You probably know that you can select an image in the Finder and press the Space bar to preview it in a Quick Look window. And you may know that you can use the arrow keys to preview other files in the same folder without closing and reopening the Quick Look window. But did you know that if you select multiple images in the Finder and hold down the Option key when pressing the Space bar, the Finder will run a full-screen slideshow with a 5-second interval between images? Move the cursor to display slideshow controls, including a button to bring up an index sheet. This feature isn’t something most people need every day, but it can be a lifesaver when you need to run a quick slideshow at a party or presentation.

(Featured image by 祝 鹤槐 from Pexels)

In November, Apple unveiled its new M1 chip and three new Macs that use it: the MacBook Air, 13-inch MacBook Pro, and Mac mini. The M1-based MacBook Air replaces the previous Intel-based MacBook Air, but with the 13-inch MacBook Pro and the Mac mini, Apple continues to sell some Intel-based models with beefier specs—most notably a higher memory ceiling.

Even though Apple makes impressive performance claims for the new Macs, the community was still somewhat skeptical. Were these new Macs as fast as Apple said? Would they be limited in some other way? And the biggest question of all, should we be buying untested M1-based Macs or tried-and-true Intel-based models? Now that these new Macs are shipping and people have had a chance to try them, let’s address these and other questions so you can plan your future Mac purchases appropriately.

Are these new Macs fast?

It’s hard to overstate just how astonishing the performance benchmarks for these new Macs are. In single-core GeekBench 5 tests, the M1-based Macs beat every existing Mac by a lot: the most recent 27-inch iMac clocked in at a benchmark score of 1250, whereas the M1 Macs hovered around 1700. (The Mac Pro and iMac Pro are tweaked for faster multi-core performance instead, so they fare even worse on the GeekBench 5 single-core benchmarks.) For many everyday apps, single-core performance is what you’ll notice.

Of course, the top-of-the-line 28-core Mac Pro and its siblings outperform the 8-core M1-based Macs in the GeekBench 5 multi-core benchmarks, but if you focus on the new M1 Macs in the multi-core rankings below, you can see that they’re just behind the fastest 27-inch iMacs and low-end Pro models. That’s doubly impressive when you remember that the Mac Pro in the screenshot below costs $6000, compared to $700 for the Mac mini.

Benchmarks don’t lie, but they also don’t tell the whole story. These new Macs feel fast. Apps launch with only a bounce or two of the icon on the Dock. The MacBook Air and MacBook Pro wake from sleep and unlock with an Apple Watch so quickly that they’re ready to use by the time you’ve finished opening the screen. We can’t promise you’ll never see the spinning beachball wait cursor, but we haven’t so far. In some ways, using these new Macs feels more like using a fast iPad or iPhone, where everything happens nearly instantly.

Finally, note that only apps that have been rewritten to support the M1 chip receive the full speed boost. Older apps must be “translated” by Apple’s Rosetta 2, which converts apps from Intel instructions to the Arm instructions needed by the M1. That happens at launch, after which macOS launches the translated app. The first launch might be slow, but subsequent launches are faster. Although emulation environments are generally quite slow, early tests show apps translated by Rosetta 2 as running at about 80% of native speed. The upshot of that is that even translated apps might run faster than the equivalent app running on an Intel-based Mac.

What’s the deal with the new M1-based Macs having only 8 GB or 16 GB of RAM?

With the new M1-based Macs, you can choose between 8 GB and 16 GB of RAM, and that’s it. In contrast, the current Intel-based 13-inch MacBook Pro lets you go up to 32 GB, and the Intel-based Mac mini can take up to 64 GB.

Although 16 GB of RAM sounds limiting, that doesn’t seem to be nearly as concerning as one might think. The reason is that the M1 chips use what Apple calls “unified memory,” which is built onto the M1 chip itself and shared by the CPU, GPU, and Neural Engine. A significant performance bottleneck in modern computers is moving data around in memory. Benchmarks suggest that the memory bandwidth on the M1 chip is about 3x faster than on a 16-inch MacBook Pro. The faster that data can be moved around in memory and shared between the processing cores, the less memory is needed.

