For the most part, Spotlight works well. Press Command-Space or use the Search field in a Finder window, and it finds everything that matches your search term. Sometimes, however, Spotlight fails to turn up a file that you know is present, likely due to index corruption. To fix the problem, you can force Spotlight to rebuild its index. (Don’t do this unless it’s necessary since reindexing can take a long time and may impact the performance of your Mac while it’s happening.) Open System Preferences > Spotlight > Privacy, and then drag your drive (or the drive on which Spotlight isn’t finding files) into the list of locations that Spotlight shouldn’t search. That deletes the old Spotlight index. Still working in the Spotlight Privacy list, select the drive and click the – button below the list. Spotlight now reindexes the contents of the drive and should find your files properly in the future.

(Featured image by cottonbro from Pexels)

For you graphic designers out there, Adobe has announced that it will be ending support for PostScript Type 1 fonts starting with Photoshop in 2021. All Adobe apps will stop allowing users to author content using Type 1 fonts beginning January 2023.

This announcement shouldn’t come as a surprise. Adobe introduced Type 1 fonts at the dawn of the Macintosh age back in 1984, started collaborating with Microsoft on the more versatile OpenType fonts in 1996, and stopped developing Type 1 fonts in 1999. Although some operating systems still support Type 1 fonts, Web browsers and mobile operating systems don’t. Worse, Type 1 fonts don’t support Unicode, limiting their ability to support extended language character sets.

However, Mac users whose careers stretch back to the 1990s and earlier likely still have Type 1 fonts kicking around—who would toss a Type 1 font that worked perfectly well? Now’s the time to think about dealing with those ancient fonts.

First, however, it’s worth a quick trip to Font Book (or whatever font utility you use) to determine which of your fonts are Type 1 fonts. You can do this easily in Font Book by creating a smart collection that selects fonts by kind:

1. Launch Font Book from your Applications folder.
2. Choose File > New Smart Collection to open the Smart Collection dialog.
3. Give the collection a name, like “PostScript Type 1.”
4. Choose All from the first pop-up menu.
5. From the criteria pop-up menu, choose Kind and complete the search by choosing “is” from the second menu and PostScript from the third menu.
6. Click OK to save your smart collection.

Once you have a sense of which of your fonts will be impacted by this change, you have three options. You can just delete them and move on, replace them with modern OpenType fonts, or convert them to OpenType.

Delete Type 1 Fonts

Although it would seem like Font Book should let you delete fonts directly, when you Control-click a font, the Remove command may be dimmed out. If that’s the case, choose Show in Finder instead.

That opens a new Finder window with the font files selected. In all likelihood, there will be other font support files in there as well, so make sure you don’t need to keep anything before tossing it all in the trash.

If you’re more cautious, don’t trash those files immediately. Instead, temporarily sequester them in a special folder. This is just in case any old documents or older software on your Mac is using those font files. As you go about your weekly and monthly tasks, if you encounter a problem with a missing font, you may wish to reinstall that font until you can find a different solution.

Replace Type 1 Fonts

For a Type 1 font published by Adobe Type, the company says you can contact its partner Fontspring to receive a discount when upgrading the font to an OpenType version. For other Type 1 fonts, including those sold by Adobe, Adobe recommends contacting the font foundry to see if there’s a discounted upgrade path.

That may be easier said than done, given how old many of these are likely to be. However, you can start by looking at the font metadata to see who created the font or holds its trademark. Select a font in Font Book and click the i button in the toolbar. The Trademark metadata is a good place to look, and some fonts may have Manufacturer, Designer, or Copyright metadata that might provide contact information.

Convert Type 1 Fonts to OpenType

Finally, what should you do if you rely on specific Type 1 fonts and no OpenType versions are available? It might be possible to convert your fonts from Type 1 to OpenType. Although we haven’t tried it, Mike Rankin at CreativePro recommends TransType, which costs $97. It’s not cheap, but it may be your only alternative.

It’s impressive that PostScript Type 1 fonts have retained support for nearly 40 years—those who bought in early got an amazing run for their money. But it’s not unreasonable for Adobe and other tech companies to move on to OpenType, which is still going strong after 25 years, with its most recent update so far in November 2020.

(Featured image by Mr Cup / Fabien Barral on Unsplash)

Typically, we like to help you solve problems in these articles. But there’s one problem we all face that has no good solution: ads on Web pages. Let us explain the background, after which you can decide how you want to proceed.

