, photographic 3D model of 240 major cities. It looks something like an aerial video, except that you control the virtual camera. You can pan around these scenes, looking over and around buildings to see what’s behind them. To create this feature, Apple says, it spent two years filming cities from helicopters.

To engage Flyover, enter a city you’d like to tour, and then switch into Satellite view. Click the 3D logo in the lower-right corner.

Now you can go nuts, conducting your own virtual chopper tour of the city using the zooming and rotating tricks described earlier. Only a couple of things are different:

• To move around the map, drag it—or use two fingers on the trackpad.

• To change your camera angle relative to the ground, press Option as you use two fingers on the trackpad—or drag up or down on the compass at lower right.

• To zoom in, spread two fingers on the trackpad—or click the + and — buttons.

It’s immersing, completely amazing, and very unlikely to make you airsick.

Flyover Tours

Apple wasn’t satisfied with letting you pan around virtual 3D city models using your finger. It’s also prepared to give you city tours in 3D.

Use the search box to enter the name of a big city or major landmark. (Some examples: San Francisco, New York, Tokyo, London, Paris, Rome, Madrid, Vancouver, San Jose, Cape Town, Stockholm. Or places like Yosemite National Park, the Sydney Opera House, Stonehenge, St. Peter’s Basilica, or the Brooklyn Bridge.)

When you hit Search, a new button appears on the map: “3D Flyover Tour.” (You can also find the button in the Info panel for a city or place.) When you hit Start, you’re in for a crazy treat: a fully automated video tour of that city or place. The San Francisco tour shows you the baseball park, the famous Transamerica Pyramid, the Alcatraz prison island, and so on. It’s slow, soothing, cool, and definitely something that paper maps never did.

Creating a Note

To create a new page in your digital notepad, choose File → New Note (-N), or click the button on the top toolbar.

Once the new page appears, type away (Figure 11-27).

As you go, you can dress up your notes with a variety of formatting:

• Paragraph formatting. The button gives you one-click access to paragraph styles like Title (big and bold), Heading, or lists with automatic bullets, dashes, or numbering.

• Text formatting. You have control over fonts, type sizes, colors, paragraph alignment, and indentation, using the commands in the Format menu.

• Checklists. The Checklist button turns any selected paragraphs into a checklist with little circles that you can check off, as shown in Figure 11-27.

• Tables. See “Tables”.

Figure 11-27. The first line of each page becomes the name of that note, as represented in the searchable list of notes (center column).
In this illustration, somebody has also opened up the Folders list, the skinny column at far left. Here you can choose which account’s notes you want to see: your iCloud notes, Gmail, Exchange, or what have you.

While you work, you can paste or drag photos and other graphics into a note, too—and links, maps, and even documents, like PDF files, Word documents, or Excel spreadsheets. Drag such a document into a note from the desktop; there it becomes an icon that you can double-click to open later.

All of this, of course, syncs flawlessly with your iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch (running iOS 9 or later).

You can click to delete the current note. Or you can click to send the note to someone, by email, AirDrop, Messages, or whatever (“Does the file have the correct file name suffix?”).

Conversely, the button in lots of other programs now lists Notes, meaning that you can send material (map, photo, link, text, address, phone number…) directly to either a new note page or an existing one.

The Notes List

As you create more pages, the list of pages (at center in Figure 11-27) becomes more useful. It’s your table of contents for the Notes pad. It’s a quick way to jump from one note to another.

Here’s what this list displays:

• The first lines of your notes, along with the time or date you last edited them. If there’s a photo or sketch on a note—an unlocked one, anyway—you see its thumbnail, too.

  To open a note, click its name. To delete a note, click it and then press the Delete key.

• Pinned notes. Ordinarily, your notes appear chronologically, most recent at the top. In Notes → Preferences, you can specify that they be sorted by Date Changed or Title instead.

  But you may have a couple of notes—things you refer to a lot—that you want to appear at the top all the time. Passwords, credit card numbers, or frequent-flyer numbers, for example.

  That’s why you can pin an individual note to the top of the list, where it won’t move. To do that, click a note and then choose File → Pin Note. Or right-click or two-finger click the note and, from the shortcut menu, choose Pin Note.

  You unpin a note using the same techniques (but choose Unpin Note instead).

There’s a search box, too. You can search all your notes instantly.

Collaborative Notes

You and your buddies can edit a page in Notes simultaneously, over the internet. It’s great when you and your spouse are planning a dinner party and brainstorming about guests and the menu, for example. Also great for adding items to the grocery or to-do list even after your spouse has left the house to get them taken care of.

Figure 11-28 shows the procedure.

Once you’ve shared a note, the person icon at the top turns dark, and a matching icon appears next to the note’s name in the master list (Figure 11-28, bottom). At any time, you can stop sharing the note—or add more people to its collaboration—by clicking that person icon again and editing the sharing panel that appears.

Figure 11-28. Top: To share a note with someone, click the button shown here by the cursor. Send the invitation by message, email, or whatever.
Bottom: The live editing isn’t as animated as it is in Google Docs—you don’t see letter-by-letter typing—but you see any changes the other person makes highlighted briefly in yellow.

Locking Notes

Locked, hidden, password-protected Notes pages are here at last, suitable for listing birthday presents you intend to get for your nosy kid, the formula for your top-secret invisibility potion, or your illicit lovers’ names.

Note that you hide and show all your locked notes with a single password. You can’t (that is, don’t have to) make up a different password for every note.

To lock a note, click the button in the toolbar; from the shortcut menu, choose Lock This Note. Enter a password for locking/unlocking all your notes (or, if you’ve done this before, enter the password).

As long as your locked notes are all unlocked, you can still see and edit them. But when there’s any risk of somebody else coming along and seeing them (on your Mac, iPhone, iPad, or any other synced gadget), click the again—and this time choose Close All Locked Notes.

Now all you see of the locked notes are their titles. Everything on them is replaced by a “This note is locked” message (and a password box).

If you correctly enter the password, then all your hidden notes are suddenly viewable and editable.

Use your power wisely.

The Attachments Browser

The Attachments Browser in Notes is a single screen showing all attachments from all notes, all rounded up on one scrolling screen (see Figure 11-29). Just as in Messages, it’s often incredibly convenient to scan the visual attachments as a way to find a particular note.

Figure 11-29. The Notes Attachments Browser lists every photo, video, sketch, scan (from your iPhone), map, website, audio file, and other document that appears in any note in your Notes, all in one place. Click one to jump to the note that contains it—a great way to find something you’re looking for without having to know when you wrote it or what it said.
Shown here: The Photos & Videos tab (top) and the Scans tab (bottom), which displays scans you’ve made on your iPhone or iPad (a feature introduced in iOS 11). You can’t create a scan directly in Notes from your Mac.

Notes Folders

You can organize your notes into folders, for ease of wading through them. Any folders you create on the Mac also show up on your iPhone/iPad.

The key to understanding this feature is the slide-out Folders list, which you can see at left in Figure 11-27. You can make it appear by choosing View → Show Folders List, or by clicking the icon on the toolbar. Then you can adjust the Folder list’s width by dragging the vertical line at its right edge.

To make a new folder, choose File → New Folder, or click New Folder below the list; name the folder and then press Return. You can then drag existing notes into its name in the Folders list. (The usual rules apply: You can select a swath of notes in a list by clicking the first and then Shift-clicking the last. Or you can click individual, nonconsecutive notes by clicking with the key pressed.)

Click a folder’s name to see the notes inside it. (Click “All [account name]” to see all the notes in that account. Note accounts are covered on the next page.)

To create a new note within a folder, click the folder’s name first. If you don’t click any folder’s name before you create the note, then it goes into the general Notes category.

You can also rename a folder (right-click or two-finger click its name; choose Rename Folder), delete one (right-click or two-finger click its name; choose Delete Folder), put one inside another (drag its name), and move a folder to a different account—for example, from your iCloud account to your Google one—by dragging it.

Tables

When you click , you get a table with two columns and two rows. Click in a cell and then start typing. To move to the next cell, press Tab on the keyboard (or click the cell).

Poke around long enough, and you can find controls for just about every formatting tool you’d ever need in a table (except the ability to manually adjust column widths and the ability to format the cell borders).

The keys to most of it are the tiny handles ( and ) that appear when you click inside a cell (Figure 11-30, top):

• Add or delete columns. Click inside a cell to make the and buttons appear. Click to make the command menu () appear (Figure 11-27, bottom). It offers commands like Add Column (Before or After the current one), and Delete Column. Click and then to see equivalent commands for Rows.

  If you’re typing in the lower-right cell, pressing Return also makes a new row.

• Move a row or column. Click or to highlight the corresponding row or column; now you can drag it to a new spot.

• Select cells. Drag across a couple of cells to make the selection handles appear; you can drag them to expand the highlighting. The usual Edit-menu commands (Cut, Copy, Paste) are now at your disposal. So are the Format-menu commands for bold, italic, underline, and so on.

• Convert text into a table. Select the text, and then click the table button (). The selected text winds up in the first column—one cell per paragraph.

• Convert table into text. Click inside a cell, and then click . Choose Convert to Text.

Figure 11-30. Top: Tables give Notes new information-storing capabilities.
Bottom: The key to adjusting and editing tables? The weird little and handles on the cells.

Notes Accounts

Notes also can show you the contents of the Notes modules on Google, Yahoo, AOL, or another IMAP email account. You’ll see each account’s notes in the Folder list, as you can see in Figure 11-27—and from there, you can drag notes hither and yon, among accounts, with abandon. (If the Folder list is hidden, click the button or choose View → Show Folders.)

To set this up, open System Preferences → Internet Accounts. Click the account you want (Exchange, Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, or whatever); finally, turn the Notes switch On.