The speed of their SSDs also lets the M1-based Macs get away with less memory. When macOS uses all its physical RAM, it falls back on virtual memory, which effectively involves moving data on and off the SSD as needed. When Macs used hard drives, swapping memory to and from disk was very slow, but modern SSDs are fast enough to hide swapping delays.

To be fair, there are still memory-intensive tasks that will run better on Macs with lots of physical RAM. That’s a big reason Apple kept the Intel versions of the 13-inch MacBook Pro and Mac mini for sale. On the very high end, you can put a whopping 1.5 TB of RAM in a Mac Pro, and if you need that kind of RAM for your work, you’ll need to stick with Intel-based Macs for now.

How will the M1-based Macs fit into a workflow?

Here’s where things get tricky. If you have an office full of Macs, there are some good reasons why you might want to stick with Intel-based Macs for a while.

• Big Sur: The M1-based Macs require macOS 11 Big Sur. In general, we recommend that people hold off on upgrading to Big Sur until Apple has released at least 1 or two maintenance updates to solidify stability and compatibility. Plus, mixing versions of operating systems and apps can lead to interoperability problems.
• Apps: Although Rosetta 2 appears to do a good job translating older apps, there may still be quirks or performance hits, particularly for complex apps.
• Memory: As mentioned above, there are some tasks where lots of physical RAM is essential, and there’s currently no way to go above 16 GB on an M1-based Mac.

But here’s the thing. Apple very intentionally focused its initial M1-based Mac models on the low end of the Mac product line. These Macs are ideal for students and individuals, or as auxiliary or traveling Macs for office workers, particularly given the startlingly good battery life in the laptops. They won’t be replacing a Mac Pro or even a 27-inch iMac right now, but no one would have replaced such a machine with a MacBook Air, 13-inch MacBook Pro, or Mac mini before either.

In the end, we’re bullish on these new M1-based Macs. They’ve redefined what the most inexpensive Macs can do, making them compelling for those who don’t require more than 16 GB of physical RAM or need to slot them into highly specific workflows.

(Featured image by Apple)

In 2018, Apple dropped support for creating print projects from within Photos, including greeting cards, calendars, and books. Instead, Apple allowed other print-service companies to build Photos Project extensions that gave users the same sort of capabilities. At first, they didn’t match up with what Apple had previously provided, but they’ve improved over time.

It’s the holiday card season again, and given how little we’ve all been able to see friends and family, we expect a lot more people will be sending cards this year. You’re welcome to use Mimeo Photos, Shutterfly, Fujifilm Prints & Gifts, Mpix, or WhiteWall, but we’re going to focus on Motif, which generally performed well in our testing.

To begin, install the Motif app from the Mac App Store, which also adds the Motif extension to System Preferences > Extensions > Photos Projects. Once you have the extension installed, here’s what you do:

1. Select photos: Although you can add photos to your card project at any time by dragging them into the project in the Photos sidebar, it’s easiest to make a new album that contains a dozen or so of the best candidates for your card. If you don’t already know exactly what you want, don’t be picky at this point because it’s easier to choose the final images from within the card layout.
2. Create the card: With your new album selected, choose File > Create > Card > Motif. Then select either a 5×7 folded card or a 4×6 flat double-sided card, in either portrait or landscape orientation.
   
3. Select a theme: Motif provides various themes, and although it doesn’t currently include any holiday themes for cards, they’re all completely customizable. Since cards have relatively few images, we recommend clicking Don’t Autoflow and placing images by hand. (For a book or a calendar, autoflow would be a boon.)
   
4. Choose layouts: Although every card page starts with a default layout, you can customize every page in various ways. Would you prefer a single image on the front, rather than a multi-photo layout? Click the layout button below the page to open the Page Layout screen, click a number corresponding to how many images you want, and click the desired layout. (A bug in the current version prevents this from working on pages containing text blocks, but you can still tweak such pages—see the instructions below for adding, removing, resizing, and rearranging blocks.)
   
