Have you ever selected a bunch of files and accidentally opened them all by double-clicking one? Or perhaps inadvertently pressed Command-I to get info, ending up with oodles of open Info windows? Here’s a quick way to recover. You can close all the windows in any well-written app with judicious use of the Option key. Press it while clicking the File menu and Close Window becomes Close All Windows. Command-W closes one window; Command-Option-W closes all of that app’s windows. If you’re a mouse person, Option-click the red close button in any window to close all the rest.

(Featured image based on an original by iStock.com/ANGHI)

Last year, a series of articles by Wall Street Journal reporters Joanna Stern and Nicole Nguyen highlighted a troubling form of crime targeting iPhone users. A thief would discover the victim’s iPhone passcode, swipe the iPhone, and run. With just the passcode, the thief could quickly change the victim’s Apple ID password, lock them out of their iCloud account, and use apps and data on the iPhone to steal money, buy things, and wreak digital havoc.

In essence, Apple allowed the passcode, which could be determined by shoulder surfing, surreptitious filming, or social engineering, to be too powerful, and criminals took advantage of the vulnerability. It’s best to use Face ID or Touch ID, especially in public, but some people continue to rely solely on the passcode.

Apple has now addressed the problem for iPhone users with the new Stolen Device Protection feature in iOS 17.3. It protects critical security and financial actions by requiring biometric authentication—Face ID or Touch ID—when you’re not in a familiar location like home or work. The most critical actions also trigger an hour-long security delay before a second biometric authentication. We recommend everyone who uses Face ID and Touch ID turn on Stolen Device Protection. The feature is not available for the iPad or Mac, but neither is as likely to be used in places like the crowded bars where many iPhones have been snatched.

How Stolen Device Protection Works

The location aspect of Stolen Device Protection is key. When you’re in a “significant location,” a place your iPhone has determined you frequent, you can do everything related to security and financial details just as you have been able to in the past, including using the passcode as an alternative or fallback.

However, when you’re in an unfamiliar location, as you would likely be if you were out in public where someone might steal your iPhone, Stolen Device Protection requires biometric authentication to:

• Use passwords or passkeys saved in Keychain
• Use payment methods saved in Safari (autofill)
• Turn off Lost Mode
• Erase all content and settings
• Apply for a new Apple Card
• View an Apple Card virtual card number
• Take certain Apple Cash and Savings actions in Wallet (for example, Apple Cash or Savings transfers)
• Use your iPhone to set up a new device (for example, Quick Start)

Some actions have even more serious consequences, so for them, Stolen Device Protection requires biometric authentication, an hour security delay—shown with a countdown timer—and then a second biometric authentication. The delay reduces the chances of an attacker forcing you to authenticate with the threat of violence. You’ll need to go through the double authentication plus delay when you want to:

• Change your Apple ID password (Apple notes this may prevent the location of your devices from appearing on iCloud.com for a while)
• Sign out of your Apple ID
• Update Apple ID account security settings (such as adding or removing a trusted device, Recovery Key, or Recovery Contact)
• Add or remove Face ID or Touch ID
• Change your iPhone passcode
• Reset All Settings
• Turn off Find My
• Turn off Stolen Device Protection

There are a few caveats to keep in mind:

• The iPhone passcode still works for purchases made with Apple Pay, so a thief could steal your passcode and iPhone and buy things.
• Although Apple says it’s required, you can turn off Significant Locations to require the extra biometric authentication and security delay everywhere. That would eliminate the worry about a thief using Significant Locations to go to your most recent familiar spot in an attempt to sidestep the extra authentication.
• If you plan to sell, give away, or trade in your iPhone, make sure to turn off Stolen Device Protection first. Once it’s out of your physical control, no one else will be able to reset it.

Turn On Stolen Device Protection

Before you get started, note that Apple says you must be using two-factor authentication for your Apple ID (everyone should be anyway), have a passcode set up for your iPhone (ditto), turn on Face ID or Touch ID, enable Find My, and turn on Significant Locations (Settings > Privacy & Security > Location Services > System Services > Significant Locations), although this last one doesn’t actually seem to be required.