That should do it. Now each account’s notes appear under their own heading in the Folders list. And your notes are synced, both ways.

All of this makes life a little more complex, of course. For example, when you create a note, you have to worry about which account it’s about to go into. To do that, be sure to specify an account name (and a folder within it, if necessary) before you create the new note.

Still Photos

When you find an effect that looks appealing (or unappealing, depending on your goals), click the camera button, or press -Return key. You see and hear a three-second countdown, and then snap!—your screen flashes white to add illumination, and the resulting photo appears on your screen. Its thumbnail joins the collection at the bottom.

4-Up Photos

If you click the 4-Up button identified at the bottom left of Figure 11-31, then when you click the Camera icon (or press -Return key), the 3-2-1 countdown begins, and then Photo Booth snaps four consecutive photos in two seconds. You can exploit the timing just the way you would in a real photo booth—make four different expressions, horse around, whatever.

The result is a single graphic with four panes, kind of like what you get at a shopping mall photo booth. (In Photo Booth, they appear rakishly assembled at an angle; but when you export the image, they appear straight, like panes of a window.) Its icon plops into the row of thumbnails at the bottom of the window, just like the single still photos.

Movies

Photo Booth can also record videos, complete with those wacky distortion effects. Click the third icon below the screen, the Movie icon (Figure 11-31), and then click the camera button (or press -T). You get the 3-2-1 countdown—but this time, Photo Booth records a video, with sound, until you click the Stop button. (The little digital counter at left reminds you that you’re still filming.) When it’s over, the movie’s icon appears in the row of thumbnails, ready to play or export.

Exporting Shots and Movies

To look at a photo or movie you’ve captured, click its thumbnail in the scrolling row at the bottom of the screen. (To return to camera mode, click the .)

Fortunately, these masterpieces of goofiness and distortion aren’t locked in Photo Booth forever. You can share them with your adoring public in any of these ways:

• Click the button. The pop-up menu offers the usual offerings of the Share menu (“Does the file have the correct file name suffix?”): Mail, Messages, AirDrop, Twitter, Facebook, and Flickr, plus Add to Photos and Add to Aperture, if you use those programs.

  There’s also a “Change profile picture” command (to make this photo represent you on the Login screen), and a More button that opens the System Preferences → Extensions screen described in “Scheduled Startup and Shutdown”.

  And speaking of interesting headshots: If you export a 4-Up image and choose it as your Buddy Picture, you’ll get an animated buddy icon. That is, your tiny icon cycles among the four images, creating a crude sort of animation. It’s sort of annoying, actually, but all the kids are doing it.

• Click the photo or movie, and then choose File → Export. (Or just right-click or two-finger click the photo or movie itself; choose Export from the shortcut menu.) You’re asked to name and save the exported image or video.

  Tip

  If you choose File → Export Original instead, then the exported photo or video lacks any of the effects you’ve applied. You get the original, undistorted, underlying photo.

• Drag a thumbnail out of the window to your desktop.

As you set off on your Photo Booth adventures, a note of caution: Keep it away from children. They won’t move from Photo Booth for the next 12 years.

The Layout

Photos is meant to look, feel, and work exactly like Photos on the iPhone/iPad. For example, when you click Photos in the source list at left, Photos automatically groups your photos into sets that are easy to navigate (Figure 11-32).

Figure 11-32. Whenever you’re looking at a grid of tiny thumbnail images (in a Year, Collection, or Moment), hold your mouse down within the batch. A larger thumbnail sprouts from your cursor, and you can slide your mouse around within the mosaic to find a particular photo, or batch of them. Release to open that photo at full-screen size for inspection.

Photos boasts a lot of recent improvements. For example, the Auto-Enhance button () is now right on the main toolbar in Viewer mode. It does a very good job at fixing the color, exposure, and contrast values for a photo—and now you don’t have to heave into Editing mode to apply it to a photo, or a whole batch of them.

The new Imports view shows not just the latest batch of imported photos, but the batch before that, and the batch before that, and so on.

Using the Showing pop-up menu at top right, you can now filter your view by Favorites, photos you’ve edited, only movies, only stills, and so on.

The Sidebar

The Sidebar list, which lists your albums and other useful categories, is no longer hideable in macOS Mojave (at least until you enter Full Screen view). Its buttons correspond precisely to the ones you’d see on the iPhone or iPad in the Photos app.

The following pages describe each Sidebar entity in turn.

Memories

Memories (Figure 11-33) are automatically selected groups of pix and videos from certain time periods or trips, which, with a click, become gorgeous, musical slideshows. Photos creates three new ones a day, which often dredges up delightful photos of events you’d nearly forgotten about. Most people are pleasantly surprised at how coherent and well-created these are, even though they’re totally automatic. Photos, short pieces of your videos, and even scrolling panoramas are all first-class citizens in these slideshows.

Right off the bat, you see a few of Photos’ suggestions, represented as clearly labeled billboards (“Cape Cod Summer,” “Best of Last Week”…). Memories can auto-recognize and auto-build slideshows of your pets, babies, outdoor activities, performances, weddings, birthdays, and games.

Double-click to open a Memory; at this point, you can scroll down to see more about what’s in it. You’ll see the photos that will be in it, as well as who’s in it (People), and where the photos came from (Places).

Figure 11-33. These are Memories: lovely, musical slideshows of pictures and movies that the program chooses using tasteful artificial intelligence.

At the very bottom, you’ll see these options:

• Delete Memory. Vaporizes this computer-generated collection (does not touch the originals).

• Add to Favorite Memories. Adds this slideshow to a new folder on the Albums tab called Favorite Memories, for quick access later.

• Block Memory. This command sounds like a parody of a psychological technique, but it actually does what it says: It prevents Photos from ever reminding you again, in Memories, of this day, place, or person. (When you click Block Memory, a shortcut menu identifies the factors that Photos used to create this Memory—Person, Place, or Day—so that you can tell it which of those three is causing you the psychic pain.)

Tip

If, after years of therapy, you can face those painful memories again, click Photos → Preferences → General → Reset Blocked Memories.

Anyway, the real fun begins when you click to start an instant slideshow. A panel offers a choice of transition styles (Sliding Panels, Reflections, and so on) and musical soundtracks—and then, when you click Play Slideshow, the show begins. It’s usually fantastic.

When you come back to your senses, note that you can wiggle the mouse for playback controls—pause, skip, adjust volume, exit, and so on.

Note

On the Mac, you can’t edit which photos and videos appear in a Memory, as you can on the iPhone or iPad.

You can create a Memory using your own choice of photos, too. Open any album and click Show as Memory in the header. Or click the name of any Collection, Moment, or Year to open those photos as a Memory.

Opening Photos

To open any selected thumbnail so you can see it at full size, press the Return key. (Press it again to close the photo.)

While the photo is open, you can zoom in or out—either drag the top-left slider, or use two fingers on your trackpad (pinch or spread them). If your Mac has a Touch Bar (“The Complicated Story of the Function Keys”), you can click or drag your finger through it to scroll through the photos in this set.

You can open a video this way, too. Play it by clicking or hitting the space bar, or trim off the dead ends using the → Trim command. For slo-mo videos from the iPhone, you can even adjust the start and stop points for the slow effect.

Editing Photos

Before reading a word about editing in Photos, first absorb this: All the changes described on these pages are nondestructive. That is, Photos never forgets the original photo. At any time, hours or years later, you can select a photo and then choose Image → Revert to Original, thus undoing any changes you’ve ever made. In other words, your changes are never really permanent.

The Rest of Photos

Photos also offers keywords, searching, sharing via iCloud (see “Revert”), slideshows, video trimming, photo books and calendars, and more.

Honestly, Photos is a huge program with a lot going on; you could write a whole book about it. In fact, someone has; check out Photos for Mac and iOS: The Missing Manual.

Importing Camera Photos

Preview can import pictures directly from a digital camera (or iPhone), meaning that there are now three macOS apps that can perform that duty. (Photos and Image Capture are the other two.) It’s sometimes handy to use Preview for this purpose, though, because it has some great tools for photos: color-correction controls, size/resolution options, format conversion, and so on.

The actual importing process, though, is exactly like using Image Capture. Connect your camera, choose File → Import from [your camera’s name], and carry on as described in “Image Capture”.

Operating Your Scanner

Preview can also operate a scanner, auto-straighten the scanned images, and export them as PDF files, JPEG graphics, and so on.

This, too, is exactly like using Image Capture to operate your scanner. Only the first step is different. Open Preview, choose File → Import from Scanner → [your scanner’s name], and proceed as described in “Scanning”. Clearly Apple saved some time by reusing some code.

Multiple Pages, Multiple Views

One hallmark of Preview is its effortless handling of multiples: multiple fax pages, multiple PDF files, batches of photos, and so on. The key to understanding the possibilities is mastering the Sidebar, shown in Figure 11-35. The idea is that these thumbnails let you navigate pages or graphics without having to open a rat’s nest of individual windows.

Figure 11-35. The Sidebar can display thumbnails, a table of contents, or annotations, or it can appear as a full-screen array of thumbnail images. Drag the central scroll bar to make the Sidebar bigger; drag the lower-right corner of the Sidebar to make the whole Preview window bigger.

To control the Sidebar, choose one of these commands from the View menu:

• Hide Sidebar. Gets the Sidebar out of your way.

• Thumbnails. This standard view (Figure 11-35, left) offers a scrolling vertical list of miniature pages or photos. Click one to see it at full size in the main window. Make the thumbnails larger or smaller by dragging the window/Sidebar dividing line.

• Table of Contents. If you’re looking over photos, this option turns the Sidebar into a scrolling list of their names. If you’ve opened a group of PDFs all at once, you see a list of them. Or, if you have a PDF that contains chapter headings, you see them listed in the Sidebar as, yes, a table of contents.