Put simply, advertising is the economic engine of the Web. Google and Facebook make billions and billions of dollars every quarter, almost entirely on advertising. Publications ranging from the New York Times to your local newspaper rely on online ads for significant portions of their revenue. (Historically, newspapers made a lot of money on classified ads, a business taken over by Craigslist.) On the other side of the equation, large and small businesses alike depend on ads to get the word out about their products and services.

The downside? We have to put up with ads slowing down page loads, distracting us from what we’re reading, getting in the way of videos, and more. The ads have gotten so bad on food blogs that someone built the JustTheRecipe site to strip out the cruft and display only recipe ingredients and instructions. Worse, the ad companies try to track your every move so ads can follow you from site to site and attempt to sell you products based on where you’ve been.

Plus, most publishers and advertisers aren’t all that happy with ads. A typical click-through rate is about 0.1%, which means only about 1 in 1000 people who see an ad will click it, and the percentage who buy after that is far lower yet. Publishers need to attract as many eyeballs as possible to deliver those clicks, so they’re more likely to write controversial headlines and try to trick you into reading as many pages as possible. Plus, advertisers are constantly trying to make their ads stand out with in-your-face designs and annoying animations. (Please, no more “one weird trick” clickbait ads!) What’s an ordinary person to do?

Tech companies who aren’t beholden to advertising have responded to the infestation of Web ads by introducing blocking technologies. Apple has built privacy features into Safari to prevent advertising companies from tracking you. Brave Software has created Brave, a new Web browser that automatically blocks ads and trackers. And numerous ad-blocking extensions work with these and other Web browsers, including Firefox and Google Chrome.

So should you use one of these approaches to blocking ads? On the plus side, you will see far fewer ads, Web pages will load faster, and you won’t be creeped out by ads that follow you around the Web like digital zombies.

However, if you block ads, you aren’t supporting the publications whose work you’re consuming, and some publications won’t let you read anything until you disable your ad blocker. Even worse, a non-trivial number of websites won’t work correctly when you have an ad blocker installed. That’s because sites often embed content onto their pages using the same techniques as ads. We recently saw an exercise equipment site whose pages of instructional videos were mostly empty and largely incomprehensible due to our ad blocker preventing the embedded videos from appearing. Disabling the ad blocker on that site allowed them to load, but it took us a few minutes to realize what was going on. In more subtle situations, you may never realize.

You can see why we say this is a lose-lose scenario. Either you allow ads to load and put up with cluttered Web pages and privacy-abusing ad trackers, or you block the ads, which hurts publications and can break Web pages.

At the moment, we come down on the side of blocking ads, supporting the publications you love through subscriptions, and realizing that you may need to disable your ad blocker if a Web page doesn’t seem to be working correctly or displaying the desired content. One easy way of testing sites with problems is simply to load them in a different Web browser that doesn’t have an ad blocker installed.

If you need help choosing or configuring an ad blocker, get in touch!

(Featured image by Jose Francisco Fernandez Saura from Pexels)

We’re cautious when it comes to recommending upgrades to new versions of macOS. Apple makes the upgrade process easy—though it can be time-consuming—but upgrading can create workflow interruptions, render favorite apps inoperable, and have other consequences. At the same time, it’s important to stay in sight of the cutting edge for security reasons and to take advantage of advances from Apple and other developers. Upgrading is not an if question; it’s a when question.

We’re not saying that everyone needs to upgrade to macOS 11 Big Sur now, but if you want to, it should be safe now that Apple has released several bug-fix updates. However, there are still a few caveats, and preparation is essential.

Reasons Not to Upgrade

Some people should continue to delay upgrades to Big Sur due to software incompatibilities. Most software under steady development will have been updated for Big Sur by now, but some workflows rely on older versions of apps where an upgrade isn’t practical or possible (ancient versions of Adobe Creative Suite, for instance), or on obsolete apps that will never be updated. You may be able to learn more at RoaringApps, but those who haven’t yet upgraded past 10.14 Mojave may have to upgrade or replace 32-bit apps that ceased working starting with 10.15 Catalina.

The other app category that continues to have trouble with Big Sur are backup apps that make bootable duplicates. Catalina moved macOS to its own read-only volume, and Big Sur goes a step further by applying cryptographic signatures that make it even harder for an attacker to compromise the operating system. Unfortunately, that also makes creating a bootable duplicate difficult. Carbon Copy Cloner and ChronoSync have developed workarounds; SuperDuper remains incompatible at this point, although an older version can create data-only backups. If you rely on one of these apps for critical backups, make sure you know what you’re getting into before upgrading or reassess your backup strategy.