Then, go to Settings > Face ID/Touch ID & Passcode, enter your passcode, and tap Turn On Protection. (If it’s enabled, tap Turn Off Protection to remove its additional safeguards.)

Once Stolen Device Protection is on and you’re in an unfamiliar location, the actions listed above will require either biometric authentication or two biometric authentications separated by the hour-long security delay.

There is one group of people who should not turn on Stolen Device Protection: those for whom Face ID or Touch ID don’t work. Most people have no trouble with Apple’s biometric technologies, but some people have worn off their fingerprints or have other physical features that confuse Touch ID or, less commonly, Face ID.

If that’s you, stick with our general recommendation for discouraging possible iPhone thefts: Never enter your iPhone passcode in public where it could be observed.

(Featured image by iStock.com/AntonioGuillem)

January’s big security news was the Mother of All Breaches, the release of a massive database containing 26 billion records built from previous breaches across numerous websites, including Adobe, Dropbox, LinkedIn, and Twitter. It’s unclear how much of the leaked data is new, but it’s a good reminder to update your passwords for accounts on compromised sites, especially those you reused on another site. Cybernews has a leak checker that reports which breached sites include your data. More generally, password managers often have a feature that checks your passwords against the Have I Been Pwned database of breaches and helps you change compromised passwords—1Password’s is called Watchtower, shown below. You can also search Have I Been Pwned directly. Don’t panic if your email address appears in numerous breaches because some of the theoretically compromised accounts may be defunct sites, trivial sites you used once 10 years ago, or duplicate password manager entries for a site whose password you already updated.

(Featured image by iStock.com/Prae_Studio)

When Apple introduced tvOS 17 last September, an eagerly awaited feature was its support for FaceTime calls, using Continuity Camera on an iPhone or iPad to equip an Apple TV with the necessary camera and microphone. FaceTime on the Apple TV requires a second-generation Apple TV 4K or later and an iPhone running iOS 17 or an iPad running iPadOS 17.

The feature works pretty well. Setting up Continuity Camera is simple—you launch the FaceTime app on the Apple TV, select your user profile, confirm on the iPhone or iPad, and then position the iPhone or iPad in landscape orientation so the rear camera faces you. You can start FaceTime calls from the Apple TV or move a call in progress from an iPhone or iPad to the Apple TV. The video quality is excellent, the audio is surprisingly good even across the room, and Center Stage zooms and pans to keep you in the picture. You can also add reactions like hearts and fireworks with hand gestures. Or not.

But that’s not what we’re here to talk about today. Apple also said that other videoconferencing apps like Zoom and Webex would be coming to the Apple TV, which could make the Apple TV a compelling addition to offices and conference rooms everywhere. It’s also perfect for joining Zoom-based exercise classes or community meetings from the comfort of your living room. In December 2023, Zoom was the first out of the gate, shipping its Zoom for Home TV app for tvOS 17.

With Zoom available, the Apple TV becomes an interesting option for businesses and organizations that want to display video meetings on a large screen. In the past, it was possible to use AirPlay to share an iPhone or iPad screen to an Apple TV, but it was difficult to position the iPhone or iPad effectively, and there was no way to use the higher-quality rear-facing camera.

To get started, launch the Zoom app on the Apple TV. It first prompts you to connect your iPhone via Continuity Camera. Select the Apple ID account that matches the one logged in on the iPhone, bring the iPhone close, tap the notification that appears, and tap Accept. Then, turn the iPhone around and set it down on the base of the TV with the rear camera facing you.

Next, you’ll be prompted to pair it with your account, which you can do most easily by navigating to https://zoom.us/pair on another device and entering a code.

Once you’re connected to your account, you can create a new meeting or join an existing meeting.

Here’s where things get tricky. It’s easy to start a meeting—select New Meeting on the main screen—but inviting people is more arduous. Starting from the Contacts screen or choosing Invite from the More pop-up menu requires that you laboriously enter an email address to invite someone via email. Instead, we recommend that you first add people on the Personal Contacts screen in your account on the Zoom website. After that, you can select several people and invite them to the meeting. Unfortunately, in our testing, the email invitations didn’t always arrive.