• Highlights & Notes. Preview is a better PDF editor than ever. If you add comments and highlighting to a PDF document, as described later in this section, you can view all of them in this tidy list—and click one to jump to it.

• Bookmarks. Here you can see any bookmarks you’ve added to a PDF, as described later in this section.

• Contact Sheet. When you choose this view, the main window scrolls away, leaving you with a full screen of thumbnail miniatures. It’s like a light table where you can look over all your photos or PDF pages at once. Make them bigger or smaller using the magnifying glass buttons at top left.

Preview as Graphics Viewer

Preview is surprisingly versatile. It can display and manipulate pictures saved in a wide variety of formats, including common graphics formats like JPEG, TIFF, PICT, and GIF; less commonly used formats like BMP, PNG, SGI, and TGA; and even Photoshop, EPS, and PDF graphics.

Preview as PDF Reader

Preview is a nearly full-blown equivalent of Adobe Reader, the free program used by millions to read PDF documents. It lets you search PDF documents, copy text out of them, add comments, fill in forms, click live hyperlinks, add highlighting, circle certain passages, type in notes—features that used to be available only in Adobe’s Acrobat Reader. You can even fill out PDF forms, typing into boxes on the electronic document.

Here are the basics:

• Zoom in and out using -plus and -minus.

  Tip

  Another way to get a closer look: Press the ` key (upper left of your keyboard), or choose Tools → Show Magnifier. Now a big magnifying glass follows your cursor; you can even press + or — to zoom in or out within it. Dismiss the magnifier by pressing ` again.

• Use the View menu commands to control how the PDF document appears: as two-page spreads; as single scrolling sheets of “paper towel”; with borders that indicate ends of pages; and so on.

• Press the space bar to page through a document (add Shift to page upward). The Page Up and Page Down keys do the same thing.

  Tip

  Some PDF documents include a table of contents, which you’ll see in Preview’s Sidebar, complete with flippy triangles that denote chapter headings. Use the and keys to walk through these chapter headings, and then expand one that looks good by pressing the key. Collapse it again with the key. In other words, you expand and collapse flippy triangles in Preview just as you do in a Finder list view.

• Bookmark your place by choosing Bookmarks → Add Bookmark (-D). You’ll be able to return to that spot by choosing its name—the page number and the first several words on the page—from the Bookmarks menu.

  These remain living, editable entities even after the document is saved and reopened. These are full-blown Acrobat annotations; they’ll show up when your PDF document is opened by Acrobat Reader or even on Windows PCs.

• If you want to copy material out of a PDF document—for pasting into a word processor, for example, where you can edit it—click the Text tool (the on the toolbar) or choose Tools → Text Selection. Now you can drag through some text (and even graphics) and then choose Edit → Copy, just as though the PDF document were a web page. You can even drag across page boundaries.

  Tip

  Ordinarily, dragging across text selects the text from one edge of the page to the other, even if the PDF document is laid out in columns. But Preview is a bit smarter. It can tell if you’re trying to get the text in only one column and highlights just that part automatically.

• To find a word or phrase somewhere in a PDF document, press -F (or choose Edit → Find → Find) to open the Find box—or just type into the box on the right of the toolbar, if it’s open. Proceed as shown in Figure 11-37.

  The search results show a snippet of the actual text surrounding each “find,” along with the number of matches per page, and even a thumbnail of the page itself. It’s all about context, baby.

  

  Figure 11-37. Type into the search box. Matches appear in the Sidebar, with page numbers; click one to go there. You can sort the found list either by rank (how likely Preview thinks it is to be what you’re looking for) or in page order; click the appropriate button to sort.

• You can save a single page from a PDF as a TIFF file to use it in other graphics, word-processing, or page-layout programs that might not directly recognize PDF.

  To extract a page, use the usual File → Export command, making sure to choose the new file format from the pop-up menu. (If you choose a format like Photoshop or JPEG, Preview converts only the currently selected page of your PDF document. That’s because there’s no such thing as a multipage Photoshop or JPEG document. But you already knew that.)

  Tip

  You can also scan a new page directly into an open PDF document, or use a page you shot on your i-gadget. Choose File → Import from [your device].

• Add keywords to a graphic or PDF (choose Tools → Show Inspector; click the tab; click the + button to fill them in). Later, you’ll be able to call up these documents with a quick Spotlight search for those details.

Annotations and Drawing Tools

Preview has become the Godzilla of PDF editing programs. It is, in fact, a full-blown drawing program now, with a choice of shapes, colors, lines, arrows, and text boxes to dress up a PDF document. These are identical to the drawing tools in Mail, so they’re worth getting to know.

You can type notes (in a box or a bubble), add clickable links (to web addresses or other spots in the document), or use circles, arrows, rectangles, strikethroughs, underlining, or colored highlighting to draw your PDF readers’ attention to certain sections. (You can dress up photos this way, too.) In fact, you can even use your laptop’s trackpad to draw on a document—or to sign one.

To highlight text in a PDF document, click the button on the toolbar, and then drag across the text. Use the pop-up menu next to the to choose a different highlighter color, or to choose underlining or strikethrough styles.

For the more ambitious annotation styles, like signing a document or drawing on it, open the Markup toolbar, shown in Figure 11-38. To do that, click on the toolbar. At this point, the icons on the toolbar offer these features:

• Text Selection, Rectangular Selection. These toggles let you highlight text in a document (so you can copy it, for example) or select a chunk of a graphic.

• Sketch. This remarkable tool lets you draw freehand in your document—and marvel as Preview cleans up your lines. For example, if you draw what’s more or less a diagonal line, Preview straightens it and makes it a perfect 45 degrees. If you draw what seems to be a box or a circle, Preview zaps it into perfection. Use the , , and buttons to specify the line thickness, add a colored border, or fill the interior with a background color. Figure 11-38 shows the process.

• Shapes. Use this pop-up menu to choose what kind of perfect shape you want to draw: line, arrow, circle, square, and so on. It will use whatever thickness and color you’ve chosen from the and pop-up menus. Once you’ve selected a tool, drag diagonally on your document to place the shape.

  The two icons at the bottom of this palette are unusual for a drawing program, but handy when you want to draw attention to some part of a document or photo.

  At lower left in the Shapes pop-up menu, the Mask dims out the entire document except the rectangular portion you enclose. The one at lower right, the loupe, magnifies a circular area to draw the viewer’s eye to it (Figure 11-38, bottom). Whatever attention-flagging markings you enclose using these tools become part of the finished, exported PDF or graphic.

• Text. Click to place a text box on the image. You can drag it or reshape it—and, of course, you can replace the word “Text” inside it with much superior words of your own. Use the pop-up menu to choose a font, color, size, and style; use the and buttons to add a colored border or fill the interior with a background color.

• Sign. See the next section for details.

• Note. Click to place a virtual Post-it note onto the document. As you type or paste into it, the note expands; you can’t otherwise control its size or shape. But when you click outside the note, it collapses down into a little square button. At this point, you can change the note’s background color (right-click or two-finger click; choose a color from the shortcut menu); drag the little square to move the note; or open the note back up by double-clicking.

  

  Figure 11-38. As you draw a freehand shape (top), macOS helpfully straightens your straight lines and makes your curved ones perfect (middle).
  If you actually prefer your imperfect original, then you can click the original (or any other variation) from the little floating palette (shown at left in the middle illustration).
  The Shapes pop-up menu () offers a range of fascinating drawing options. They include the classic Speech Bubble and the loupe, which produces a magnified view of one circular area (bottom).
  While you’re editing a loupe, you see a tiny green dot. Drag it to adjust the magnification inside the circle; drag the blue one to change the circle’s size.

  Tip

  Later you can view a tidy list of all your notes and highlighted passages by choosing View → Highlighting and Notes. On the resulting panel, Preview ordinarily displays each text note with your name and the date. If you’d rather not have that info added, then choose Preview → Preferences, click PDF, and then turn off “Add name to annotations.”

• Shape Style. This palette governs the thickness and style of whatever line or shape you’re drawing (or you’ve selected). There are some cool options here, including dashed lines, shadowed ones, chalky-looking ones—and ones with arrowheads.

• Border Color, Fill Color. These palettes affect the border color (line color) and interior background color of whatever shape you’re drawing (or have selected).

• Text Style. Here are your font, size, and style commands for whatever text you’re about to type (or have selected).

Once you’ve made an annotation, you can drag it around, drag its blue control dots to change its shape, edit the text inside it, and so on.

Signing PDF Documents with Your Real Signature

Of macOS’s 47,000 features, few are quite as slick or useful as the PDF signature option (Figure 11-39). It lets your Mac memorize your signature, either by taking a picture of it—or by letting you sign with your finger on your laptop’s trackpad.

Figure 11-39. Top: Hold up your written signature page in front of your Mac’s camera. Make sure it’s big enough to fill the box on the left side—never mind that it appears backward—and position it so that it sits on the blue line, as shown here. After a moment, your isolated, beautifully photographed signature appears in the Preview box.
Middle: You can choose a stored signature from the little pop-up menu.
Bottom: Drag to move your inserted signature; drag the corner dots to adjust its size.

Once Preview has stored your signature, you can slap it into the PDF documents that will come through your life.

The first step is to teach Preview what your signature looks like. On the Markup toolbar, click the Sign pop-up menu, . In the resulting window, you’re offered two tabs:

• Trackpad. If your Mac has a trackpad, this option lets you write out your signature with your finger! Click where it says “Click Here to Begin,” and then draw away.

  Plan ahead; the width of the trackpad is all the space you’ve got. When you’re done, press any key and then click Done. The result may not look exactly like your pen-and-paper signature, but it’ll do for most purposes.