Before You Upgrade

Once you’ve decided to upgrade to Big Sur, you have three main tasks:

• Update apps: Make sure all your apps are as up-to-date as possible. If you regularly put off updates, now’s the time to let them complete so you have Big Sur-compatible versions.
• Clear space: Big Sur needs a minimum of 35.5 GB to upgrade, and as of macOS 11.2.1, the installer won’t proceed unless there’s enough space. Don’t cut this close—you should always have at least 10–20% free space for virtual memory, cache files, and breathing room.
• Make a backup: Never, ever install a major upgrade to macOS without ensuring that you have at least one current backup first. In an ideal world, you’d have an updated Time Machine backup, a bootable duplicate, and an Internet backup. That way, if something goes wrong as thousands of files are moved around on your drive, you can easily restore.

After those tasks are complete, make sure you don’t need your Mac for a few hours. There’s no telling exactly how long the upgrade will take, especially if it has to convert your drive to APFS, so never start an upgrade if you need the Mac soon.

Initiating the upgrade is just a matter of opening System Preferences > Software Update, clicking the Upgrade Now button, and following the instructions.

After You Upgrade

Part of the reason to set aside plenty of time for your Big Sur upgrade is that there are always clean-up tasks afterward. We can’t predict precisely what you’ll run into, but here are a few situations we’ve noticed:

• macOS will probably need to update its authentication situation by asking for your Apple ID password, your Mac’s password, and if you have another Mac, its password too. Don’t worry that this is a security breach—it’s fine.
• Some apps may have to ask for permission to access your contacts and calendar even though you previously granted permission. Again, that’s fine.
• If you use your Apple Watch to unlock your Mac and apps (and you should, it’s great!), you’ll need to re-enable that in System Preferences > Security & Privacy > General.
• If you use Gmail or Google Calendar or other Google services, you may need to log in to your Google account again.
• Websites that usually remember your login state will likely require that you log in again. If you’re using a password manager like 1Password, that’s easy.
• You may have to re-enable text-message forwarding to your Mac on your iPhone in Settings > Messages > Text Message Forwarding.
• Those who use Backblaze for Internet backups will find their backups have been “safety frozen.” Follow these instructions for thawing your account.

Finally, Time Machine in Big Sur now supports and prefers APFS-formatted drives, and all of Apple’s development is going in that direction now. You can keep using your existing Time Machine backup in Big Sur, but after you’re confident that everything is working well—and you have another backup—it’s worth removing your Time Machine backup drive in System Preferences > Time Machine > Select Disk, reformatting the drive as APFS in Disk Utility, and restarting the backup in the Time Machine preference pane.

With all that housekeeping done, it’s time to check out all the new features in Big Sur!

(Featured image based on originals by Apple)

We regularly hear from people who think they need Adobe Acrobat DC to manipulate PDFs. Don’t misunderstand: Adobe Acrobat is the gold standard, but it’s complicated and expensive—$14.99 per month or as part of Creative Cloud for $52.99 per month. In contrast, Apple’s Preview is easy and free with macOS. Here are six tasks that people may think require Acrobat but can easily be accomplished in Preview.

Remove and Rearrange or Export Pages

Have a PDF with unnecessary pages? You can delete them in Preview. First, make sure page thumbnails are showing in the sidebar by choosing View > Thumbnails. Then select the pages you want to remove and press Delete. Choose File > Save when you’re done—you’ll need to do that after all the rest of these tasks too.

Rearranging pages also happens in the sidebar—just drag the thumbnails as needed. If you drag a thumbnail to the Finder, Preview exports the page as its own PDF file.

Merge and Add Pages

What about putting pages from one PDF into another? Preview has your back there too. Open both PDFs, make sure their sidebars are showing page thumbnails, and then drag one or more thumbnails from one sidebar to the other, dropping them between the desired pages in the destination.

You can also drag a PDF from the Finder into the sidebar to add all its pages. Or, to take a photo or scan a document and insert it into the document, Control-click in the sidebar and choose Import from iPhone or iPad.

Annotate Text

Let’s say someone asks for edits or comments on a PDF. Although you can’t change the text with Preview, you can mark up the document.

• Highlight text: They may give you flashbacks to high school, but Preview provides a handful of colored highlighters, along with underline and strikethrough styles. Choose one from the Highlight menu in the toolbar and then select the desired text.
  
• Add highlight notes: To ensure that your highlights make sense to others, add notes to them. Control-click the highlighted text and choose Add Note. Then enter your note in the colored box that appears. It shrinks when you click away from it and expands when you click it again.
  
• Add general notes: You can also place faux sticky notes anywhere on a PDF page. Reveal the Markup toolbar by clicking the Markup button, and then click the Note button. Dag the closed note box to position it on the page. See all your notes in the sidebar by choosing View > Highlights and Notes.
  