The remaining option is to swipe up on the clickpad during a meeting to select the green shield button in the upper-left corner. That displays the meeting details, and a Join by Laptop button (the second screenshot below) shows the necessary URL, meeting ID, and passcode to share in another channel, like Messages or the phone. There’s no other way to share a link to a meeting that we could find.

Joining someone else’s meeting is difficult. Most Zoom meetings are shared via a link, and once you click or tap it in email, Messages, a calendar event, or on a website, the meeting starts. The Apple TV breaks that model—there’s no apparent way to load a Zoom link. FaceTime sidesteps this limitation by making it easy to move a call from the iPhone to the Apple TV—just put the iPhone close to the Apple TV, and a notification will suggest the move. Zoom offers no such option.

Instead, to join a Zoom call, you must manually enter the meeting ID and passcode. If you’ve been sent only the link, you’ll have to request the passcode separately (the numeric meeting ID can be extracted from the URL). Entering characters with the Siri Remote is slow and awkward, so we recommend using Siri, which recognizes spoken numbers well (hold down the Siri button on the side of the remote). You could also use an iPhone or iPad as a remote control for the Apple TV since you can type more effectively or use copy and paste on those devices. But if you’re already using your iPhone for Continuity Camera, for instance, you’ll need another device. Zoom does provide a Meeting History, which is helpful for recurring meetings, but you must still enter the passcode each time.

Once you start a call, touch the clickpad on the Siri Remote to display the Zoom menu at the bottom of the screen. You can then navigate using the clickpad (press the center to activate the selected command) and the Back button. Available options let you mute yourself, turn your video off and on, switch between the usual Zoom views, display Zoom reactions, manage participants, invite more people, turn on captions, and control the Continuity Camera video effects (Center Stage, Portrait Mode, and Apple’s gestural Reactions). Center Stage does an excellent job of following you around as you move. Portrait Mode just makes the background a little fuzzy; it’s not a strong effect. If you press the Back button to leave the Zoom app, your video pauses for others on the call.

Two common Zoom actions don’t translate fully to the Apple TV: chat and screen sharing. Incoming chat messages appear on the Apple TV in the corner, but only for 6 seconds, and longer messages are truncated after a handful of lines. There’s no way to keep them onscreen longer or get back to them. There’s no way to reply to chat messages. Zoom on the Apple TV does provide an option to share the screen, but that’s the screen of another device—there’s no app or desktop to share on the Apple TV, and no, you can’t share video.

Overall, the Zoom app for Apple TV feels like a 1.0. Most of the features that make sense are present, but fully adapting to a platform that lacks a keyboard or any way to follow links will take Zoom some time. If the company could add the capability to move an in-progress call from an iPhone or iPad to an Apple TV as FaceTime can, that would help a lot. Another possible concern is the need to have the Apple ID on the Apple TV match the one on the iPhone—all the possible logins could get confusing in a larger office.

Regardless, Zoom on the Apple TV works well enough to try out. Just make sure to run through the initial setup well before your meeting is due to start.

(Featured image based on an original by iStock.com/gorodenkoff)

In a slight nod to the hype surrounding generative AI, Apple added inline text prediction capabilities to the iPhone, iPad, and Mac. They can be helpful, particularly on the iPhone and iPad, where it’s often much easier to tap the Space bar than to finish typing a word or sentence. But that’s less true on the Mac, where a fast typist can be slowed down or derailed by the suggestions, and some people dislike having an AI finish their thoughts. The feature is easily turned off. On the iPhone and iPad running at least iOS/iPadOS 17.2, go to Settings > General > Keyboard and switch off Show Predictions Inline. (Leave Predictive Text on to continue to get suggestions above the keyboard.) On the Mac running macOS 14.2 Sonoma or later, open System Settings > Keyboard, click Edit under the Text Input header, turn off “Show inline predictive text,” and click Done.

(Featured image based on an original by iStock.com/Armastas)

We’re all accustomed to searching the Web generally in Safari by typing in the search field and pressing Return or tapping Go. Most of us are also familiar with the search suggestions that Safari shows below the search field as we type.

