When Apple first announced macOS 10.13 High Sierra and iOS 11, one of the promised features was Messages in iCloud, a way of syncing your conversations in Messages via your iCloud account. Despite the fact that Messages already tries to sync its conversations between your devices, this feature proved difficult for Apple to deliver, and it didn’t appear until the recently released macOS 10.3.5 and iOS 11.4.

The idea behind Messages in iCloud is that it, as the name suggests, stores your conversations and their attachments in your iCloud account, rather than on each device individually. That’s a win because it can offload non-trivial amounts of data to iCloud, freeing up more space on that 16 GB iPhone.

Because the primary source of Messages data is in iCloud, the conversations should also sync perfectly and more quickly than in the past, something that was often frustrating when conversations didn’t quite match up across device. (iOS 11.4 also fixes a bug that could cause some messages to appear out of order.) Even better, deleting a conversation or attachment on one of your devices deletes it from all of them.

The main thing to be aware of before enabling Messages in iCloud is that it does count against your iCloud storage space. That said, if you back up your iOS devices to iCloud, removing Messages data from each device—such as your iPad and iPhone—and storing a single copy in iCloud should result in less overall iCloud usage. (And, realistically, if Messages in iCloud would make you need a higher tier of iCloud storage, you were probably going to need to upgrade soon for other reasons anyway.)

Enabling Messages in iCloud is simple.

• On the Mac, open Messages > Preferences > Accounts and select the Enable Messages in iCloud checkbox.
  
• In iOS, go to Settings > Your Name > iCloud, and turn on Messages.

There are three quirks to be aware of:

• You won’t be able to enable Messages in iCloud unless you’ve enabled two-factor authentication for the Apple ID associated with your iCloud account. It’s a good idea for security reasons anyway!
• On the Mac, in the Messages account preferences, there’s a Sync Now button you can click if, for some reason, Messages hasn’t synced automatically. We don’t yet know if or when that will be necessary.
• When you first enable Messages in iCloud in iOS, you may see a note at the bottom of the screen saying that uploading to iCloud requires the device to be plugged in and connected to Wi-Fi. That’s necessary only for the first big upload.
  

Should you wish to turn off Messages in iCloud, be aware that it may take some time for each device to download all the messages.

For most people, Messages in iCloud is a no-brainer. Its syncing works the way you’d expect, complete with quick updates and universal removal of deleted conversations. The main reason you might not want to enable the feature is if you have only the free 5 GB of iCloud storage and aren’t interested in paying for more space.

Have you ever composed the perfect photo in the iPhone’s Camera app and then been unable to tap the shutter button without jiggling the iPhone and blurring the image? That can be especially difficult with macro shots that require physical contortions to position the iPhone properly. Sometimes, pressing one of the physical volume buttons on the iPhone to trigger the shutter is the solution. But, even better, connect your iPhone’s wired EarPods and then press one of their volume buttons to take a photo. Bonus tip—the EarPods’ buttons also work to start and stop video recording!

Apple makes it easy to look up information about any word you can see on your Mac, in nearly any app. To access this information, Control- or right-click the word and choose Look Up “word”, use the trackpad to tap the word with three fingers, or hover the pointer over it and press Command-Control-D. macOS displays a popover with a dictionary definition. And in 10.12 Sierra and later, you can also swipe right with two fingers on the trackpad (or click the buttons at the bottom) to see much more in the popover, including Wikipedia entries, apps, news, sports info, movies, TV shows, music, maps, Twitter accounts, and more. Give it a try a few times, and it might become a habit!

Running low on space on your iPhone or iPad in iOS 11? This problem may be easier to deal with than you expect because Apple has added a quick way to free up storage space by removing unneeded apps. Go to Settings > General > iPhone/iPad Storage, where you’ll see a Recommendations section. This section may include an option to Offload Unused Apps with an estimate of how much space you could save. Tap Enable to allow iOS to remove apps that you haven’t launched in a while—this happens only if you’re low on space. iOS preserves any documents or data associated with the offloaded app, and the app’s icon remains on the Home screen, with a cloud badge. Tapping the app icon reloads it from the App Store, assuming it’s still available. If you find yourself waiting for apps to reload often and you can clear space in other ways, you can disable the feature in Settings > iTunes & App Store > Offload Unused Apps.

Nearly all of us have to work together in a group at some point. Whether it’s for your job, a PTA, a club sports team, or a family trying to organize a vacation, it’s helpful to have a spot where everyone in the group can contribute information, comment on what others say, and build a structure around that information.

Most project management apps and services provide a canned workflow, but unfortunately, these tools are often overly structured. For a more flexible approach, check out Trello, a free online service you can use in any Web browser, or via Mac and iOS apps. You can pay $10 per month for additional features and integrations, but many groups will never need to go beyond the free service.