• Add shapes and text boxes: The Markup toolbar also contains controls for creating various shapes (including lines with arrows) and text boxes. At times, the best way to show what you mean is to put a box, line, or text directly on the page. Click a shape to add it—text you type while it’s selected sticks with the shape, like the speech balloon below and the arrows above.
  

If you do need to edit the text of a PDF, that’s a job for Adobe Acrobat or another PDF tool like Smile’s PDFpen.

Redact Text

Sometimes, when you’re sharing a PDF, you want to redact sensitive information so it can’t be read. macOS 11 Big Sur’s version of Preview can permanently obscure and delete selected text from the document. Choose Tools > Redact and select the text you want to hide.

In earlier versions of macOS, you can simulate redaction by covering text with a colored rectangle. Unfortunately, recipients could delete your rectangle or copy the text underneath it. Don’t depend on this workaround to protect confidential information. For true redaction in older versions of macOS, use Acrobat or PDFpen.

Fill PDF Forms

Although Preview cannot create fillable PDF forms (again, turn to Acrobat or Smile’s PDFpenPro), it works fine for entering information into such forms. If you have to fill out an IRS form for your employer, for instance, Preview should work fine. Just click in a field and type, or click a checkbox to select it.

One warning. We’ve heard occasional reports that Windows users reading PDFs with forms filled out in Preview sometimes don’t see the entered text. When returning an important form, it’s always best to ask the recipient to confirm that it worked. If it doesn’t, fall back on the free Adobe Acrobat Reader DC.

Sign Documents

Now that so much paperwork has gone digital, we often need to sign PDFs. The most important documents will probably use a service like SignEasy that’s designed for collecting legally binding, secure signatures. But for something like a simple permit application, you can add your signature in Preview by clicking the Signature button in the Markup toolbar and choosing it.

Inserting (and resizing) an already created signature is easy, as is the one-time process of making one. Click the Signature button, and then click Create Signature. If your Mac has a trackpad, write on it with your finger or a rubber-tipped iPad stylus. Or use a marker to write your signature on paper and take a picture of it with the camera. In macOS 10.15 Catalina and later, you can also create a signature on an iPhone or iPad. Once created, the signature sticks around in Preview and even syncs to your other Macs through iCloud.

Note that Preview’s signature is just a graphic that could be copied, so it’s no more protected than a handwritten signature that could be scanned or photocopied.

Useful as all these features are, they’re just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to what Preview can do, particularly with graphics. For a complete look at Preview’s features, check out the 178-page ebook Take Control of Preview.

(Featured image by Cytonn Photography from Pexels)

With iCloud Drive, Apple provides an Optimize Mac Storage checkbox that, when checked, stores the full contents of iCloud Drive on the Mac only if there’s enough space. However, you may wish to recover local storage space without selecting that option—luckily, that’s easy to do. Open iCloud Drive in the Finder, Control-click a file, and choose Remove Download. The file remains in iCloud Drive, and if you need it locally, you can click the cloud icon next to its name to download it. If you’re not sure which files in the iCloud Drive window occupy the most space, choose View > As List, and then click the Size column so the largest files sort to the top (click again if they’re sorting to the bottom).

(Featured image based on originals by Denny Müller on Unsplash and Mahir Uysal on Unsplash)

Remember when we had to keep magnets away from floppy disks to avoid scrambling them? Modern storage is no longer vulnerable, but magnets and electromagnetic fields from consumer electronics can interfere with medical devices, like implanted pacemakers and defibrillators. Although iPhone 12 models contain more magnets than prior models, Apple says they’re not expected to pose a greater risk of magnetic interference. However, after a study found that one pacemaker could be deactivated by holding an iPhone 12 near it, Apple issued a support document recommending that you keep your iPhone 12 and MagSafe accessories more than 6 inches (15 cm) away from your medical device or more than 12 inches (30 cm) away while wirelessly charging. Better safe than sorry—if you have a pacemaker, don’t put your iPhone or any other consumer electronics in a breast pocket.

(Featured image by Ulrike Leone from Pixabay)

In the heyday of iTunes, Apple users stored their music, movies, and TV shows on their Macs and shared them with other Macs in their homes, as well as their iPhones, iPads, and Apple TVs. Of late, however, streaming has become Apple’s preferred media consumption approach, thanks to the rise of Apple Music and the way the Apple TV app aggregates video streaming services like Netflix.

