We continually recommend that every Apple user rely on a password manager like 1Password or LastPass for creating, managing, and entering passwords securely. What we haven’t encouraged as heavily is relying on Apple’s built-in password management features. Although they’re free, they’ve been too basic and hard to use over the years, relying largely on an ancient utility called Keychain Access.

However, with the release of iOS 15, iPadOS 15, and macOS 12 Monterey, Apple has at long last created a coherent platform-wide interface—the bluntly named Passwords—for viewing, editing, and deleting passwords on each of its platforms. You might wonder if you need a separate password manager anymore. First, let’s dispense with two common scenarios:

• Start if you’re new to password management: If you have so far resisted adopting a password manager, you should start using Passwords on your Apple devices immediately. In all likelihood, you already have some login credentials stored there.
• Don’t switch if you like your password manager: If you’re already using another password manager that you like, there’s no reason to switch to Apple’s password manager. It’s fine, but it doesn’t offer any capabilities beyond most independent password managers.

Those who are already using a password manager but aren’t entirely happy with it or would prefer not to pay for it face a tougher decision. How much your password manager is worth to you is a question only you can answer, but would Apple’s Passwords provide the features you need? Here’s what it can do:

• Create strong passwords: Safari suggests strong passwords when it detects that you’re creating a new login. In iOS and iPadOS, make sure Settings > Passwords > AutoFill Passwords > AutoFill Passwords is enabled. On the Mac, make sure Safari > Preferences > Autofill > User Names and Passwords is selected.
  
• Manage passwords: To see all your passwords, look in Settings > Passwords in iOS 15 and iPadOS 15, and in System Preferences > Passwords in Monterey. Tap or click one to view its details; once inside, use Edit to make changes. You can delete an unused login while editing or from the list. In iOS and iPadOS, swipe left on a login and tap Delete; on the Mac, Control-click the login and choose Delete.
  
• Sync passwords: Passwords are most useful when they’re accessible on all your devices. That will be true as long as Settings > Your Name > iCloud > Keychain > iCloud Keychain is enabled in iOS and iPadOS, and System Preferences > Apple ID > iCloud > Keychain is selected on the Mac. And, of course, all your devices must be signed in to the same iCloud account.
• Autofill passwords: As long as the autofill settings mentioned earlier are active, Safari will offer to autofill passwords when you log in to a site whose credentials you’ve stored. iOS and iPadOS apps also support autofill through the keyboard.
  
• Support two-factor authentication (2FA): This new feature allows you to add the setup secret (usually a scanned QR code or manually entered key) that enables the creation and automatic entry of 2FA codes.
  
• Import and export passwords: In the Passwords preference pane on the Mac, you can now import and export passwords, simplifying migration.
• Report questionable passwords: We all have passwords that are easily guessed or reused on multiple sites—the Passwords interface calls out such passwords so you can change them.
  
• Share passwords: If you need to share a password with a family member or colleague, the Share button lets you do that via AirDrop. Passwords are saved into the recipient’s keychain directly.
• Detect compromised passwords: Both Settings > Passwords > Security Recommendations and System Preferences > Passwords have a Detect Compromised Passwords option. Select it to be alerted if any of your login credentials are compromised in a site’s security breach.

That’s a solid set of features, and for many people, it will be sufficient. However, independent password managers like 1Password and LastPass have evolved over many years and boast very real advantages:

• Multiple platforms and Web browsers: Apple’s password management features focus on Apple operating systems and Safari. There is an iCloud Passwords Chrome extension for Windows, and Web browsers in iOS and iPadOS can tie into the system-wide password features. But for broad support across platforms and use within browsers other than Safari, stick with an independent password manager.
• Data beyond Web logins: Want to store your bank account numbers, driver’s license, credit cards, vaccination card, and the like in your password manager? Many independent password managers support secure storage of types of data beyond logins. They also often let you leave notes on items and include file attachments—a screenshot of a screen summarizing login requirements, for instance.
• Families and teams: Although Apple is inching in this direction with the forthcoming Digital Legacy program, in which you can specify someone as a Legacy Contact so they can access to your iCloud account in the event of your death, the group sharing features of independent password managers are much more useful here and now. Share key passwords with your spouse or your college-bound child to ensure that everyone will have the access they need to shared accounts.
• One-time password sharing: 1Password added this feature recently, and there are independent sites like 1ty.me and onetimesecret.com that provide it as well. In essence, it lets you securely share a single password with anyone else, embedding it in a link that can be viewed only once. That prevents passwords from being sent around in email or text messages where they could be stolen.