What sets Trello apart from so many other systems is that it takes a real-world approach to managing bits of information. Imagine a whiteboard, with columns drawn on it to indicate different stages of a process and sticky notes that represent tasks. You can write on the sticky notes and move them between columns on the whiteboard, so you can always see at a glance where things stand in the overall project.

Trello translates that basic concept into the digital world, with “boards” that are like a whiteboard, “lists” that mimic the hand-drawn columns, and “cards” that are like sticky notes on steroids.

You can have as many Trello boards as you like, and you can share each board with any number of people. Each board can have lots of lists, and each list can contain as many cards as you want. Don’t go nuts making too many lists or cards—just as with a physical whiteboard, that could make things unwieldy.

Cards are where the magic happens. Each card has a title and an optional description, and its own comment thread for people to discuss the card’s topic. You can add checklists to a card, upload attachments, and even assign a due date. People can be connected to a card so they receive notifications of new comments or attachments via email and via iOS notifications. Labels help you categorize cards in ways beyond putting them in a list. And perhaps best of all, an Activity section tracks everything that anyone does on a card, so you always know what has happened.

Imagine a Trello board for tracking job applicants through a hiring funnel. It could have a list for each part of the process, starting with receiving an application and going through each interview to the eventual decision. Each applicant would get a card containing their contact information, with the person’s resumé attached and checklists for mandatory questions. Labels might identify applicants for different jobs. After an interview, the interviewer would add a comment with notes about how it went, and move the card on to the next person. At all times, the hiring manager could see where any applicant was in the process and access all pertinent information.

Many Trello boards end up being process-oriented, where each list maps to a particular part of a process, and users move cards from list to list as the process goes along. But that doesn’t have to be the case; for example, you could create a collaborative calendar where each list maps to a week, or you could build a board that tracks client leads with a list for each person in a sales group.

In fact, the possibilities are endless. We’ve heard of Web developers using Trello to manage feature requests and bug reports on a site redesign, lawyers walking contracts through a review process, publishers moving books through multiple editing stages, teachers creating a “newsletter” with a list for each week and a card for each item to share with parents, and more. Give it a try!

As iPhones have become ever more prevalent, one of Apple’s bundled apps—Find My Friends—has become significantly more useful. Although there are legitimate concerns about sharing your location willy-nilly, Find My Friends gives everyone full control over what they share, making it truly helpful for families and close friends. So if you’ve ever thought it would be useful to know when your child left their soccer game or wanted them to receive an automatic alert when you leave to pick them up, Find My Friends is the app for you. It’s also great for keeping track of aging parents or for housemates looking out for one another.

Add and Remove Friends

Although you can add friends in the Find My Friends app by tapping Add and selecting their contact card, it’s easier to work from Messages, assuming you want to share your location with someone with whom you regularly text anyway. In their conversation, tap the i button, tap Share My Location, and in the popover that appears, tap Share Indefinitely. (Share for One Hour and Share Until End of Day are useful for temporarily sharing your location while traveling, say, to visit colleagues with whom permanent sharing would be inappropriate.)

However you initiate the sharing, the other person receives a notification and can accept and choose to share their location as well. (If they don’t do so right away, you can tap their name in your Find My Friends list and tap Ask to Follow.) That said, unidirectional sharing is all right, though in families and particularly for children, bidirectional sharing can be more helpful.

Should you ever wish to stop sharing your location with someone, you can either swipe left on their entry in Find My Friends and tap the red Trash button, or go into their conversation details in Messages and tap Stop Sharing My Location.

Work with Locations

Once you have someone in the Find My Friends app, you’ll see their entry in the list and their location on the map. That may be all you need if, for example, your goal is to see where your spouse is on their bike ride so you can figure out when to start dinner. A tip: for a quick location check, ask Siri something like, “Where is my wife?”

But Find My Friends has other features that make it even more useful. To access these features, tap a friend in the list or on the map to focus on them.

• Contact: Tap Contact to view your friend’s contact card. From it, you can start a Messages conversation, phone call, FaceTime call, email message, or money transfer via Apple Pay. You can also edit their details from here.
• Notify Me: With the Notify Me feature, Find My Friends can tell you when your friend leaves or arrives at a particular location. Two locations—their current location and your current location—are always available for quick selection. Or tap Other, and then either search for a location or press and hold on the map to drop a pin at that spot. You can even expand the orange dropped-pin circle to make the location less precise (and thus less likely to miss, if the person doesn’t quite go where you expect).
• Notify Friend: On the flip side, Notify Friend (tap More to access this feature) lets you tell your friend of your location right now, or when you leave or arrive at a location. A welcome addition here is a Repeat Every Time switch, so you could, for instance, have Find My Friends alert your mother in advance whenever you decide to stop over at the last minute.
• Get Directions: Also in the More screen is a car icon; tap it to display directions to your friend’s current location in Maps. It’s a great way to avoid those awkward conversations when you need to pick up your kid after a party and they can’t tell you precisely where they are.