• Camera. Sign your name on a piece of white paper; hold it up to your Mac’s camera, as shown in Figure 11-39. When the positioning looks good, click Done. You’ve just stored your signature. (You have to do this only once—per signature, anyway.)

Now, then. When the time comes to sign a document, make the Markup toolbar visible. From the pop-up menu, choose the signature’s name (Figure 11-39, middle.)

The signature appears in its own graphics box. Drag it to a new position, or drag the blue handles to resize it (Figure 11-39, bottom).

Fill in PDF Forms

Here’s a feature that could save a lot of trees: fill-inable PDF forms.

Figure 11-40. When you fill in a form, the cursor changes automatically into an insertion point when it detects a box or a line you can fill in. And it turns into a pointing-finger icon when it’s over a checkbox. Click to put a checkmark in that box; click again to remove the checkmark. It’s hours of fun for the whole family!
When you’re finished, save the document as you would any other. Amazingly, you’ll be able to edit your responses when you open the PDF document again later.

Lots and lots of PDF documents are forms that you’re supposed to fill out—from IRS tax forms to school permission slips. Preview is smart enough to recognize boxes to fill in, lines to type on, and checkboxes to click, meaning that you don’t have to print, fill out, and then scan these things anymore. And it manages to find those lines, text boxes, and checkboxes on any PDF document, not just those that were originally designed to be filled in by PDF form-filling software. See Figure 11-40.

The Toolbar

There’s a lot you can do with Preview’s toolbar. You can customize it (by choosing View → Customize Toolbar), rearrange its icons (by -dragging them sideways), and remove icons (by -dragging them downward).

The Details Bubble

If you click an item’s button, you open the Details bubble. See Figure 11-41.

Here are the options you’ll find:

• On a Day. Reminders can remind you at a certain time on a certain date. In the Details bubble, next to “remind me,” turn on On a Day. The proposed time is the next “o’clock”—if it’s 12:15 now, the app suggests 1:00. But you can click the date to open a clickable mini-calendar (to change the date), or click the digits of the time to edit them.

  

  Figure 11-41. To open the Details panel, double-click the reminder item in the list, or click the button to its right.
  To close the panel, click Done or click anywhere else in Reminders.

• At a Location. If you turn on this checkbox, your Mac or phone will use its location circuits to remind you of this item when you arrive at a certain place or leave a certain place. (Your laptop will remind you, if it’s turned on and within a Wi-Fi hotspot. But more often, this option will be useful if you have an iPhone or iPad that’s on the same iCloud account. Record the reminder on your Mac—receive the reminder on your phone.)

  The little pop-up menu here proposes Current Location—wherever you are at the moment. That’s handy if, for example, you’re dropping off your dry cleaning and want to remember to pick it up the next time you’re driving by.

  But you can click that line to specify Home (your home address, as you’ve set it up in Contacts). You can also start typing any city name, or the name of any person in your Contacts whose address you’ve specified. You’ll even see “Porky Pig Home” and “Porky Pig Work,” if Porky has a couple of addresses on file.

  The final step here is to click either Leaving or Arriving. Later, your gadgets will remind you at the appointed time, or as you approach (or leave) the appointed address. It’s fairly mind-blowing the first few times it happens.

• repeat. Reminders can remind you about things that recur in your life, like quarterly tax payments, haircuts, and anniversaries. Click “repeat” if you want this reminder to appear every day, week, two weeks, month, or year. (This option appears only if you’ve turned on the On a Day option.)

• priority. Click this pop-up menu to specify whether this item has High, Medium, or Low priority—or None. You’ll see one, two, or three exclamation marks (!!!) next to each item in your Reminders list, indicating its urgency. In some of the calendar programs that sync with Reminders, you can sort your task list by priority.

• note. Here’s a handy place where you can record freehand notes about this item: an address, a phone number, details of any kind.

Click Done to close the Details bubble and record your changes.

The Calendar of Deadline Hell

As you now know, Reminders can give you warnings of upcoming deadlines and to-do items. You don’t have to wait until it gives you a reminder, though. Click Scheduled at the top of the list to review a list of all upcoming reminders.

Lists

Handily enough, you can create more than one to-do list, each with its own name: a Groceries list, Kids’ Chores, a running tally of expenses, and so on. Here’s a great way to log what you eat if you’re on a diet, or to keep a list of movies people recommend.

If you share an iCloud account with another family member, you might create a different Reminder list for each person. (Of course, now you run the risk that your spouse might sneakily add items to your to-do list!)

If you have an Exchange account, one of your lists can be synced to your corporate Tasks list. It doesn’t offer all the features of the other lists in Reminders, but at least it’s kept tidy and separate. (Just set up your Exchange account in System Preferences → Internet Accounts.)

The list of lists is at the left side of Reminders; it’s visible in Figure 11-41.

At the outset, the list of lists lists only one list: Reminders. But you can create others. Click the + button at the bottom-left corner, or choose File → New List, or hit -L, or just double-click any blank spot in the list of lists. (If you have more than one online account set up, like an iCloud account and a Yahoo account, you’ll have to specify which account gets this list).

In any case, you’ve just made a new list called New List. Type to rename it to “Groceries list,” “Movies list,” whatever you like. (You can also get rid of a list by clicking it and then pressing the Delete key.)

Once you’ve created some lists, you can switch among them by pressing the and keys to “walk” through the list.

You can assign a task to a different list by dragging it. Click any blank part of its line (not the text itself), and drag carefully onto the name of a different list in the List list at left.

Syncing Reminders

Once you’ve set up a few reminders in Reminders, you’ll marvel as it gracefully integrates with the Notification Center when it wants your attention.

But it also auto-synchronizes your to-do lists across other gadgets, like iPhones, iPads, iPod Touches, other Macs, and even Windows PCs.

To give it permission for that kind of sharing, open System Preferences → iCloud and turn on the Reminders checkbox.

Note, however, that Reminders also can coordinate with the to-do list features of Exchange and so-called CalDAV services (Yahoo is one). To set them up, open System Preferences → Internet Accounts. Click the account you want (like Exchange or Yahoo); finally, turn the Reminders switch On.

That should do it. Now your to-do lists are synced, both ways.

Creating Sticky Notes

The first time you launch Stickies, a couple of sample notes appear automatically, describing some of the program’s features. You can quickly dispose of each sample by clicking the Close button in the upper-left corner of each note or by choosing File → Close (-W). Each time you close a note, a dialog box asks if you want to save it. If you click Delete Note, the note disappears permanently.

To create a new note, choose File → New Note (-N). Then start typing or:

• Drag text in from any other program. Or drag text clippings from the desktop directly into your note. You can also drag a graphics file into a note to add a picture. You can even drag a sound or a movie in.

• Drag the icon of a PDF file into a note. (Stickies can accommodate multipage PDF files. At first, you see only the first page, but the scroll bar reveals the rest.)

• Choose File → Import Text and select any plain text file or RTF (Rich Text Format) document to bring it into a note.

• Drag URLs into a note directly from a web browser’s address bar.

  Tip

  If one particular note contains your most important information—your to-do list, say—you can force it to remain in front of all other windows, even if Stickies itself gets shunted to the background. Just click the note, and then choose Note → Floating Window.

  

  Figure 11-42. In the old days of the Mac, the notes you created with Stickies were text-only, single-font deals. Today, however, you can use a mix of fonts, colors, and styles within each note. You can even paste in graphics, sounds, and movies (like PICT, GIF, JPEG, QuickTime, AIFF, whole PDF files, and so on), creating the world’s most elaborate reminders and to-do lists.
  After you paste in an image, you can even use the Markup tool to draw, scribble and highlight on it as you would in many other apps. Neat!

• In many Apple programs, you can select a chunk of text and then choose Make New Sticky Note from the program’s Services menu, or press Shift--Y. This command launches Stickies, creates a new note, and fills it with your selected text—all in one step.

Have a favorite style for your sticky notes? First create a new note, choosing the color and text style you like and setting it to the size you prefer. Then choose Window → Use as Default. All new notes you create now appear in the size, font, and color you’ve chosen.

Growing and Shrinking Notes

Stickies includes a few built-in tricks for managing a deskful of notes:

• Drag any corner of the note to make it larger or smaller onscreen.

• Use the small triangle in the upper-right corner of each note to zoom and shrink note windows with a single click. The first click expands a note nearly to full-screen size. Another click pops the note back down to normal size.

• The best option: Double-click anywhere along the dark strip at the top of each note to collapse it into a compact one-line mini-note. You also can collapse a selected note by choosing Window → Collapse (-M).

Formatting Notes

Stickies has word processor–like commands for creating designer sticky notes, with any combination of fonts, colors, and styles (explore the Font menu). You can also choose from six background colors from the Color menu.

Saving Sticky Notes

The notes you create in Stickies last only as long as you keep them open. If you close a note to get it out of the way (and click Delete Note in the confirmation box), it vanishes permanently.

If you want to preserve the information you’ve stuffed into your notes in a more permanent form, you can do it in one of two ways: Close the note but hit the Save button, or use File → Export Text. Either way, you save the note as a standalone TextEdit document, with the following format options:

• Plain Text. This option saves your note as a plain text file, with neither formatting nor pictures.

• RTF. RTF stands for Rich Text Format, a special exchange format that preserves most formatting, including fonts, style, and color choices. You can open the resulting RTF file in just about any word processor with all your formatting still intact.