In the end, Apple’s new password management features are like so many other built-in features. They offer the basic capabilities that most users need while leaving plenty of room for enterprising developers to offer compelling additional features. Use Apple’s Passwords or another password manager, whichever you prefer. Just don’t rely on a simple text file or physical notebook to manage passwords. It’s more work, easily lost, and far less secure.

(Featured image by iStock.com/peshkov)

Few would disagree that the most popular image editing software in the world is Adobe Photoshop, the top illustration app is Adobe Illustrator, and the preeminent page layout package is Adobe InDesign. Many design and publishing professionals spend their lives in one or more of these apps.

There’s one problem: cost. Adobe provides access to them only via Creative Cloud subscriptions, where each app costs $21 per month, making it hard to pass up the $53-per-month All Apps bundle that includes all three plus Premiere Pro, Acrobat Pro, and more. That All Apps bundle works out to an eye-watering $636 per year.

For many people, that $636 annual expense is just the cost of doing business. They need the full power of Adobe’s tools, and they need to collaborate with others using native Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign files. If you fall into that camp, no worries, and you can stop reading right now.

However, if you’re subscribing to Adobe Creative Cloud merely because you need a capable image editor, illustration app, or page layout package, and you aren’t otherwise deep in the Adobe ecosystem, consider the Affinity suite from Serif: Affinity Photo, Affinity Designer, and Affinity Publisher, each of which costs $55. Once. That’s right, you can buy all three for $165, or just about the same as 3 months of Creative Cloud. Updates are free. Versions for Microsoft Windows are available for $55 too, and Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer also come as $10 iPad apps.

The obvious question is if you could replace Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign with Affinity Photo, Affinity Designer, and Affinity Publisher. We can’t answer that for sure—the Adobe apps have so many features that it’s impossible to know which are most important to you and if the Affinity apps’ features are comparable. Some may not match up—we’ve been told that master pages in Affinity Publisher are a bit funkier than master pages in InDesign, for instance. Others may even be better—some people we know find exporting Web graphics from Affinity Designer easier than exporting from Illustrator. And some may not exist at all—it doesn’t seem that Affinity Publisher (the newest addition to the suite) has a Track Changes feature like InDesign.

For instance, just as you can embed Photoshop and Illustrator files in an InDesign layout and then use the Edit Original command to edit them in the other app, you can embed Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer files in Affinity Publisher. Serif’s StudioLink technology provides direct access to the primary tools from Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer right within an Affinity Publisher document. It’s neat.

Overall, the feature sets are similar. Those who would consider switching from Creative Cloud can probably figure out how to accomplish their necessary tasks using the Affinity apps. That’s not to say that they’re clones of Adobe’s apps. In many cases, you might need to learn a new technique for accomplishing some task. Along with full documentation, Serif provides hundreds of tutorial videos and runs an active user forum where people ask questions, make suggestions, and share tutorials. Simple Web searches also often turn up blog posts with useful techniques from Affinity users.

What about moving files back and forth? Affinity Photo can open Photoshop’s proprietary PSD files, although it’s not guaranteed to import everything perfectly. Affinity Designer can open Illustrator documents as long as they were saved with the Create Compatible PDF File option selected. Similarly, it can open Illustrator-created PDF files that many designers send to clients as proofs. And Affinity Designer can open InDesign files that have been saved in IDML (InDesign Markup Language) format. Plus, you can often just copy and paste text and objects between the apps. If you decide to switch, you might want to continue your Creative Cloud subscription while ensuring that your key Adobe files are saved such that the Affinity apps can open them.

On the export side, the Affinity apps can export in many formats, but they’re more for final exports when it’s time to print or publish. You probably wouldn’t want to use the Affinity apps to collaborate on files with those using the Adobe apps. That said, Affinity Photo can export PSD files for use in Photoshop, and Affinity Designer and Affinity Publisher are probably best served by exporting PDF files that Illustrator and InDesign can open. Just don’t expect everything to move between the apps flawlessly.