5. Add photos: To add a photo to a blank spot on the card, drag it from the photo tray at the bottom of the window, which shows all the available images (scroll to the right to see all the photos if necessary). Dragging a photo on top of a placed image replaces it, pushing the previous one back into the image tray.
   
6. Add and edit text: Themes come with pre-defined text blocks, but you can always add your own by clicking the Aa button under the page. You can tweak the font face, style, size, color, and more in the controls that appear whenever you select a text box.
   

Although that’s the basics of what you need to know to create and customize a card. Motif provides numerous other options that may prove helpful:

• Move between pages: Arrow buttons on the left and right side of the screen let you move between the pages of a card, but it’s easier to press the left and right arrow keys. If you prefer to see all your pages at once, click the right side of the page button in the upper-right corner of the window.
• Resize blocks: You can resize any image or text block by clicking it and dragging its blue size handles. If the Magic Resize button in the top right of the window is selected, other blocks will resize to fit.
  
• Rearrange image blocks: To move a block within a layout, click it, click the Move button in the control bar that appears, and then drag the block to a new location.
  
• Add or delete a block: You can add or delete an image block without going through the Page Layout screen. To add a block, drag an image from the tray to a blank spot in between other blocks. To remove a block, select it and click the trash icon in the control bar.
• Edit photos: To edit a photo from within the project, select it and then double-click it again to open it in the regular Photos editing view. Other tools in the control bar let you zoom the image (drag the zoomed image to move it within the block), rotate the image, and change its opacity—for all three, adjust the changes with the slider underneath.
• Overlay text: Once you’ve placed a text block on a page, resize or move it so it overlaps an image. If the text doesn’t appear because it’s underneath the image, choose Send Backward from the control bar’s Arrange menu.
• Change page color: In the Page Layout screen, find the Page Color button. Click it to change the color using the standard macOS color picker.

Some people may be able to create a card, drop a few photos in, change the text, and be done in minutes. Others will want to tweak every last detail to get things just so—if you’re particular, you can probably spend hours on it.

Either way, when you’re done, it’s time to place your order. You’ll need to create an account with Motif and run through a six-step process of choosing the number of cards you want, providing your billing information, picking shipping options, and entering your payment details.

After that, it’s merely a matter of waiting until they arrive and then stuffing envelopes, addressing them, and popping them in a mailbox.

(Featured image by Annie Spratt on Unsplash)

In July 2017, Adobe announced that it would stop distributing and updating Flash Player on December 31st, 2020. Web standards like HTML5 provide a viable alternative to Flash content, and organizations that relied on Flash have had three years to replace it. Because Adobe will no longer be addressing security vulnerabilities in Flash with updates, Flash Player now prompts users to uninstall. We strongly recommend doing so—just click the Uninstall button if you get this alert. If you don’t, a Flash Player Install Manager app in your Utilities folder should be able to remove Flash Player as well. Adobe also provides instructions to uninstall manually.

(Featured image based on an original by Gary Meulemans on Unsplash)

Starting with macOS 10.15.5 Catalina, Apple introduced a battery health management feature that improves your battery’s lifespan by adjusting charging patterns to reduce the rate at which the battery chemically ages. (Find it in System Preferences > Energy Saver > Battery Health.) One thing to be aware of with battery health management is that it might cause your MacBook to display “Battery Is Not Charging” in the battery status menu even when it’s plugged in. That’s normal, and it’s nothing to worry about. Of course, if you regularly see that message, it’s a hint that you may not be using the proper power adapter and cable or that the power source isn’t delivering enough juice.