• RTFD. RTFD, a strange and powerful variant of RTF, is a Rich Text Format document with attachments. How do you “attach” items to an RTFD file? Drag the icon of an actual application (Preview, Calculator, or whatever) or a multipage PDF file, into a sticky note. The icon for the program or document appears in the note, but double-clicking the icon doesn’t do anything. When you export the note as an RTFD file, the result is a TextEdit document that has embedded within it the entire program or document you dragged in. The program icon appears just as it did in the sticky note, but if you double-click the icon, the program actually opens.

  You can also paste a graphic into your sticky note. When you export the note as an RTFD document, the resulting package file includes a graphics file of the format you pasted.

Customizing Your Portfolio

It’s fairly unlikely that your stock portfolio contains just Apple, Google, and Facebook. Fortunately, you can customize the list of stocks to reflect the companies you do own (or want to track).

Figure 11-43. Top: The Stocks app, newly arrived on the Mac, tracks your portfolio in the left-side column. At the right, you see news stories related to your holdings—a key factor in their value fluctuations.
Bottom: Click a stock to see its price graph over time. Drag through the graph to isolate a certain time interval.

To edit the list, click in the lower-right corner of the stocks list. You arrive at the editing screen, where these choices await:

• Delete a stock by clicking the button and then the Remove confirmation button.

• Rearrange the list by dragging the grip strips on the right side.

• Add a stock by clicking + in the top-left corner; in the search box, type in the company’s name or symbol for a scrolling list of companies with matching names. Click + for one you want to track. You return to the stocks-list editing screen.

When you’re finished setting up your stock list, click Cancel and then Done.

TextEdit’s Two Personalities

The one confusing aspect of TextEdit is that it’s both a plain text editor (no formatting; globally compatible) and a true word processor (fonts, sizes, styles; compatible with other word processors). Here’s the scheme:

• You can change a plain text document to a formatted one by choosing Format → Make Rich Text or Shift--T. The ruler appears automatically to remind you that a new world of formatting has just become available.

• Conversely, you can change a formatted document (a Word file you’ve opened, for example) to a plain text document by choosing Format → Make Plain Text (or, again, Shift--T). An alert message appears to point out that you’re about to lose all formatting.

• If you know what kind of document you always want to open, go to the TextEdit → Preferences dialog box; on the New Document tab, select Rich Text or Plain Text. That’s what you’ll get each time you choose File → New.

Working in TextEdit

As you begin typing, all the usual word-processing rules apply, with a few twists:

• Choose bold, italic, and font sizes using the formatting toolbar. (You can still use the commands in the Format menu.) You can even create subscripts or superscripts, change the color of the text (Format → Font → Show Colors), and so on.

• Common paragraph-alignment options—Align Left, Align Right, Center, Justify—are all available as toolbar buttons and also reside in the Format → Text submenu. Adjust the line spacing (single, double, or any fraction or multiple) using the Spacing pop-up menu in the toolbar.

• The toolbar also offers automatic bulleting and numbering of paragraphs. Just choose the numbering style you prefer from the pop-up menu at the right end of the toolbar.

  Tip

  If your Mac has a Touch Bar (“The Complicated Story of the Function Keys”), all of these formatting controls appear as glowing buttons—the better to apply styles without lifting your hands from the keyboard.

• You can select several nonadjacent bits of text simultaneously. To pull this off, highlight your first piece of text by dragging, and then press as you use the mouse to select more text. Bingo: You’ve highlighted two separate chunks of text.

  When you’re done selecting bits of text here and there, you can operate on them en masse. For example, you can make them all bold or italic in one fell swoop. You can even use the Cut, Copy, and Paste commands, as described in the next section. When you cut or copy, the command acts upon all your selections at once.

  You can also drag any one of the highlighted portions to a new area, confident that the other chunks will come along for the ride. All the selected areas wind up consolidated in their new location.

  Tip

  If you Option-drag one of the highlighted bits, you copy all selected chunks, leaving the originals in place.

• Similarly, you can use the Find command. To do that, choose Edit → Find → Find (or just press -F). Fill in the search box; the sought-for term appears highlighted everywhere in your document at once. (You can also search and replace, using the other commands in the Edit → Find submenu.)

• If you Option-drag vertically, you can freely select an arbitrary column of text (not necessarily the entire page width). This technique is useful when you want to select only one column in a multicolumn layout, or when you want to select the numbers in a list and format them all at once.

Style Sheets

A style is a prepackaged collection of formatting attributes that you can apply and reapply with a click of the mouse (bold, 24-point Optima, double-spaced, centered, for instance). You can create as many styles as you need: chapter headings, sidebar styles, and so on. You end up with a collection of custom-tailored styles for each of the repeating elements of your document.

Once you’ve created your styles, you can apply them as you need them, confident in the knowledge that they’ll be consistent throughout the document. During the editing process, if you notice that you accidentally styled a headline using the Subhead style, you can fix the problem by simply reapplying the correct style.

• Creating a named style. To create a style, format some text so it looks the way you like it, complete with font, color, line spacing, tab settings, and so on.

  Then, from the pop-up menu at the left end of the toolbar, choose Show Styles (Figure 11-45). Click Add To Favorites, type a name for the style, turn on both checkboxes, and then click Add.

  

  Figure 11-45. Highlight the text you want to format. Then, from the ¶ pop-up menu in the toolbar, choose Show Styles. With each click of the button, you summon a snippet of the next chunk of formatting. When you find one you like, you can either click Apply (to zap the highlighted text into submission) or Add To Favorites (to reuse this canned style later). In the latter case, you can give the new style a name (bottom).

• Applying a style. Later, when you want to reuse the formatting you set up, highlight some text and then choose the appropriate name from the pop-up menu. TextEdit applies the formatting.

  Tip

  If you simply click inside a paragraph, applying a style affects only paragraph attributes, like line spacing, tab stops, and alignment. If you highlight a random chunk of text instead, applying a style affects only character attributes, like the font and type size. If you highlight an entire paragraph, however, both text and paragraph formatting appear.

• Deleting a style. To delete a superfluous style, choose Show Styles from the pop-up menu on the toolbar. Click the Favorite Styles button, choose the unwanted style’s name from the pop-up menu, and then click Remove From Favorites. (Deleting a style doesn’t affect any formatting that’s already in your document; it just removes the name from the Styles menu.)

• Replacing all occurrences. You can highlight every occurrence of a certain style at once—and then change, copy, or delete them all at once.

  To make this work, choose Show Styles from the pop-up menu. Choose the style you want to work on. (If Document Styles is selected, then click the button to page through the styles; if Favorite Styles is selected, then choose from the pop-up menu.) Then click Select.

  In the little details sheet that appears, click the options you want, and then click Select. TextEdit highlights every occurrence of that style in the entire document (or selection). At this point, you can use any of the usual text-formatting controls to modify them all simultaneously.

• Formatting by example. In TextEdit, you can also use Option--C and Option--V (Format → Font → Copy Style and Format → Font → Paste Style) to grab formatting from one place in your document and reuse it elsewhere. (Of course, you can’t apply styles in text-only documents.)

Tables

Tables can make life a lot easier when you want to create a resumé, agenda, program booklet, list, multiple-choice test, web page, or another document where numbers, words, and phrases must be aligned across the page. In the bad old days, people did it by pressing the Tab key to line up columns—a technique that turned into a nightmare as soon as you tried to add or delete text. But using a word processor’s table feature is light-years easier and more flexible, because each row of a table expands to contain whatever you put into it. Everything else in its row remains aligned.

• Create a table by choosing Format → Table. The floating Table palette appears (Figure 11-46). Use it to specify how many rows and columns you want. The placeholder table in your document adjusts itself in real time.

• Format the table using the other controls in the Table palette. The Alignment controls let you specify how the text in the table cells hugs its border. Cell controls the thickness of the line around the selected cells’ borders (or, if you enter 0, makes the table walls invisible). The color swatch next to Cell specifies the color of the solid lines. The Cell Background controls let you color in the table cells with colors of your choice. (Choose Color Fill from the pop-up menu, and then click the color swatch.) This is an especially valuable option for web designers.

• Adjust the rows and columns by dragging the cell borders.

• Merge two selected cells by clicking Merge Cells in the Table palette. Once you’ve done that, you can use the Split Cells button to split them apart again. (Split Cells doesn’t work except in cells you’ve previously merged.)

• Nest a table inside a cell of another by clicking in the cell and then clicking Nest Table. Change the numbers in the Row and Columns boxes to set up its dimensions (Figure 11-46).

Figure 11-46. Note to web designers: TextEdit may not be Dreamweaver, but it’s great for spinning out quick web pages, thanks to the table features. Here you can see that a big table forms the underlying structure for this web page, along with a couple of nested ones and color selections.

TextEdit as Web Designer

The Table palette isn’t the only clue that Apple intends TextEdit to be a quick-and-dirty web page design program. Consider these other tools:

• You can easily add graphics to the page by dragging or pasting them into a document. The program understands many common image formats, including TIFF, PICT, JPEG and PNG.

• You can add web-style hyperlinks by highlighting “Click here” (or whatever the link says), choosing Edit → Add Link (-K), and then entering the web address in the resulting dialog box. Or just drag a link in from Safari, Mail, or another program. (To edit the link later, right-click or two-finger click it, and then choose Edit Link.)

  Tip

  Of course, you can also have TextEdit convert typed links into clickable ones automatically as you type them. That’s the purpose of the Smart Links option in TextEdit → Preferences.

• To save a brand-new document as an HTML (web page) file, choose File → Save; from the File Format pop-up menu, choose Web Page. (To save an existing TextEdit document as an HTML file, choose File → Duplicate and then File → Save; choose Web Archive Document from the pop-up menu.)

• Don’t miss the HTML options in TextEdit → Preferences. On the Open and Save tab, you can specify what kind of HTML document you want to produce, what Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) setting you want, and whether or not you want TextEdit to include code to preserve blank areas (white space) in your layout.