In the end, the decision is yours—we’re merely suggesting the Affinity suite as a cost-saving option if you don’t need everything Creative Cloud provides. Visit the Affinity site, watch Serif’s marketing and tutorial videos, and poke around in the extensive online help. Free trial versions of all the apps are available, and there’s a 14-day money-back guarantee. In the best of all worlds, you’ll save hundreds of dollars per year and find that you like the Affinity apps more than Adobe’s.

(Featured image by Serif)

Have you heard the expression “hit by a bus”? It’s a somewhat macabre attempt to inject a little levity into planning for the unthinkable event of dying without warning. No one expects to be hit by a bus, but people do die unexpectedly in all sorts of ways. That’s terrible, of course, but it’s also incredibly hard on that person’s family, who suddenly must deal with an overwhelming number of details. Many of those details revolve around the deceased’s digital life—devices, accounts, passwords, subscriptions, and more.

We strongly encourage everyone, regardless of age or infirmity, to think about what your family would want and need to do with your digital presence in the event of your death. The ultimate guide to this topic is Joe Kissell’s book Take Control of Your Digital Legacy, although the current version is a little out of date and is slated for updating in 2022.

The next edition of that book will undoubtedly discuss Apple’s new Legacy Contact feature, introduced in iOS 15.2, iPadOS 15.2, and macOS 12.1 Monterey. It enables you to specify one or more people as a Legacy Contact. Should you die unexpectedly, those people can use an access key along with your death certificate to access much of your Apple content and remove Activation Lock from your devices. (If you have time to prepare for your passing, it’s easier to share all your passwords and passcodes explicitly.) The person or people you set as Legacy Contacts don’t have to be running Apple’s latest operating systems or even be Apple users, though it’s easier if they are. (Like so many other things in life.)

Don’t put off specifying someone as a Legacy Contact, whether it’s a family member or close friend. The entire point of the “hit by a bus” scenario is that it’s both unexpected and could happen at any time. (It’s possible to get access without being a Legacy Contact, but it requires a court order and will undoubtedly be significantly more work.)

Apple provides good directions for the Legacy Contact feature, and while we’ll summarize the steps below, read Apple’s documentation to get the word from the horse’s mouth. Apple’s support pages include:

• Data that a Legacy Contact can access
• How to add a Legacy Contact for your Apple ID
• Request access to an Apple account as a Legacy Contact

What Data Can a Legacy Contact Access?

Apple has the full list at the link above, but in short, a Legacy Contact can access anything stored in iCloud, including photos, email, contacts, calendars, messages, files, and more, as well as the contents of iCloud Backup. Not included are licensed media (music, movies, and books), in-app purchases (upgrades, subscriptions, and game currency), payment information (Apple ID payment info or Apple Pay cards), and anything stored in the account holder’s keychain (usernames and passwords, credit card details, and more). A Legacy Contact cannot access the deceased’s devices—Apple is incapable of sharing passcodes. However, Apple can remove Activation Lock so those devices can be erased and reused.

How Do You Add a Legacy Contact?

Adding someone as a Legacy Contact is easy. You must be running iOS 15.2, iPadOS 15.2, or macOS 12.1 Monterey to initiate the process, and two-factor authentication must be turned on for your Apple ID (this is a very good idea anyway).

On an iPhone or iPad, go to Settings > Your Name > Password & Security > Legacy Contact > Add Legacy Contact. On a Mac, use System Preferences > Apple ID > Password & Security > Legacy Contact > Manage. You can choose a group member if you’re in a Family Sharing group or pick someone from your contacts list.

As part of the process of picking someone, Apple allows you to share the access key via Messages if they’re running iOS 15.2, iPadOS 15.2, or macOS 12.1 Monterey. If they accept, a copy of the access key will automatically be stored in their Apple ID settings. If they’re not running a necessary operating system or don’t use an Apple device, you can instead print out an access key QR code and give that to them. You might also want to print a copy to store with your will and other important documents.

It may often be appropriate to act as a Legacy Contact for the people you’re asking to be your Legacy Contacts, particularly with spouses or adult children.

How Does a Legacy Contact Request Account Access?