(Featured image created with originals by cottonbro from Pexels and OpenIcons from Pixabay)

We all have things we do regularly on our iPhones, whether it’s checking the weather, searching Google, or invoking the magnifier. Apple has long provided ways of making your most common actions easier to access. You might put an app on your Dock, open Control Center, or take advantage of the triple-press Accessibility shortcut. With iOS 14, Apple has opened up a new and customizable way of triggering actions: Back Tap.

With a double or triple tap on the back of any iPhone 8 or newer running iOS 14, you can invoke any one of a variety of actions, including custom Shortcuts. Sorry, Back Tap isn’t available in iPadOS 14.

Enabling Back Tap is easy, although you might not stumble upon it on your own. That’s because it’s technically an accessibility feature for those who have trouble interacting with the iPhone physically. But just as curb cuts help both those in wheelchairs and stroller-pushing parents, the Back Tap feature is a boon for everyone.

Go to Settings > Accessibility > Touch > Back Tap (it’s way down at the bottom), where you can attach actions to both double tap and a triple tap.

Apple provides a broad set of actions, but most of them are focused on helping people who can’t use other iPhone gestures. So yes, you could make a double tap open Spotlight for searching, but unless that’s somehow a lot easier than swiping down on the Home screen, it’s not worth one of your two triggers. Actions fall into four categories:

• System: Most of the System choices mimic easy Home screen gestures or button presses. Most interesting are Mute, which toggles the ringer volume without forcing you to press the Volume Down button repeatedly, and Screenshot, which takes a picture of your screen without making you press two buttons at once.
• Accessibility: For those who need these Accessibility options, having them easily accessible via Back Tap will be welcome. The most compelling actions for the general public are Magnifier, Speak Screen, and Voice Control. (Voice Control provides much more capable dictation than Siri.)
• Scroll Gestures: These options scroll a vertically oriented page or screen. Sadly, they don’t work for horizontally driven page flipping in book reading apps like Libby.
• Shortcuts: Here’s where Back Tap becomes ultimately useful, at least if you can find or build the necessary shortcuts. Anything Shortcuts can do, you can invoke with a double or triple tap.

Wait, what’s Shortcuts? It’s an automation app that Apple includes with every iPhone. With it, you can chain together multiple actions derived from iOS capabilities or provided by your apps to create custom shortcuts. Other systems call similar collections of commands macros or automations or workflows.

Explaining how to build your own shortcuts is a topic for another day, but you can also download sample shortcuts from Apple’s gallery, both to see how it’s done and to use them. For instance, if you tap the Gallery button in Shortcuts ➊, tap Starter Shortcuts ➋, tap Take a Break ➌, and tap Add Shortcut ➍, you’ll copy the Take a Break shortcut to My Shortcuts. Then you can assign a double tap in Back Tap to invoke Take a Break, which sets an alarm for a specified number of minutes and turns on Do Not Disturb until the alarm goes off.

If you want to learn more about Shortcuts right away, check out Take Control of Shortcuts, a 122-page ebook by Rosemary Orchard.

Give it a try! Back Tap might turn out to be the iOS 14 feature you use more frequently than any other.

(Featured image by Ekaterina Bolovtsova from Pexels)

You likely know that you can use Do Not Disturb to prevent random notifications on your iPhone from waking you at night—it’s easy to set a Do Not Disturb schedule for your usual sleeping hours. Another setting in there is important but often overlooked. If you ever use your iPhone during those Do Not Disturb hours—perhaps to read a book while a partner or roommate is asleep—you don’t want it to make any noise. To prevent that, in Settings > Do Not Disturb, make sure to set Silence to Always instead of While iPhone Is Locked.

(Featured image by Kristina Flour on Unsplash)

A significant new feature in iOS 14 is Home screen widgets, information-rich tiles that share space on a Home screen with app icons. iPhone users familiar with Google’s Android smartphone operating system have long clamored for widgets because they provide quick information at a glance, without having to launch an app or swipe right on the Home screen for Today view.