TextEdit Preferences

Most of the settings in the TextEdit Preferences → New Document pane have no effect on documents that are already open—only on documents you open or create from now on. Most of the settings are self-explanatory; nonetheless, handy explanatory balloons appear if you point to an option without clicking. Here are a few settings that may not be immediately clear:

• Font. If Helvetica 12 doesn’t float your boat, you can change TextEdit’s starting font. In fact, you can set two default fonts—one for Rich Text documents and another one for plain text files.

  Note

  By definition, plain text files don’t have any formatting. So whatever font you choose here for plain text files is for your viewing pleasure only. If you plan to send the file to anyone else, remember that the font choice won’t be saved with the document.

• Window Size. These settings have no effect unless you’re in Wrap to Window mode, in which the text rewraps to fit the window width, as opposed to Wrap to Page mode. (You choose these options from TextEdit’s Format menu.) If you are in Wrap to Window mode, then these dimensions determine the size of the window that appears each time you create a new TextEdit document.

• Properties. These boxes—Author, Company, and Copyright—are some of the tags that Spotlight inspects when it searches your Mac. If you’d like to be able to round up your documents by these characteristics, fill them in here to specify the information you want to use for most documents. (To fill them in differently for individual documents, choose File → Show Properties instead.)

• Options. These are the on/off switches for the various typing aids described in Chapter 6: smart quotes, data detectors, text replacement, and so on.

TextEdit’s Other Writing Tools

TextEdit includes a few other very useful document-editing tools:

• Allow Hyphenation. When you select this command from the Format menu, TextEdit breaks up words by syllable and inserts hyphens when necessary in order to create more visually pleasing line breaks.

  Tip

  It’s especially important to turn this feature on if your paragraph alignment is set to Justify, or if you create narrow columns of text. If hyphenation is turned off, then TextEdit won’t break up long words at the end of a line—even if it leaves big, ugly gaps between words.

• Prevent Editing. When you turn this option on (in the Format menu), you’re locked out. You can select and copy text to your heart’s content, but you can’t change anything. Prevent Editing mode can be useful if you want to prevent yourself from making accidental changes to a file, but it’s not much of a security feature. (All anyone has to do is choose Format → Allow Editing to regain full editing privileges.)

• Spelling and Grammar. These aren’t TextEdit features; they’re system-wide macOS features, and they’re described starting in “Power Typing”.

Editing Your Recording

You might not guess that such a tiny, self-effacing app actually offers some basic editing functions, but it does. Click a recording, then Edit to open its Edit screen (Figure 11-47, right).

Here you have four options:

• Record over it. When the blue playhead line is parked at the beginning or middle of the audio, the big red button says Replace. Click it to record over part (or all) of your original recording. This is kind of handy. If you recorded a brilliant speech, but stumbled on the opening line (or any line, actually), you can replace it without having to redo the whole thing. Hit to stop.

• Add onto it. You can also add on more audio to your existing recording. Just park the blue playhead line at the end of the current sound waves, and then hit Resume. Hit to stop.

• Trim it. You can trim off the beginning or end of your audio clip—which is great, since that’s where you’ll usually find “dead air” or microphone fumbling before the good stuff starts playing.

  To do that, click the Crop button (). At this point, the “map” of the entire sound recording (at the middle of the screen) sprouts yellow crop handles. Drag them inward to isolate the part you want to keep. When you’re close, use the magnified area at top to fine-tune the trip points, using the vertical yellow lines. Play the sound as necessary to guide you ().

  Click Trim to shave away everything outside your selected area. If you like the result, click Save. If you’d rather try again, choose Edit → Undo. Or hit Cancel to forget the whole thing.

• Cut out a chunk. To cut something out of the middle, isolate the undesired audio using the crop and trim handles as described above. This time, though, hit the Delete button. You’ve just chopped the selection out of the middle.

  Here again, you can hit Save (to preserve the edit), or Cancel to back out of the entire operation.

The beauty of all of this, by the way, is that your audio recordings can now magically and wirelessly appear on all your other Apple machinery, just as though they’re calendar appointments or Safari bookmarks. The on/off switch for this syncing is hiding away in System Preferences → iCloud → iCloud Drive → Options → Voice Memos.

Activity Monitor

Activity Monitor is designed to let the technologically savvy Mac fan see how much of the Mac’s available power is being tapped at any given moment.

AirPort Utility

You use the AirPort Utility to set up and manage AirPort base stations (Apple’s wireless Wi-Fi networking routers).

If you click Continue, it presents a series of screens, posing one question at a time: what you want to name the network, what password you want for it, and so on. Once you’ve followed the steps and answered the questions, your AirPort hardware will be properly configured and ready to use.

Audio MIDI Setup

This program has a split personality; its name is a description of its two halves:

• Audio. When you first open Audio MIDI Setup, you see a complete summary of the audio inputs and outputs available on your Mac right now. It’s a like the Sound pane of System Preferences, but with a lot more geeky detail. Here, for example, you can specify the recording level for your Mac’s microphone, or even change the audio quality it records.

  For most people, this is all meaningless, because most Macs have only one input (the microphone) and one output (the speakers). But if you’re sitting in your darkened music studio, humming with high-tech audio gear whose software has been designed to work with this little program, you’ll smile when you see this tab.

  There’s even a Configure Speakers button, for those audiophilic Mac fans who’ve attached stereo or even surround-sound speaker systems to their Macs.

  Tip

  Using the menu at the bottom of the window, you can turn your various audio inputs (that is, microphones, line inputs, and so on) on or off. You can even direct your Mac’s system beeps to pour forth from one set of speakers (like the one built into your Mac), and all other sound, like music, through a different set.

• MIDI. MIDI stands for Musical Instrument Digital Interface, a standard “language” for inter-synthesizer communication. It’s available to music software companies who have written their wares to capitalize on these tools.

  When you choose Window → Show MIDI Window, you get a window that represents your recording-studio configuration. By clicking Add Device, you create a new icon that represents one of your pieces of gear. Double-click the icon to specify its make and model. Finally, by dragging lines from the “in” and “out” arrows, you teach your Mac and its MIDI software how the various components are wired together.

Bluetooth File Exchange

One of the luxuries of using a Mac that has Bluetooth is the ability to shoot files (to colleagues who own similarly clever gadgets) through the air, up to 30 feet away. Bluetooth File Exchange makes it possible, as described in “Via Bluetooth”.

Boot Camp Assistant

Since 2006, Macs have come with Intel chips inside, meaning that Macs and PCs use exactly the same memory, hard drives, monitors, mice, keyboards, networking protocols, and processors. With just a little bit of setup, therefore, your Mac can run Windows and Windows programs!

Think of all the potential switchers who are tempted by the Mac’s sleek looks, yet worry about leaving Windows behind entirely. Or the people who love Apple’s productivity programs but have jobs that rely on Microsoft Access, Outlook, or some other piece of Windows corporateware. Even true-blue Mac fans occasionally look longingly at some of the Windows-only games, websites, or movie download services they thought they’d never be able to use.

Today, there are two ways to run Windows on a Mac:

• Restart it in Boot Camp. Boot Camp Assistant lets you restart your Mac into Windows.

  At that point, it’s a full-blown Windows PC, with no trace of the Mac on the screen. It runs at 100 percent of the speed of a real PC, because it is one. Compatibility with Windows software is excellent. The only downsides: Your laptop battery life isn’t as good, and you have to restart the Mac to return to the familiar world of macOS.

  Tip

  What’s cool, though, is that even when you’re running Windows, you can still access your Mac files and folders, as described next.

• Open Parallels or Fusion. The problem with Boot Camp is that every time you switch to or from Windows, you have to close down everything you were working on and restart the computer. You lose two or three minutes each way.

  There is another way: an $80 utility called Parallels Desktop for Mac (parallels.com), or its rival, VMware Fusion (vmware.com). These two programs let you run Windows and macOS simultaneously; Windows hangs out in a window of its own, while the Mac is running macOS. You’re getting about 90 percent of Boot Camp’s Windows speed—which is plenty fast for everything but 3D games.

  Having virtualization software on your Mac is a beautiful thing. You can be working on a design in iWork, duck into a Microsoft Access database (Windows only), look up an address, copy it, and paste it back into the Mac program.

  You can even install Boot Camp and Parallels/Fusion. They coexist beautifully on a single Mac and can even use the same copy of Windows.

Both techniques require you to provide your own copy of Windows. Since Boot Camp comes with the Mac, here’s a quick rundown.

Using Boot Camp

At this point, your Mac is actually a true Windows PC. You can install and run Windows programs, utilities, and even games; you’ll discover that they run really fast and well.

Most of your Mac’s features work in Windows: Ethernet and Wi-Fi networking, audio input and output, built-in camera, brightness and volume keys, key, multitouch trackpad gestures, Bluetooth, and so on. You’ll also discover a new Control Panel icon and system-tray pop-up menu, as described later in this section.

Figure 11-49. Top: To choose your preferred operating system—the one that always starts up unless you intervene—choose → System Preferences. Click Startup Disk, and then click the icon for either macOS or Windows. Next, either click Restart (if you want to switch right now) or close the panel. The same controls are available when you’re running Windows.
Middle: To open the Boot Camp Control Panel, choose its name from its icon in the Windows system tray.
Bottom: This display, known as the Startup Manager, appears when you press Option during startup. It displays all the disk icons or partitions that contain bootable operating systems. Click the one you want, and then click the up-arrow button.

Note

Once you’re running Windows, you might wonder: How am I supposed to right-click? I don’t have a two-button mouse or two-button trackpad!

Yes, you do. See “Notes on Right-Clicking” for a panoply of options.

Keyboard translation guide

Now, if you really want to learn about Windows, you need a book like Windows 10: The Missing Manual.

