07.08.2020

Mac Features Used To Launch Apps

Mac Features Used To Launch Apps 5,0/5 1336 votes

With each release of the Mac OS, new features are added, older features may be updated, and in some cases, removed or replaced. Over the course of a few OS updates, it’s easy for some very useful system features to be forgotten. That’s why we’re going to take a look at 10 features that don’t get as much use as we think they should.

Jun 16, 2020  Kuo says that the first Mac models to adopt Arm-based chips will be the 13.3-inch MacBook Pro and an iMac with a redesigned form factor, with Apple planning to launch. Find an app: Type its name in the search field at the top of Launchpad.Or look on another page in Launchpad—swipe left or right on the trackpad or press Command-Left Arrow or Command-Right Arrow. Open an app: Click it. During downtime, or if you reach the time limit set for apps in Screen Time preferences, app icons are dimmed and an hourglass icon is shown. Jun 09, 2020  Once Launchpad is open, you can move apps you want to group closer together on the same page or transfer some to another page. On your Mac, select the icon of the app you want to move/drag. Press and hold the trackpad or mouse while you drag the item to a new location. Release the trackpad or mouse to drop the item in the new location.

1) Tabbing Between Fields and Control Elements
The tab key can get quite a workout on the Mac. Besides its obvious use in text editors and word processors to move the cursor a predefined distance, it’s used on the Mac to move between fields in various apps. This makes the tab key extremely helpful when filling in an online form, letting you move quickly to the next field to enter information, or to the next list item to make a selection.

Further Reading: OWC Announces Cutting-edge Thunderbolt 3 Products at CES 2018

(You can use the Keyboard preference pane to control how the tab key responds within windows, dialog boxes, and forms.)

You may have noticed when filling in forms that the tab key will jump past dropdown menus and other types of controls used in forms and dialog boxes. You can make the tab key stop at just about any type of user interface element with this small change:

Launch System Preferences and select the Keyboard preference pane.

Select the Shortcuts button at the top of the Keyboard window.

Near the bottom you’ll find options for Full Keyboard Access. The default is to have the tab key only move between text boxes and lists. You can change the setting to have the tab key move between all controls.

You can also change the tab key behavior on the fly, without returning to the System Preferences, by using the keyboard shortcut Control + F7 to toggle between the two options.

2) New Folder With Selection
This useful Finder feature has been around since OS X Lion, but is still often overlooked when it comes to file management and organization. As long as you select two or more files, you can have the Finder automatically create a new folder and move the selected items into the folder for you.

Open a Finder window and navigate to the files you would like to have placed in a new folder. Select the files; remember you must select at least two files (or folders) for this trick to work.

Right-click or control-click on one of the selected items, and then choose New Folder with Selection (X Items) from the popup menu. The X in the menu name will be replaced with the number of items you actually selected.

You can also select multiple items in the Finder and from the File menu select New Folder with Selection (X Items).

3) Use a Document’s Icon to Move a File or Duplicate a File (Proxy Icon)
The proxy icon is the thumbnail of a document icon that appears in the title bar of the document window of most Mac apps, usually at the top center of the window. It’s called a proxy icon because it’s a stand-in for the actual icon of the document you’re working on.

The proxy icon is more than just a bit of eye candy. It can be used just like the document’s real icon, which means you can:

Drag the proxy icon anywhere on your Mac to create an alias to the original file at the new location.

Option + drag to create a copy of the document at the location you drag the proxy icon to.

Press command or control for a pop-down menu that shows the path to the document.

4) Spotlight Can Do More Than You Think
With each new version of the Mac’s operating system, the Spotlight search system gets more powerful. Sure, you can use Spotlight to search for files or folders on your Mac, either by name or by a phrase they may contain. But Spotlight can do more than search your Mac; it has the ability to search the Internet for the data you need.

When you have a question, you don’t need to launch a browser window and head off to your favorite search engine; instead, open Spotlight and enter your question.

(Spotlight can do more than just search your Mac; it can search the Internet and provide results to simple queries.)

Some of our favorite uses for Spotlight’s Internet search include:

Weather: Just enter the word weather and a town or city name, such as weather Grants Pass, OR, and Spotlight will give you the weather report for the specified town.

Flight Updates: Enter the name of the airline and the flight number, and Spotlight can give you the latest update on the flight, including whether it’s on time, canceled, or delayed. In many cases, Spotlight will list a website that can track the flight’s path, showing you where its current position is.

Calculator: If you need to perform some quick math, just open Spotlight and enter the equation. From basic math to complex functions, Spotlight can do the math for you, without having to open the calculator app.

5) Text Substitution
Are there recurring phrases, special characters, or symbols that you repeatedly add to documents you’re working on? Text substitution is a feature of the Mac that you can use to expand a short abbreviation into a longer phrase, word, or symbol.

Launch System Preference and select the Language & Text preference pane, or the Language & Region preference pane, depending on the version of the Mac OS you’re using.

In the Language & Text preference pane, select the Text tab. In the Language & Region preference pane, click the Keyboard Preferences button, and then select the Text tab.

The Text tab will display two columns; the one on the left contains the short abbreviation that will be replaced with the item from the right-hand column. To add new substitutions, click the plus (+) button at the bottom of the columns.