But did you know that Safari has a feature that lets you use the search field to search directly within your favorite websites, so you don’t have to wade through unnecessary search engine results or navigate somewhere manually before searching? It’s called Quick Website Search and is available for the Mac, iPhone, and iPad. It’s helpful for websites within which you search often. For example, we often search for technical information on Apple’s website. You might find the feature helpful for searching Amazon or another shopping site, a help center, or an events calendar.

All you have to do to prime Quick Website Search’s pump is search a website using its internal search option. Look for a magnifying glass or Search option, enter a term in the search field, and submit the search. It doesn’t matter what you search for—all you’re doing is teaching Safari how to search on that site, and it will remember the site from then on.

Later, to look for pages only from that site, enter three or four characters from its name (don’t accept any auto-completions!), a space, and then your search term. Don’t press Return or tap Go, however. Instead, pick the suggestion from the suggestion list under the “Search sitename” heading.

Safari then sends the search directly to the site in question, so instead of results from Google or your default search engine, you’ll see the results on the desired site.

The process is the same on the iPhone and iPad, although Safari on those platforms doesn’t remember websites you’ve searched as reliably.

On the Mac, you can see which sites Quick Website Search has remembered and remove them by opening Safari > Settings > Search and clicking Manage Websites next to Enable Quick Website Search.

On the iPhone and iPad, open Settings > Safari > Quick Website Search to see and remove the remembered sites.

This way of searching within a website can be a big productivity win, so it probably won’t take long to get used to this new way of jumping into your most used websites’ internal search engines.

(Featured image based on an original by iStock.com/YiuCheung)

Remembering to update your contacts with new email addresses, phone numbers, and postal addresses can be hard. But if you’ve received that information in Mail or Messages, Siri’s data detection capabilities can help. Open Contacts on the Mac and press the Down arrow to cycle through your contacts. When you see one with information in light gray and a parenthetical like (Siri Found in Mail), click the ⓘ button to the right ➊ to see some context in the source message. If the information is correct, click Add to Contact ➋ to keep it.

(Featured image based on an original by iStock.com/Brett_Hondow)

Google is big. Google Search generated $225 billion in revenue in 2022, thanks in part to being the default search engine on all Apple devices. To retain that position—and continue to reap the ad revenue that it generates—Google pays Apple about $18 billion every year. Along with Apple, Google pays billions to phone manufacturers like Samsung, LG, and Motorola; major wireless carriers such as AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon; and browser developers like Mozilla and Opera.

So is Google Search’s 90% market share because it’s the best search engine or because Google has enough money to pay distributors for top placement?

Along with concerns about whether Google is the best search engine, some people worry about Google collecting information about them to show targeted ads alongside search results. The more information Google has on users, the argument goes, the better that ads can be targeted, and the more likely it is that users will click the ads, which generates money for Google from advertisers. Others worry that Google’s results may reflect certain types of bias.

If you’re perturbed by the privacy implications of Google knowing everything you search for, or if you’ve found Google’s search results less helpful than you’d like, you can easily switch to another search engine to see if you prefer its results and privacy stance.

How to Switch Search Engines

For many Apple users, the main place to choose a preferred search engine is in Safari’s settings. On the Mac, choose Safari > Settings > Search and choose the desired search engine from the Search Engine pop-up menu. You can choose a different one for Private Browsing windows if you want.

In Chrome-based browsers like Google Chrome, Arc, Brave, Microsoft Edge, and Opera on the Mac, open the settings and look for Search Engine. A pop-up menu lets you choose from some standard options, and additional choices let you add search engines like Brave Search that are too new (or not paying) to appear. Firefox offers similar options when you choose Firefox > Settings > Search.

On the iPhone and iPad, go to Settings > Safari >  Search Engine. Again, if you want a different search engine in Private Browsing tabs, turn off Also Use in Private Browsing and choose another option.

Top Alternative Search Engines

Conceptually, what search engines do is simple—they search a set of Web pages for matching keywords and return a list of them in order of relevance to the user. The hard part is dealing with the number of pages—estimates suggest Google indexes 50 billion pages and Bing 4.5 billion—and scaling the service to respond instantly to tens or hundreds of millions of queries per day. (Google processes 8.5 billion searches per day; Bing handles 400 million.) Beyond Google, here are the main search engines and what sets them apart. (You will also likely see Yandex, sometimes called “the Google of Russia.” Avoid it. For so many reasons.)