But suggesting that you go buy another huge book would be tacky. So here’s just enough to get by.

First of all, a Mac keyboard and a Windows keyboard aren’t the same. Each has keys that would strike the other as extremely goofy. Still, you can trigger almost any keystroke that Windows is expecting by substituting special Apple keystrokes, like this:

Windows keystroke	Apple keystroke
Ctrl+Alt+Delete	Control-Option-Delete
Alt	Option
Ctrl key
Backspace	Delete
Delete (forward delete)	(on laptops, fn-Delete)
Enter	Return
Num Lock	Clear (laptops: fn-F6)
Print Screen (PrtScn)	F14 (laptops: fn-F11)
Print Active Window (Alt+PrtScn)	Option-F14 (laptops: Option-fn-F11)

The keyboard shortcuts in your programs are mostly the same as on the Mac, but you have to substitute the key for the Ctrl key. So in Windows programs on the Mac, Copy, Save, and Print are now -C, -S, and -P.

Tip

You know that awesome two-finger scrolling trick on Mac laptops? It works when you’re running Windows, too.

If you really want to understand how your Mac keyboard corresponds to a PC keyboard, don’t miss Apple’s thrilling document on the subject at support.apple.com/kb/HT1167.

ColorSync Utility

If you use ColorSync, then you probably know already that this utility is for people in the high-end color printing business. Its tabs include these two:

• Profile First Aid. This tab performs a fairly esoteric task: repairing ColorSync profiles that may be “broken” because they don’t strictly conform to the ICC profile specifications. (International Color Consortium profiles are part of Apple’s ColorSync color management system.) If a profile for your specific monitor or printer doesn’t appear in the Profiles tab of this program when it should, then Profile First Aid is the tool you need to fix it.

• Profiles. This tab lets you review all the ColorSync profiles installed on your system. The area on the right side of the window displays information about each ColorSync profile you select from the list on the left.

For more information on ColorSync, see “ColorSync”.

Console

Console is a viewer for all of macOS’s logs—the behind-the-scenes, internal Unix record of your Mac’s activities.

Opening the Console log is a bit like stepping into an operating room during a complex surgery: You’re exposed to stuff the average person just isn’t supposed to see. (Typical Console entries: “kCGErrorCannotComplete” or “doGetDisplayTransferByTable.”) You can adjust the font and word wrapping using Console’s Font menu, but the truth is that the phrase “CGXGetWindowType: Invalid window -1” looks ugly in just about any font!

Console isn’t useless, however. These messages can be of significant value to programmers who are debugging software or troubleshooting a messy problem, or, occasionally, to someone you’ve called for tech support.

For example, your crash logs are detailed technical descriptions of what went wrong when various programs crashed, and what was stored in memory at the time.

Unfortunately, there’s not much plain English here to help you understand the crash, or how to avoid it in the future. Most of it runs along the lines of “Exception: EXC_BAD_ACCESS (0x0001); Codes: KERN_INVALID_ADDRESS (0x0001) at 0x2f6b657d.”

DigitalColor Meter

DigitalColor Meter can grab the exact color value of any pixel on your screen, which can be helpful when matching colors in web page construction or other design work. After launching the DigitalColor Meter, just point anywhere on your screen. A magnified view appears in the meter window, and the RGB (red-green-blue) color value of the pixels appears in the meter window.

Here are some tips for using the DigitalColor Meter to capture color information from your screen:

• To home in on the exact pixel (and color) you want to measure, drag the Aperture Size slider to the smallest size: 1 pixel.

• Press -X (View → Lock X) to freeze your cursor at its current horizontal position; you can now move it only horizontally. Or press -Y (View → Lock Y) to freeze your cursor at its current vertical position. You can also lock the cursor in both directions by pressing -L (View → Lock Position). (Press the keystroke again to unlock.) The idea is to make it easier for you to snap to exactly the pixel you want.

• When the Aperture Size slider is set to view more than one pixel, DigitalColor Meter measures the average value of the pixels being examined.

Disk Utility

This important program has two key functions:

• It serves as macOS’s own disk-repair program: a powerful administration tool that lets you repair, erase, format, and partition disks. You’ll probably use Disk Utility most often for its First Aid feature, which solves a number of weird little Mac glitches. But it’s also worth keeping in mind in case you ever find yourself facing a serious disk problem.

• Disk Utility also creates and manages disk images, electronic versions of disks or folders that you can exchange electronically with other people.

The following discussion tackles the program’s two personalities one at a time.

Disk Utility, the hard drive repair program

When you first open Disk Utility, you see, at a glance, what kinds of files are eating up your disk space (see Figure 11-50).

Figure 11-50. The left Disk Utility panel lists your hard drive and any other disks in or attached to your Mac at the moment.
The main welcome screen shows where all your disk space is going, color coded by category.

When you click the name of your hard drive’s mechanism, like “500 GB Hitachi iC25N0…” (not the “Macintosh HD” volume label below it), you see a cluster of buttons, one for each of the main Disk Utility functions:

• First Aid. This is the disk-repair part of Disk Utility, and it does a terrific job at fixing many disk problems. When you’re troubleshooting, Disk Utility should be your first resort.

  To use it, click the icon of a disk and then click First Aid. After asking for confirmation (click Run), this function scours every single file on your drive, checking for corruption, flakiness, or trouble spots on the disk.

  If Disk First Aid reports that it’s unable to fix the problem, then it’s time to invest in a program like DiskWarrior (alsoft.com).

• Partition. With the Partition tools, you can erase a hard drive in such a way that you subdivide its surface. Each chunk will be represented on your screen by another hard drive icon (Figure 11-51).

  There are some very good reasons not to partition a drive these days: A partitioned hard drive is more difficult to resurrect after a serious crash, requires more navigation when you want to open a particular file, and offers no speed or safety benefits. And if you’re using APFS (see the box on the previous page), of course, creating new volumes is a much more modern, flexible way of subdividing your drive.

  On the other hand, there’s one very good reason to do it: Partitioning is the only way to use Boot Camp, described starting in “Bluetooth File Exchange”. When you’re using Boot Camp, your Mac is a Mac when running off of one partition, and a Windows PC when starting up from another one. (But you don’t use Disk Utility in that case; you use Boot Camp Assistant.)

  Note

  Partitioning is not the same thing as creating APFS volumes, described in the box on the previous page.

  

  Figure 11-51. To add each new partition, click +.
  Now drag the tiny, round handles to adjust the dividers in the pie chart; that’s how you specify the relative sizes of the partitions you want. Assign a name and a format for each partition in the Partition Information area, and then click Apply.

• Erase. Select a disk, choose a format—always APFS or macOS Extended (Journaled), unless you’re formatting a disk for use on a Windows PC—give it a name, and then click Erase to wipe a disk clean. See the box on the previous page for more on APFS.

  Tip

  Click Security Options to view a slider. It can strike four spots on the spectrum from the speed of the disk erasing to the security of it. At the far-left position, macOS erases the drive quickly, but a recovery app could recover the files. At the more secure settings, macOS performs various additional time-consuming scrubbing tasks, writing over your old files with randomized gibberish, making file recovery impossible. Something to remember if you sell your Mac!

• Restore. You can create an exact replica of a volume. From the Sidebar, choose the target volume—the one that will become a replica of some other one—and then click Restore. Choose the volume you want to replicate, click Restore again, and then Done.

• Unmount. This button ejects whatever disk you’ve selected in the left-side list.

• Info. Click to view a little table of super-technical details about the selected drive.

Grapher

This little unsung app is an amazing piece of work. It lets you create 2D or 3D graphs of staggering beauty and complexity.

When you first open Grapher, you’re asked to choose what kind of virtual “graph paper” you want: two-dimensional (standard, polar, logarithmic, and so on) or three-dimensional (cubic, spherical, cylindrical, and so on). Click a name to see a preview; when you’re happy with the selection, click Open.

Now the main Grapher window appears (Figure 11-53). Do yourself a favor. Spend a few wow-inducing minutes choosing canned equations from the Examples menu and watching how Grapher whips up gorgeous, colorful, sometimes animated graphs on the fly.

When you’re ready to plug in an equation of your own, type it into the text box at the top of the window. If you’re not such a math hotshot, or you’re not sure of the equation format, work from the canned equations and mathematical building blocks that appear when you choose Equation → New Equation from Template or Window → Show Equation Palette (a floating window containing a huge selection of math symbols and constants).

Figure 11-53. In general, you type equations into Grapher just as you would on paper (like z=2xy). If in doubt, check the online help, which offers enough hints on functions, constants, differential equations, series, and periodic equations to keep the A Beautiful Mind guy busy for days.

Once the graph is up on the screen, you can tailor it like this:

• To move a 2D graph in the window, choose View → Move Tool and then drag; to move a 3D graph, -drag it.

• To rotate a 3D graph, drag in any direction. If you add the Option key, you flip the graph around on one axis.

• To change the colors, line thicknesses, 3D “walls,” and other graphic elements, click the button (or choose Window → Show Inspector) to open the formatting palette. The controls you find here vary by graph type, but rest assured that Grapher can accommodate your every visual whim.

• To change the fonts and sizes, choose Grapher → Preferences. On the Equations panel, the four sliders let you specify the relative sizes of the text elements. If you click the sample equation, the Fonts panel appears, so you can go to town fiddling with the type.

When it’s all over, you can preserve your masterpiece using any of these techniques:

• Export a graphic by choosing File → Export.

• Copy an equation to the Clipboard by right-clicking or two-finger clicking it and choosing Copy As → TIFF (or EPS, or text, or whatever) from the shortcut menu. Now you can paste it into another program.