Nevertheless, even though iTunes has been replaced by the Music and TV apps on the Mac, it’s still possible to maintain your libraries of music and videos on your Mac. When you do that, sharing that media with your other Apple devices over your local Wi-Fi network continues to work through Home Sharing, but how you manage that technology has changed. To be clear, we’re talking about content stored in the Media folders specified in the Music and TV apps’ preferences—they may still point to an old iTunes Media folder.

One note first. We’re focusing on network sharing here, not syncing media to an iPhone or iPad. That’s possible too, but is a separate topic—for more details, check out Take Control of macOS Media Apps, by Kirk McElhearn.

Set Up Home Sharing on Your Mac

With the demise of iTunes, Apple has moved the Home Sharing controls to the Sharing pane of System Preferences. Follow these steps to enable it:

1. Open System Preferences > Sharing > Media Sharing.
2. Give your library a recognizable name.
3. Select the checkbox for Home Sharing.
4. Enter your Apple ID credentials. You’ll need to use this same Apple ID for every computer or device on your Home Sharing network. (There is also a guest option that  others in your household can use; see below.)
5. Click Turn On Home Sharing.

Home Sharing provides three options via checkboxes:

• Devices update play counts: Select this option if you want each play from one of your devices to update the play count in your Home Sharing library.
• Share photos with Apple TV: This option lets you share photos from your Photos library—either everything or just selected albums, with an option to include videos. You can also share photos from your Pictures folder, any folder inside it, or any folder at all.
  
• Share media with guests: Normally, you can access media using Home Sharing only from devices signed in with your Apple ID. With this option, however, you can allow guests to access your songs, movies, and TV shows. If you live in an apartment or other situation where people unknown to you can see your Wi-Fi network, it’s a good idea to require a password, and regardless, you can share just selected playlists if you want. Guests access Home Sharing media just like you do.
  

Access Media from a Mac

The process of accessing media from another Mac using Home Sharing is the same for music and video—the only difference is that you use the Music app for music and the TV app for video. In either, click Library in the sidebar and choose your shared library under Public Sharing. Library changes to the name of your shared library, and all the items underneath display its contents. You’ll interact with them just like any local or streamed media.

Access Media from an iPhone or iPad

As on the Mac, the trick on the iPhone or iPad is simply to use the correct app. For instance, to access your videos, open the TV app, tap Library ➊ at the bottom, and tap the name of your Home Sharing library ➋ above. You’ll then need to tap to select the type of content you want to view, and then you’ll see thumbnails for the actual videos. Tap one to play it.

Access Media and Photos from an Apple TV

Finding Home Sharing media is a little different on the Apple TV. Open the Computers app, select your library, and then choose from music, photos, or videos at the top. A sidebar at the right lets you drill down into your content.

You can also have the Apple TV play a randomized slideshow of your photos as its screen saver. Go to Settings > General > Screen Saver > Type > Home Sharing > Photos, and select either Photos to show all available photos or Albums to limit the selection. In the Screen Saver preferences, you can also set a preferred transition.

We won’t pretend that Home Sharing is the latest and greatest technology from Apple—it’s definitely yesteryear’s solution—but if you have a lot of music and video on your Mac, it’s a good way to share it throughout your house and get a personalized screen saver on your Apple TV.

(Featured image based on an original by Erik Mclean from Pexels)

In iOS 14 and iPadOS 14, Apple added two new status indicators to the right side of the status bar at the top of the screen. They’re designed to give you feedback about what an app is doing. An orange dot indicates that an app is using the microphone, and a green dot means that an app is using the camera (and possibly the microphone as well). They’re subtle and shouldn’t be distracting, but if you ever notice them when you don’t think the camera or microphone should be in use, look for apps that might be using them in the background.

(Featured image by Bruno Massao from Pexels)

We’re all accustomed to the Do Not Disturb feature on our iPhones since they’re with us for most of the day and often spend the night next to the bed. But Apple long ago added Do Not Disturb to the Mac as well, and it’s useful for muting your Mac at night to eliminate unnecessary noises and for preventing unwanted notifications during presentations. In System Preferences > Notifications > Do Not Disturb, you can tell macOS to turn the feature on during specific times, when the display is sleeping or locked, and when mirroring to another screen. Or, you can turn on Do Not Disturb manually—you might want to do this when giving a presentation with Zoom or another videoconferencing app. In macOS 10.15 Catalina and earlier, do this in Notification Center by clicking it at the far right of the menu bar, scrolling up, and enabling the Do Not Disturb switch. In macOS 11 Big Sur, you find Do Not Disturb in Control Center.

(Featured image by Andrea Piacquadio from Pexels)