• Bing: The second-most popular (though far, far behind Google) search engine in the world, Microsoft’s Bing sets itself apart with a busy, highly designed search results page that mixes a variety of results. It may work well for you, or you may find it overwhelming and difficult to parse. Microsoft is also putting a lot of effort into chat-based AI-powered results. Bing claims to offer more user privacy than Google, but it’s still tracking users to target ads better. If Bing has better privacy than Google, it may mostly be due to not being part of the larger Google data-collection empire.
  
• Yahoo: Though it was the first Web search engine, Yahoo hasn’t run its own index since 2009. Today, Yahoo’s search results are powered by Microsoft Bing, so while the look of the search results page may differ, the results should be identical to Bing’s. Yahoo’s privacy stance is also similar to Bing’s.
  
• DuckDuckGo: If privacy is paramount, DuckDuckGo is worth a look because it does not track or store user information at all. Instead, it chooses ads to display only by matching with search keywords. Although it uses Bing for some of its results, DuckDuckGo also incorporates information from numerous other sources, so it won’t seem like an exact clone of Bing.
  
• Ecosia: The main reason to use the Berlin-based Ecosia is if you like Bing’s results (but not its layout) and want to support a “social business” that claims to be carbon-negative, offers full financial transparency, and protects users’ privacy. Founded in 2009, Ecosia today relies entirely on Bing’s search results and ads (clicks on which are how Ecosia earns money), and it claims to have planted over 188 million trees in 35 countries since its inception. It’s hard to argue with Ecosia’s environmental results, but as a search engine, it doesn’t feel special.
  
• Brave Search: A truly independent search engine, Brave Search relies on its own created-from-scratch index (it leaned on Google and Bing for some results early on, but ceased in August 2023). It also emphasizes user privacy and doesn’t track users, searches, or clicks. Although Brave Search displays keyword-based ads by default, users can pay $3 per month for Brave Search Premium, which provides ad-free results pages. You’ll have to set Brave as the default search engine for most browsers manually; for Safari, all you can do is make a favorite to search.brave.com.
  
• Kagi: Speaking of paid search engines, if you really want to avoid ads, Kagi is another independent search engine that rolls its own index and provides access only to subscribers, eschewing ads entirely. You can sign up for a 100-search test account, and if you like it, pay $5 per month for 300 searches or $10 per month for unlimited searches. As with Brave Search, you must manually set Kagi as the default search engine (there’s an extension for Safari).
  

The “best” search engine is the one that gives you the answers you want without triggering privacy worries or concerns about bias. If you want to see if something other than Google will work better for you, set it as your default search engine and try it for a few weeks.

(Featured image by iStock.com/Prykhodov)

You’ve ended up with two folders whose contents—hundreds of files or more—are similar but not identical. Perhaps you’re recovering from a sync failure, or maybe you pulled an old version of the folder from a backup and aren’t sure what’s different. Regardless, here’s how you can merge them in the Finder. Make sure the folders are named identically and are in two different locations on your Mac. Press and hold the Option key, then drag the folder that contains more files to the location that contains the folder with fewer files. In the dialog that appears, click Merge to copy only newer files from the source and those not already in the destination. (It’s not a two-way sync; for that, you need an app like ChronoSync.) The Merge button appears only if the source folder contains files not in the destination; if the folders contain just different versions of identically named files, you’ll get only Stop and Replace buttons. For safety, always work on copies of your folders and check your work afterward to ensure the right things happened.

(Featured image by iStock.com/RerF)

Many people use screenshots to clip portions of their Mac screen for later reference. For example, you could save a screenshot of an error dialog to show tech support, store a confirmation number from a Web page, or keep a chat from social media. You can even record screen movies to show a developer how their app is misbehaving.

Years ago, Apple introduced a floating control bar that makes accessing features for taking screenshots and recording screen movies easier. The hardest thing about using the control bar is memorizing its keyboard shortcut: Command-Shift-5. (The even older shortcuts of Command-Shift-3 for full-screen screenshots and Command-Shift-4 for windows and portions of the screen also still work.)