Let’s assume the worst and pretend ​​that someone who has added you as a Legacy Contact has passed away. To request access to their Apple ID, you need the access key that the person shared with you and a copy of their death certificate. You can find the access key on an iPhone or iPad in Settings > Your Name > Password & Security > Legacy Contact > Contact’s Name, and on the Mac in System Preferences > Apple ID > Password & Security, where you click Manage next to Legacy Contact settings and then Details next to the person’s name. It’s also possible that the person shared the access key as a document stored with their estate planning documents.

The screens that provide the access key also have a Request Access link. Tap or click that and follow the instructions to upload the death certificate. If you don’t have an appropriate Apple device, you can also do this on the Web at Apple’s Digital Legacy – Request Access page.

Apple evaluates all access requests to make sure they’re legitimate, and once approved, sends you an email with more details and instructions. That email will also include a special Legacy Contact Apple ID that replaces the deceased’s previous Apple ID. You can use that Apple ID to log in to iCloud.com or download data at privacy.apple.com, sign in to an Apple device, or restore an iCloud backup to another Apple device. Having an access request approved also removes Activation Lock from the deceased’s Apple devices so you can restore them to factory settings and set them up again, either fresh or with the Legacy Contact’s Apple ID’s data.

The main limitation is that the Legacy Contact Apple ID is good only for 3 years, after which the legacy account is permanently deleted. So be sure to download everything important fairly quickly—don’t just keep using the Legacy Contact Apple ID or assume that you’ll be able to go back to it at any time.

We sincerely hope that you never have to act as Legacy Contact for a loved one, but we can say from experience that this new feature can only help make an already stressful time more manageable.

(Featured image by iStock.com/Olga Serba)

Social Media: Apple’s new Legacy Contact feature makes it simpler for you to give a family member access to your iCloud data after your death. Read on to learn how to make someone a Legacy Contact or what to do if you are a Legacy Contact.

Did you know that pressing and holding the side button and one of the volume buttons on an iPhone 8 or later brings up a screen that lets you power your iPhone off, show your medical ID, and invoke Emergency SOS? (On earlier iPhones, press the side or top button five times.) Slide Emergency SOS, and your iPhone will immediately call emergency services, which could be lifesaving in a real emergency. Even without touching​​ that slider, if you continue to hold the side button and volume button, after a 5-second countdown, the iPhone automatically calls emergency services, which may not be what you want. At least in the US, even if you hang up, that will likely cause the 911 dispatcher to send police to your location. To ensure that you can’t accidentally trigger Emergency SOS to call automatically, go to Settings > Emergency SOS and turn off Auto Call. We won’t say how we know this can happen.

(Featured image by iStock.com/LightFieldStudios)

Do you like using full-screen mode on your new M1-based MacBook Pro but hate having the menu bar disappear unless you move the pointer to the top of the screen? Happily, in macOS 12 Monterey, Apple has at long last added a setting to keep the menu bar visible at all times. Open System Preferences > Dock & Menu Bar and uncheck “Automatically hide and show the menu bar in full screen.” The change won’t affect apps currently in full-screen mode until you toggle their window state again or quit and relaunch. Unfortunately, some apps, including Apple’s Photos, need to be updated to show toolbars or other controls at the top of the window without forcing you to mouse up there to reveal them.

(Featured image by Adam Engst)

Between texts, alarms, reminders, calls, and myriad other notifications on our iPhones, iPads, and Macs, it’s a miracle we get anything done at all. To free us from this onslaught, Apple previously provided Do Not Disturb, which let you set times during which you could be free from interruption.

In iOS 15, iPadOS 15, and macOS 12 Monterey, Apple has gone even further. Do Not Disturb is now called Focus, and Apple has made it more powerful and flexible. Focus can turn on automatically at certain times, at particular locations, or when you’re using certain apps so you can avoid interruptions during activities like working out, doing homework, eating dinner, or gaming. But not all interruptions—you can allow certain people and apps to break through the cone of silence. A Focus can also hide or show certain Home screen pages, prevent notifications from appearing on the Lock screen, and more. Plus, all your devices can share the same Focus settings—we’re showing iPhone screenshots below, but the interface is identical in iPadOS and similar on the Mac, where you’ll find it in System Preferences > Notifications & Focus > Focus.