In fact, you could think of iOS 14’s Home screen widgets as having escaped Today view—which is still there and provides access to a scrolling list of widgets that you choose. Widgets do need to be updated for iOS 14 to live on the Home screen and appear at the top of the Today view list. Older widgets remain accessible at the bottom of Today view, and you can add and remove them by tapping Edit at the very bottom of the Today view screen.

Adding Widgets

To add a widget to a Home screen or to Today view (which, for the purposes of widget management, is just another Home screen), follow these steps:

1. Touch and hold any empty spot on a Home screen until the icons start jiggling.
2. Tap the + button at the top of the screen.
3. In the Widget pop-up, scroll or search to find apps that offer widgets.
4. Tap any widget to see its options; swipe left and right to see different sizes or types of information.
5. Once you’ve found the widget size and content you want, tap Add Widget.
6. Back on the Home screen, drag the widget to the desired location, which may involve dragging it to another Home screen or the Today view. Remember that you can instead swipe with another finger to move the screen underneath the widget while you’re dragging.
7. After you position it as you want, tap Done in the upper-right corner (Face ID) or press the Home button (Touch ID).

One tip: Other apps and widgets will move out of the way, which can be disconcerting, and it can result in your apps being shuffled around weirdly in the end. It’s safest to add widgets to an empty or nearly empty Home screen and, once you’ve gotten them configured as you like, move them to your final destination Home screen.

Choosing Widget Sizes and Types

Widgets come in up to three sizes: a small square that occupies the space of four app icons, a horizontal rectangle that’s the size of two rows of apps, and a large square that takes up the space of four rows of apps. Plus, apps can provide multiple widgets, so the Spark email and calendar app, for instance, has nine different widgets that show recent email messages and upcoming events in a variety of layouts.

You might be thinking that widgets are cool but that they take up a lot of space. That’s true, and although nothing prevents you from having a bunch of Home screens devoted to nothing but widgets, you can also combine widgets into a stack. To do this, when you’re in jiggle mode, simply drag one widget onto another of the same size, much as you’d add an app to a folder. iOS 14 combines the two and, once you leave jiggle mode, lets you swipe up and down on the widget to move between them. You can add quite a few widgets to a stack, though at some point, it will become challenging to find the one you want.

Stacks have another trick up their sleeve: Smart Rotate. When this option is enabled, the stack automatically displays the widget it thinks you’re most likely to want to see from the available set. How it chooses is a black box, so we can’t predict how well it will work for you. Smart Rotate seems to be on by default; if you want to check or turn it off, touch and hold on a stack ➊, tap Edit Stack ➋, and then toggle the Smart Rotate switch ➌. Note that you can also rearrange the order of widgets by dragging their handles ➍ and delete one directly by swiping left on it ➎.

For an Apple-mediated taste of what this might be like, consider adding a special type of widget: the Smart Stack, which always sits at the top of the otherwise-alphabetical list of apps that provide widgets when you’re looking for one to add. The Smart Stack widget, which is available in all three sizes, automatically populates itself with widgets that it thinks you’re likely to find interesting. It too employs Smart Rotate, and you can edit the Smart Stack just like one you’ve created.

Removing Widgets

It will take some experimentation to hit upon a set of widgets that show the information you want, so don’t be shy about removing widgets or stacks that aren’t being helpful. To do so:

1. Touch and hold any empty spot on a Home screen until the icons start jiggling.
2. Tap the – button in the upper-left corner of a widget or stack.
3. In the alert that appears, tap Remove. Repeat as desired.
4. Tap Done in the upper-right corner (Face ID), or press the Home button (Touch ID).

You can also touch and hold a widget or stack and then tap Remove Widget or Remove Stack.

What’s most important about the new Home screen widgets in iOS 14 is that they’re completely individualized. No two iPhone users will even have the same widget choices, and as your favorite apps are updated for iOS 14, new widgets will appear. So take a few minutes to explore what’s available now, and be sure to check back every month or so.