Meet the Control Bar

Let’s take a quick tour of the control bar. The leftmost  🅧 button dismisses the bar (alternatively, press Esc). You can also drag next to the 🅧 to reposition the bar. You’ll use the following three buttons to take screenshots and the next two to record movies.

The Options button displays a pop-up menu. If you’ve selected a screenshot button, the menu offers screenshot-related choices; if you’ve clicked either movie button, you see recording choices.

You may also see a Capture or Record button off to the right; more on them shortly.

Using the Options Menu

The top area of this menu, labeled Save To, enables you to choose a destination for screenshots or movies. By default, it’s set to the Desktop folder, which makes it easy to work with your screenshots right away, but your desktop can quickly get cluttered if you take a lot of screenshots. Feel free to choose Other Location and specify a folder of your choice, such as the Screenshots folder shown above.

If you choose an app like Mail, Messages, or Preview, a copy of your screenshot or movie will immediately appear in that app. For screenshots, you can also choose Clipboard to put a copy in the clipboard so you can paste it. Holding down the Control key while capturing a screenshot also puts the screenshot in the clipboard.

The Timer options let you adjust something on the screen immediately before your screenshot or movie begins. You can choose a 5- or 10-second delay. Timers are handy for situations where invoking the control bar would change the screen in an undesirable way.

With movies, you can record your voice over the action on screen. Select the desired microphone in the menu.

The bottom portion of the menu offers special options:

• With Show Floating Thumbnail, a small icon of a screenshot or movie appears temporarily in the lower-right corner of the screen after you take it. In the case of a screenshot, you can click this icon to mark it up, trash it, or share it; for a movie, you can crop it (useful if the start or end aren’t what you want), play it, delete it, or share it.
• Remember Last Selection is a big help when generating a batch of screenshots or movies using the same selection rectangle.
• To make your pointer appear in your screenshot, choose Show Mouse Pointer, and for movies, to display a circle where you click, choose Show Mouse Clicks.

Taking a Screenshot

Here’s how to take each type of screenshot:

• Capture Entire Screen: Click the leftmost screenshot button and move the pointer off the control bar. Click the screen. (If your Mac has multiple screens, click the one you want.)
• Capture Selected Window: To limit your screenshot to just one standalone interface element—a window, dialog, or menu—click the second button and then click the desired item. If you want to capture a dialog separately from an app window behind it, press Command and move the pointer over the dialog. (To eliminate the drop shadow, press and hold Option as you click.)
• Capture Selected Portion: To take a screenshot of an arbitrary portion of the screen, use the third screenshot button . Click it and then resize and reposition the selection rectangle over the desired area—note that it shows you the pixel dimensions of the selection. (Reposition the rectangle by moving it with the hand pointer that appears when you hover over it, and resize it by dragging any selection dot.) Finally, click the Capture button at the right of the control bar or press the Return key to create the screenshot.

The name of the resulting image will be “Screenshot” plus the current date and time. It will also be in PNG format. If you prefer JPEG format for all your screenshots, you can change the default by pasting the command below into Terminal. Change things back by repeating the command, replacing JPG with PNG.

defaults write com.apple.screencapture type JPG

Recording a Movie

The two screen recording buttons are also easy to use:

• Record Entire Screen: Click the first movie button and then the Record button at the right of the control bar. If you have two or more screens, clicking the Record button presents a menu from which you can choose which screen to record.
• Record Selected Portion: Click the second movie button , then resize and reposition the selection rectangle over the recording area, just as with capturing a selection for a screenshot. When you’re ready, click the Record button.

When it’s time to stop recording, if you see a stop button on the menu bar to the right of the current app’s menu items, click it. If it’s hard to find, press Command-Shift-5 to bring up the control bar again, which will now offer a stop button. Or just press Command-Control-Escape.

Movies are named “Screen Recording” plus the date and time and will be in QuickTime movie (.mov) format using the H.264 codec.

With screenshots and screen movies, the sky’s the limit for what you can capture or record, whether it’s a funny autocorrect chat mistake, an important reservation number, or a movie of a buggy app to share with tech support.

(Featured image uses a background by iStock.com/Altinosmanaj)