In Settings > Focus, Apple provides a pre-built Focus for Do Not Disturb, Driving, and Sleep to match the old Do Not Disturb options:

• Do Not Disturb: This catch-all Focus takes over from the old Do Not Disturb setting.
• Driving: This Focus replaces the old Do Not Disturb While Driving option. It’s unusual in that it doesn’t allow any app notifications through at all (eyes on the road!). It also lets you write a custom auto-reply for those who text you while you’re driving.
• Sleep: If you use Apple’s sleep management features in the Health app, you’ll use this Focus to control which notifications can get through while you’re asleep.

Apart from those, Apple makes six suggestions: Personal and Work (in the main list), and Fitness, Gaming, Mindfulness, and Reading (when you add a new Focus). You can also create a custom Focus from scratch.

Apple’s suggestions are special in one important way. Fitness, Gaming, and Mindfulness can turn on automatically: when you’re engaged in a workout, when you connect a wireless controller, and when you’re in a Mindfulness session started from your Apple Watch, respectively.

When configuring a suggested Focus or creating a new one from scratch, Focus runs you through several setup screens. One has you choose people whose notifications you want to come through regardless, and what to do about incoming phone calls. The other screen lets you pick which apps can notify you when the Focus is active, with an additional option to allow notifications marked as Time Sensitive through regardless. (Time Sensitive notifications include timed Reminders alerts, for instance, and are usually best left enabled.)

Once your Focus is ready, you can configure various options, including:

• Focus Status: Enable this option to allow apps to alert those who message you that you have notifications silenced.
• Home Screen: If your Focus involves you using the Home screen a lot, you can have it hide notification badges that might lure you into another app or even hide entire Home screen pages that could be distracting.
• Lock Screen: If you might be looking at your Lock screen while the Focus is active, you can have it dim automatically and hide or show silenced notifications as appropriate.
• Schedule or Automation: Although you can turn on any Focus from Control Center, it may be easier to have it turn itself on automatically at certain times, in particular locations, or when certain apps are active.

As with any new feature, it’s going to take a bit to figure out how to make Focus work best for you. We’re still learning it ourselves, but here are some recommendations:

• To identify when a Focus would be helpful, wait until you find notifications irritating and then think about which ones you’d want a Focus to block.
• Create just one or two Focuses at first. You don’t want to end up with a bunch that interact in unexpected ways and cause you to miss important notifications.
• Be careful with schedules and automations. An automation that invokes the Reading Focus when Books is open might work well for reading before bed but could be problematic if you read while waiting for a meeting to start.
• It may be safest to allow silenced notifications to appear on the Lock screen so you can easily see what you missed afterward and adjust the Focus as necessary.
• You can manually invoke a Focus by tapping the Focus button in Control Center and selecting the one you want. Tap the ••• button to the right of the Focus to specify when it should turn off automatically, or just tap the Focus again to turn it off.
  

Newness aside, Focus looks like it will help us all cut down on distracting notifications. And if all else fails, stick with just Do Not Disturb, Driving, and Sleep to replicate what we had before.

(Featured image by iStock.com/Daisy-Daisy)

Thanks to Apple’s 2020 acquisition of weather company Dark Sky, the iPhone’s Weather app has learned some new tricks in iOS 15. (It still isn’t available on the iPad, oddly.) Most obvious is its addition of weather maps that can show precipitation, temperature, and air quality. More subtle are the notifications that can alert you to incoming precipitation at your precise location. To turn them on in Weather, tap the location button in the lower-right corner of the screen, tap Turn On Notifications, and agree to the necessary location and notification permissions when prompted. (You can also do this later in Settings > Weather > Location and Settings > Weather > Notifications.) From then on, whenever Weather thinks precipitation is about to start or stop at any of your preset locations, you’ll get an alert. Some people find that Weather’s notifications aren’t as frequent or accurate as those from other weather apps like CARROT Weather, but Apple will likely be improving the system.

(Featured image by iStock.com/trendobjects)

Even those of us who don’t work with graphics professionally often find ourselves needing to resize images. Perhaps you have a large square headshot, but the site to which you’re uploading requires it to be exactly 100 by 100 pixels. Or maybe you have an iPhone 13 Pro photo that’s 4032 by 3024, but you need the long side to be 1280 pixels and the short side to be 800 pixels. You might even need to cut out an 800-by-600 rectangle from a much larger image.