(Featured image by Adam Engst)

On the Mac, nearly every file has an extension, a set of characters after a period that indicates what type of file it is and determines which app opens it. So, .png indicates a PNG graphic that opens in Preview by default, .pages denotes a Pages document, and .docx identifies a file as belonging to and opening in Microsoft Word. Plus, the extension for all applications is .app. Depending on what you do, how often you exchange files with people on other platforms, and your personal preference, you may wish to see more or fewer extensions. You control that in Finder > Preferences > Advanced, with the “Show all filename extensions” checkbox. Individual files can override the setting, so if an extension isn’t doing what you want, select the file, choose File > Get Info, and check or uncheck the Hide Extension checkbox in the Info window.

(Featured image created with originals by Patrick Ward on Unsplash and Mateusz Zdrzałek from Pixabay)

For those who work in organizations, regardless of size, you know how much effort is involved with coordinating a group’s technology. It can take quite some time to set up a new Mac, iPad, or iPhone with all the right apps, settings, and logins. And that’s just to get started—on an everyday basis, maintaining solid security practices is essential, and support requests are inevitable.

The solution to all this is MDM, or mobile device management, which is a way of centrally administering computers, tablets, and smartphones to simplify setup and ensure peace of mind for both employers and employees. Apple strongly encourages the use of MDM; the company continually enhances the core capabilities that MDM systems expose for IT administrators. If the benefits we outline here interest you, contact us to talk about your needs.

Benefits to the Organization

MDM is a big win for organizations, including businesses, non-profits, schools, government agencies, and more. It’s just too hard—and too insecure—to deal with every device individually. With MDM, organizations benefit in the following ways.

• Quick, consistent setup: With MDM, organizations can create profiles—collections of settings and account information—and install them automatically as part of a deployment strategy. In the best case, users have to do little more than power on the device and sign in; it automatically checks with the MDM server and downloads the necessary information. MDM solutions also let organizations install and configure approved sets of apps to ensure that every employee has the tools they need at their fingertips.
• Improved security: A great deal of digital security comes down to policies: requiring a strong passcode, ensuring secure settings for things like screensavers, requiring that backups be encrypted, and more. All these options are easily set and enforced by MDM profiles. Plus, MDM can separate personal and business accounts and data and even ensure encryption of on-device data. And perhaps most important, MDM enables remote locating, locking, and wiping of lost devices.
• Lower costs: Although MDM solutions usually come with a monthly cost, research shows that organizations save money overall in two main ways. Initially, MDM reduces setup costs by replacing an hour or two of hands-on effort with remotely pushed deployment. Over time, the consistency of setup and app availability dramatically reduces ongoing support costs.
• Asset tracking: An MDM solution enables information-rich asset tracking, making it easy for an organization to see exactly what devices it owns, which employees have them, and where they’re located. Such a system enables more efficient use of existing resources and easier lifecycle management.

Benefits to the User

Although it might seem as though MDM is primarily aimed at helping and protecting the organization, individual users benefit as well.

• Personal/work separation: MDM makes it possible to separate personal and work accounts and data, which can eliminate the need to carry both personal and work phones at all times. In some cases, MDM can also make it so employees can securely use their own devices—which might be newer or more powerful—with organizational data and accounts.
• Faster, easier setup: Most people don’t look forward to setting up and configuring devices, particularly when typing in usernames and passwords for numerous accounts. MDM does much of that, so employees can focus on their actual jobs.
• Peace of mind: With the security policies enforced by MDM, users can have confidence that they haven’t inadvertently done anything to expose confidential data. Plus, mistakes happen, and devices are lost or stolen. An MDM solution might be able to locate a lost device, and if not, it can ensure that the device is both worthless and unable to reveal anything damaging.

As helpful as MDM is once your organization is using it, we won’t pretend that choosing and setting up an MDM solution is trivial. Unless you have significant IT staff and resources, it makes sense to work with people who already have considerable MDM experience. We do, and we’d be happy to discuss a custom approach that fits your needs.

(Featured image by Annie Spratt on Unsplash)