It’s easy to be cynical about the privacy implications of location sharing. Obviously, you want to share locations only with people you trust, and who trust you. But once you do that, you’ll likely discover that Find My Friends provides peace of mind, since you know you’ll be on time to pick up your kid after an away game and your spouse knows that if she has a bike accident, you’ll be able to find her.

Finder freezes. They shouldn’t happen at all, and they don’t happen often, but it’s not unheard of for your Mac’s Finder to freeze, freak out, or otherwise stop responding properly. To bring it back to life, hold down the Option key, click and hold the Finder icon in the Dock, and choose Relaunch. (If the “click and hold” action feels odd, you can instead hold down Control and Option, and then just click.) In theory, you should be able to keep working normally after the Finder relaunches, but we recommend restarting your Mac afterward just to be safe.

Have you ever needed to write directions for where to find a file on the Mac? That’s easy if it’s in a well-traveled location, like the Music or Pictures folder, but more difficult if it’s in an obscure hidey-hole. Rather than write out instructions like “Look in the Chrome folder inside Google’s Application Support folder in your user Library folder,” select the item in question, hold down the Option key, and choose Edit > Copy “ItemName” as Pathname. (A pathname, or path, is the sequence of nested folders that holds a file or folder, such as /Users/adrian/Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome.) Then paste the path into an email message or word processing document (or wherever you like). You’ll now have the entire thing exactly where you need it, and you don’t have to worry that you’ve accidentally left out a navigational step.

For many years, Apple has sold macOS Server (previously called OS X Server) for those who wanted to run various Unix-based Internet services on a Mac. Server became popular because it put an easy-to-use graphical interface on top of the Unix apps, allowing Mac users to avoid complicated configuration files and reducing the need to work at the command line.

At its peak, Server boasted 24 different Internet services, but since then Apple has pared down what it can do, such that recent versions of macOS Server offer only 13 services. Now, however, Apple has announced that, in a Fall 2018 update, it will be eliminating all but 3 services: Open Directory, Profile Manager, and Xsan storage management.

To prepare for that, Apple has done two things. First, the most popular features of Server—Caching Server, File Sharing Server, and Time Machine Server—are now part of macOS 10.13 High Sierra. Caching Server reduces Internet usage by sharing software distributed by Apple (updates and apps) and iCloud data from one Mac to other Apple devices on a local network. File Sharing Server lets you create a shared folder that multiple Macs can access. And Time Machine Server lets you specify a shared folder as a destination for Time Machine backups from other Macs on the network.

Second, new installations of the current macOS Server 5.6 and 5.6.1 hide quite a few services, including Calendar, Contacts, DHCP, DNS, Mail, Messages, NetInstall, VPN, Websites, and Wiki. If they were configured in a previous version of Server that’s being upgraded, they’ll still be available. For each of the services to be removed, Apple suggests open-source alternatives, but most don’t have Mac-specific interfaces that simplify management.

What to do? If you’re running Server now, nothing needs to change right away, or perhaps even for some time. Nothing Apple does to a future version of Server will affect your existing installation. The only problem is that you won’t get updates that could be important for security, stability, or interoperability. Contact me to see what solutions I recommend for the services you rely on.

That said, if you’re running Caching Server, File Sharing Server, or Time Machine Server now, it might be worth transitioning those to a Mac running High Sierra, though it’s safest to check with me first in case you have a usage scenario that may not transfer cleanly. The first two are easy to turn on and configure in System Preferences > Sharing; just click the checkbox next to their names in the Service list and adjust the settings in the pane to the right.

Time Machine Server is a bit more complicated. To enable it, turn on File Sharing, share a folder (likely on an external drive), and then Control- or right-click the folder from within the Sharing preference pane, choose Advanced Options, and select “Share as a Time Machine backup destination.”

If you’re not currently running Server and are looking to add calendar sharing, a mail server, or an internal wiki, I can’t recommend getting started with Server. It’s not a relationship that will end well, and I can recommend more capable alternatives. Even if you’re just looking for a way of distributing settings to Macs and iOS devices in your organization, Server’s Profile Manager often isn’t the best choice. So again, get in touch and let me know what you’re trying to achieve and I can both make recommendations and help with setup and maintenance.