• Export an animated graph by choosing Equation → Create Animation. The dialog box lets you specify how long you want the movie to last (and a lot of other things).

Finally, click Create Animation. After a moment, the finished movie appears. If you like it, choose File → Save As to preserve it on your hard drive for future generations.

Keychain Access

Keychain Access memorizes and stores all your secret information—passwords for network access, file servers, FTP sites, web pages, and other secure items. For instructions on using Keychain Access, see “The Keychain”.

Migration Assistant

This little cutie automates the transfer of all your stuff from another Mac, or even a Windows PC, to your current Mac: your Home folder, network settings, programs, and more. This comes in extremely handy when you buy a newer, better Mac—or when you need Time Machine to recover an entire dead Mac’s worth of data. (It can also copy everything over from a secondary hard drive or partition.) The instructions on the screen guide you through the process (see Appendix A).

Screenshot

You know the fancy new screen-capture feature Apple added to macOS Mojave? (If not, you can read up in “Screen-Capture Keystrokes”.) Well, behind the scenes, it’s just this application at work. It opens when you press that Shift--5 keystroke.

Script Editor

This little program, formerly called AppleScript Editor, is where you can type up your own AppleScripts. You can read about these programmery software robots in the free online appendix to this chapter, “Automator & AppleScript.” It’s available on this book’s “Missing CD” page at missingmanuals.com.

System Information

System Information (formerly called System Profiler) is a great tool for learning exactly what’s installed on your Mac and what’s not—in terms of both hardware and software. The people who answer the phones on Apple’s tech-support line are particularly fond of System Information, since the detailed information it reports can be very useful for troubleshooting nasty problems.

There are actually two versions of System Information: a quick, easy snapshot and a ridiculously detailed version:

• Snapshot. Choose → About This Mac. You get a concise, attractive summary info screen that reveals your macOS version, your Mac’s memory amount, its serial number, what processor it has inside, and so on (Figure 11-54, top).

  Tip

  If you click your macOS version number in the Overview box, you get to see its build number—something primarily of interest to programmers and people who beta-test macOS.

  

  Figure 11-54. This dialog box gives you a plain-English display of the Mac details you probably care the most about: memory, screen, storage, serial number, macOS version, and so on. (Click the tabs across the top for more details.) To proceed from here to the full System Information program, click System Report.

  The tabs across the top reveal similarly precise details about your Displays and Storage. The Support tab offers links to various sources of online help, and the Service tab reveals your options for getting the Mac fixed.

• Ridiculously detailed. Open Applications → Utilities; double-click System Information. (You can also open the System Information program from inside the About This Mac dialog box shown in Figure 11-54 at top; just click System Report.)

When System Information opens, it reports information about your Mac in a list down the left side (Figure 11-55). The details fall into these categories:

• Hardware. Click this word to see precisely which model Mac you have, what kind of chip is inside (and how many), how much memory it has, and its serial number.

  If you expand the flippy triangle, you get to see details about which Memory slots are filled and the size of the memory module in each slot; what kind of Disc Burning your Mac can do (DVD-R, DVD+R, and so on); what PCI cards are installed in your expansion slots; what Graphics/Displays circuitry you have (graphics card and monitor); what’s attached to your SATA bus (internal drives, like your hard drive); what’s connected to your Thunderbolt, USB, and FireWire chains, if anything; and much more.

  

  Figure 11-55. Does your MacBook’s chip run at 2 GHz or 2.6? What percentage of your external hard drive is filled up? What are the version numbers of every program installed on your Mac? Can your DVD burner burn dual-layer discs? Does your laptop have any open slots for extra RAM?

• Network details what Wi-Fi components you have, what internet connection Locations you’ve established, and so on.

• Software shows which version of macOS you have and what your computer’s name is, as far as the network is concerned (“Pat’s Computer,” for example).

  The Applications list documents every program on your system, with version information. It’s useful for spotting duplicate copies of programs.

  Similar information shows up in the Extensions panel. Extensions are the drivers for the Mac’s various components, which sit in the System → Library → Extensions folder. Whatever is in that folder is what you see listed in this panel. Other categories include self-explanatory lists like Fonts, Preference Panes, and Startup Items.

  Finally, the Logs panel reveals your Mac’s secret diary: a record of the traumatic events it experiences from day to day. (Many of these are the same as those revealed by the Console utility; see “Console”.)

Terminal

Underneath its shiny skin, macOS is actually Unix, one of the oldest and most respected operating systems in use today. But you’d never know it by looking; Unix is a world without icons, menus, or dialog boxes. You operate it by typing out memorized commands at a special prompt, called the command line. The mouse is almost useless here.

Wait a minute—Apple’s ultramodern operating system, with a command line? What’s going on? Actually, the command line never went away. At universities and corporations worldwide, professional computer nerds still value the efficiency of pounding away at the little C: or $ prompts.

You never have to use macOS’s command line. In fact, Apple has swept it pretty far under the rug. There are, however, some tasks you can perform only at the command line.

Terminal is your keyhole into macOS’s Unix innards. There’s a whole chapter on it waiting for you on this book’s “Missing CD” page at missingmanuals.com.

VoiceOver Utility

For details on this screen-reader software, see “VoiceOver Tab”.

About This Mac

Turns out that the information screen shown in Figure 11-54, which opens when you choose → About This Mac, is actually a standalone app. It’s in your the Library → Core Services → Applications folder.

Archive Utility

Here is the actual app that performs the zipping and unzipping functions described in “Optimized Storage”.

Directory Utility

On a corporate network, a highly paid network administrator may use this little app to access and manage the corporate directory servers—centralized databases and drives. If you are that highly paid network administrator, you should read Apple’s guide without delay: support.apple.com/guide/directory-utility/.

DVD Player

For the six people whose Macs still have physical DVD drives, Apple offers this ancient relic of a playback program.

Feedback Assistant

Apple tests out new versions of its operating systems on willing volunteers. Anyone who’s interested can sign up for Apple’s public beta-testing program at beta.apple.com. If you join, you’ll get to try out upcoming versions of macOS before they’re released to the teeming masses. Along the way, you’ll probably encounter bugs, crashes, and other unfinished business.

When that happens, Apple hopes you’ll use this app to submit reports of the problems you find. On its end, Apple’s programmers collect all these bug reports, organize them, and set about fixing as many as they can in time for the public release of the software.

Folder Actions Setup

This app opens up when you right-click or two-finger click a desktop folder and, from the shortcut menu, choose Folder Actions Setup. You’re offered a list of folder actions—canned processes that run automatically every time you drop a file into this folder.

For example, maybe you want every graphics file in this folder automatically converted into PNG format. Or maybe you want every PDF document rotated 90 degrees. Or maybe you want the Mac to alert you every time someone puts a file into this folder.

All of this is part of Apple’s ancient, technical, but (in some circles) beloved AppleScript programming system. You can read more about it on this book’s “Missing CD” at missingmanuals.com, in a document called “AppleScript & Automator.”

Network Utility

You can find and open Network Utility with a Spotlight search, or from within System Information, described in “Keychain Access” (choose Window → Network Utility).

In any case, it gathers information about websites and network citizens. It offers a suite of standard internet tools like netstat, ping, traceroute, DNS lookup, and whois—advanced tools, to be sure, but ones that even Mac novices may be asked to fire up when calling a technician for internet help.

Otherwise, you probably won’t need to use Network Utility to get your work done. However, Network Utility can be useful when you’re doing internet detective work:

• Use ping to enter an address (either a web address like google.com or an IP address like 192.168.1.110), and then “ping” (send out a “sonar” signal to) the server to see how long it takes for it to respond to your request. Network Utility reports the response time in milliseconds—a useful test when you’re trying to see if a remote server (a website, for example) is up and running. (The time it takes for the ping to report back to you also tells you how good your connection to it is.)

• Traceroute lets you track how many “hops” are required for your Mac to communicate with a certain server (an IP address or web address). You’ll see that your request actually jumps from one trunk of the internet to another, from router to router, as it makes its way to its destination. You’ll learn that a message sometimes crisscrosses the entire country before it arrives. You can also see how long each leg of the journey took, in milliseconds.

• Whois (“who is”) can gather an amazing amount of information about the owners of any particular domain (such as apple.com)—including name and address info, telephone numbers, and administrative contacts. It uses the technique shown in Figure 11-56.

Figure 11-56. The whois tool is a powerful part of Network Utility. First enter a domain that you want information about, and then choose a whois server (you might try whois.internic.net). When you click the Whois button, you get a surprisingly revealing report about the owner of the domain, including phone numbers and contact names.

RAID Utility

If you’re a hard-core Mac nerd, you know what a RAID drive is. It’s a hard drive that, behind the scenes, is made up of multiple spinning disks. Depending on the choices you make in RAID Utility, you can set them up so they all appear to the Mac as one giant disk—or you can set things up so that it’s one half-sized hard drive, and the other half is a real-time mirror, a backup.

Apple’s techie details for techie people are here: images.apple.com/xserve/pdf/RAID_Utility_User_Guide.pdf.

Screen Sharing

This app does the heavy lifting for the Screen Sharing feature described in “Screen Sharing”.

Storage Management

The “how to free up more space on your hard drive” feature described in “Optimized Storage” is actually this little app at work.

System Image Utility

Here’s another obscure app intended exclusively for professional corporate network administrators. It’s for creating “disks” on the network that all Macs can access. Details at support.apple.com/guide/system-image-utility/welcome/mac.

Wireless Diagnostics

If you’re having Wi-Fi problems, here’s a handy troubleshooting trick: While pressing the Option key, open the menu and choose Open Wireless Diagnostics. This app opens. It walks you through some Wi-Fi troubleshooting steps.

A full guide is online at support.apple.com/en-us/HT202663.