These tasks are easily accomplished with professional graphics apps like Photoshop, but you don’t need to pay for or learn Photoshop for a quick resizing and cropping of an image. That’s because Preview, which is built into macOS, can do many of these tasks with aplomb.

One note: You can resize images to be smaller with little or no loss of quality, but you can’t make images bigger without them looking fuzzier unless you employ specialized tools.

Shrink an Image without Changing Aspect Ratio

Let’s take our first example above. We have a square headshot that we need to upload to an account, but the site won’t accept an image larger than 100 pixels square. To shrink the image to the specified size, we’ll first make a copy in the Finder or we’ll open the file in Preview and choose File > Duplicate. Then, with the image open in Preview, we’ll choose Tools > Adjust Size, make sure “pixels” is chosen to the right of the Width and Height fields, and enter 100 into the Width field. Because Scale Proportionally is selected, Height automatically changes to 100 to match. We’ll click OK to exit the dialog and then save the file.

Shrink an Image and Crop to Different Dimensions

Let’s move on to our second example above. We have a photo of some home-baked bread loaves that we’ve taken with the iPhone, and we need to resize it to 1280 by 800 pixels before uploading it to our food blog. There are two problems: the image is much larger than we need to start, and when we try resizing it to the desired pixel count in one dimension, the other dimension is wrong.

We’ll start the same way we did before, by making a copy of the original and in Preview choosing Tools > Adjust Size. In the Image Dimensions dialog, we’ll first type 1280 into the Width field. In this example, doing that causes the Height field to change to 752, which is too small (below left). Remember, shrinking images is easy and works well, but expanding them is hard. So instead, we’ll type 800 into the Height field, which causes the Width field to change to 1361 (below right). That’s good; we’ll click OK to resize the image. It will look small, but we can zoom it back to the window size by choosing View > Zoom to Fit.

For the next step, we need to get the image width down from 1361 to 1280 pixels, which we do by cropping. Choose Edit > Select All (or just press Command-A), and notice that there’s a selection rectangle around the entire image, with blue drag handles in the middle of each side and at each corner. We’ll need to take some off each side to keep the loaves centered, so we’ll drag the left side in a little to start. If you have trouble grabbing the blue drag handles instead of the edge of Preview’s window, choose View > Zoom Out to zoom out one step and separate the handles from the window edges.

Next, we’ll drag the right side in. Notice that as we drag, Preview displays the image dimensions in a little lozenge (at the right in the screenshot)—we’ve stopped at 1280. Since we’re moving only the edges, only the width changes—resizing from the corners would be much harder because both dimensions would change simultaneously.

One tip. If you’ve gotten the selection rectangle to 1280 by 800, but the content under it isn’t centered as you’d like, press and hold the left or right arrow key to move the selection rectangle to the left or right.

Once we have the selection rectangle at the right size and in the right place, we’ll choose Tools > Crop to discard the image content outside the selection.

Extract a Portion of an Image with Specific Dimensions

For our final example, let’s assume that we have a large picture of cherry tomatoes, and we need to cut out just the black tomatoes for a Web page that requires an 800-by-600 image. Once again, the image is too large, but the trickier problem is that we only need a small portion of it.

We’ll start by dragging out a selection rectangle that’s roughly 800 by 600, using Preview’s measurement lozenge. All we’re doing here is getting a sense of what the shape of 800 by 600 looks like. Then we make another selection around the black cherry tomatoes that’s roughly the same aspect ratio, wider than it is tall. The details don’t matter much at this point.

The next step is to crop the photo to the selection with Tools > Crop. Then we choose Tools > Adjust Size and set the Width field to 800 to get the width correct. That reveals that the height of our rough crop was slightly too large, at 630 pixels. We’ll click OK to resize the image to those dimensions.

Finally, we’ll use the same technique we did in the example above, with Select All, dragging the top handle down until the dimensions are 800 by 600, and then using Tools > Crop to discard the extra content.

As you can see, you can do a lot with just three basic techniques in Preview:

• Using Tools > Adjust Size to resize the entire image
• Dragging out selection rectangles while paying attention to the measurements
• Using Tools > Crop to get rid of content outside the selection rectangle

We won’t pretend that Preview is the ultimate graphics tool, but it’s capable, easy to use, and on every Mac.

(Featured image by iStock.com/Gearstd)

The new 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models feature a camera housing built into the screen, resulting in a notch like that on the iPhone. Most developers are updating their apps to ensure that no controls or menu bar items appear blocked or hidden by the notch, but if you use an older app that doesn’t play nicely with the notch, there’s a fix. Quit the app if it’s running, select it in the Finder’s Applications folder, and choose File > Get Info. In the Info window that opens, select “Scale to fit below built-in camera.” The active area of the display resizes so everything appears below the notch, slightly reducing the overall screen space. This checkbox won’t appear once the app has been updated to avoid the notch.

(Featured image by Apple)

If mailing your holiday cards (which you designed in Photos with a plug-in like Motif or Mimeo Photos, right?) is made harder by having to write addresses on envelopes, you can skip the handwriting step this year. Although many people don’t realize this, it’s easy to print mailing labels on standard label stock using the Contacts app on the Mac. You can even add a personal touch by including a graphic and using a custom color and font choice. Follow these steps:

1. In Contacts, choose File > New Group to create an empty group into which you can collect your card recipients. Name the group something like Holiday Cards.
2. Click All Contacts to see your full collection of contacts, and then drag your recipients from the center column to copy them into the Holiday Cards group. Note that you have to click and hold briefly before Contacts lets you start dragging a contact. You can drag contacts one at a time or select several at once and drag the entire selection. This doesn’t move contacts out of All Contacts—you’re just adding them to the Holiday Cards group, which functions like a playlist in Music.
   
3. Once the Holiday Cards group contains all your recipients, click its name in the sidebar, and then choose File > Print to open the Print dialog.
4. To set up your cards, you need to see details in the Print dialog, so at the bottom of the Print dialog, click the Show Details button (if it’s already called Hide Details, you’re all set). You also need to see the special controls for Contacts, so make sure Contacts is chosen from the pop-up menu underneath the page range fields. Then from the Style pop-up menu, choose Mailing Labels.
   
5. Beneath the Style pop-up menu, make sure Layout is selected, and then in the Layout view, from the Page pop-up menus, choose the manufacturer of your labels and the number associated with the labels. (Avery 5160 is a particularly common label type and is readily available at office supply stores and online.)
6. Click Label to switch to the Label view. From the Addresses pop-up menu, choose the type of address you’re using. Home is likely the most appropriate; if you choose All, Contacts will print both Home and Work addresses if available. You can also select the checkboxes for Company and Country here, and if you print the country, you can exclude your own country, which makes it easy to include overseas friends and relatives without printing the country for most people.
   
7. Although the defaults are fine, you can change the color of the label text, select a small image to print next to each contact, and change the font.
8. It’s time to print, but not on your label stock just yet! Click the Print button to print a draft of your labels on plain paper. You’ll use this draft for two things—checking the addresses for accuracy and verifying that the labels will print properly on the label stock. To check if the labels will print correctly, stack a page from the draft on top of a sheet of blank labels, and then hold them up to a bright light or sunlit window. You should be able to see whether the positioning is right—it should be in most cases. If not, make sure you’ve chosen the right label in the Print dialog, and if all else fails, create a custom label with your own margins and gutters to make it work. You may also want to increase or decrease the font size, making sure that even your longest addresses will fit.
9. Once you’ve fixed addresses for everyone who has moved recently and verified your positioning, you can print for real on your label stock.

There’s only one limitation to using Contacts to print your labels. If you’re a perfectionist, you might want to customize how the names of couples appear on the label. Even though it has the necessary Spouse relationship field that links contacts together, Contacts doesn’t support different name formats on labels. For instance, if you’re sending a card to a couple who share a last name, you might want the name line to read “Barack and Michelle Obama.” The same goes for couples who don’t share a last name, like “Ellen DeGeneres and Portia de Rossi.” The solution for this picky conundrum is Belight Software’s $9.99 Swift Publisher app, which lets you create label templates using individual fields from Contacts.

But that’s overkill for most of us, who care more about what’s inside the envelope. Most of the work comes in selecting people, making sure their addresses are right, and updating those that have changed—actually printing labels takes only a few minutes. As you stick your labels on envelopes, you can revel in the knowledge that it will go even faster next year!

(Featured image by iStock.com/Bet_Noire)