(Text substitution replaces a short abbreviation with a longer phrase or symbol.)

Enter an abbreviation, such as Myem, in the first column; in the second column, enter what Myem would expand to. In this example, Myem stands for My email, and would expand to your email address. Now, whenever you enter Myem, your email address will be inserted in place of Myem.

Add as many substitutions as you wish, using the plus (+) button for each one. If you need to remove a substitution, use the minus (-) button.

6) Finder Tags
Finder Tags were added to the Mac with OS X Mavericks, though they replaced an earlier incarnation of tags known as labels. No matter what you call the feature, tags are a wonderful way to help organize and find items on your Mac.

Tags are especially good for those of us who work on lots of projects at once. Files and folders can be tagged with both a color and a name, such as Blue for tax documents, Green for backyard projects, Yellow for schoolwork, and Red for the railroad transportation corridor to bike route project.

You get the idea; you can use colors and names in just about any way you see fit. The advantage is that you can search in the Finder as well as Spotlight using tag names or colors. This lets you find all relevant documents quickly, no matter where you stored them on your Mac.

In addition, files and folders can have multiple tags associated with them. So, the cost breakdown on that backyard project can also have a tax tag associated with it, since part of the project includes a few items that will be deductible at tax time.

Tags can be added when saving a file, or in the Finder, by adding a tag to an existing item.

Add Tags in a Save dialog box: This method will work in most Save or Save as dialog boxes. We’re going to use the Text Edit app as an example.

Launch Text Edit and open a new document.

In the new document, add a few words, and then select Save from the File menu.

Give the document a name, and then click in the Tags field. A list of current tags will be displayed. Select one from the list; you can actually select multiple tags for the saved document, one after the other. When you’re ready, click the Save button.

Add Tags in the Finder: If you find you need to add a tag to an existing file or folder, this method will do the job.

In a Finder window, select the item you wish to add a tag to.

Right-click on the item and select a tag name or color from the popup menu. If the color or name isn’t shown, click on the word Tags for a complete list.

Search in Spotlight: Enter the word tag and the tag color or name. Spotlight will return all tag matches.

Search in Finder: Tags are part of the Finder sidebar. Select a tag color or name from the sidebar, and the Finder will display all matches.

Tag names and colors can be edited in the Finder Preferences.

7) Create a Printer Pool
Have you ever needed to print a document quickly but found that someone else was already using your favorite printer? Printer pools may be the answer. If you have more than one printer connected to your Mac, you can create a printer pool that will send your document to the first available printer.

(You can use a printer pool to manage multiple printers and ensure that your document is printed as soon as possible.)

To create a printer pool, launch System Preferences and select Print & Scan or Printers & Scanners, depending on the version of the OS you’re using.

From the list of installed printers, select at least two of the printers.

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Click the Create Printer Pool button.

Give the pool a name, and click the OK button.

That’s it; the printer pool has been created. The next time you need to print something, select the pool you just made from the list of printers in an app’s Print dialog box.

8) Tabbing Through Open Apps
The Dock may be a pretty good app launcher, but it’s not the only way to switch between open apps, especially when you have a large number of apps running, or many windows taking up the screen.

(The app switcher is a quick way to move from one open app to another.)

Instead, use the Mac’s built-in app switcher to tab through open apps:

Press the command + tab keys to open the app switcher. It will appear as a row of icons in the middle of your display. Continue to hold the command key and press the tab button to move forward (right to left) through each app’s icon. When you get to the app you wish to use, release the tab and command keys. The selected app will become the focus, bringing all of its windows to the front.

Mac features is used to launch apps

If you move past the app you were looking for, or simply want to move left to right, use the command + shift + tab keys.

9) Show Preview in Any Finder View
The Finder has four views available (Icon, List, Column, and Cover Flow), but only the column view lets you preview a document’s content. Actually, that’s not quite true; you can add a preview pane to any Finder view with this trick:

Open a Finder window in any view you wish.

From the Finder menu, select View, Show Preview.

The Preview pane will be added to the current Finder view.

10) Spring-Loaded Folders
This is another cool feature of the Mac’s Finder, though it’s a little difficult to describe. Spring-loaded folders allow you to drag an item to a folder. After a slight delay, the folder will open, and display its contents, allowing you to continue to drag the item to another folder within the first folder.

You can continue this dragging through a folder hierarchy for as long as there are folders to traverse. The end result is that you can drag an item to any location on your Mac without having to open multiple Finder windows to do it.

You can adjust the time delay in opening a folder by opening Finder preferences, selecting the General tab, and then using the Spring-Loaded Folders and Windows slider to set the delay time before a folder opens.

In OS X El Capitan and later, the Spring-Loaded Folders adjustment settings have been moved to System Preferences, Accessibility, Mouse & Trackball.

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It's time for another chipset transition for the Mac, this time from Intel to ARM. The rumors continue to escalate around this potential future for the Mac line, and may see software and hardware announcements soon. An ARM Mac is inevitable, but the question is, when?

● Apple designed chipset
● New ARM friendly macOS
● Based on existing A-series processors
● Software already exists
● Control over entire stack
● Leave legacy software behind
● Transition likely smoothed by existing hardware

Software shifts and hardware transitions are nothing new to Apple, and we are about to see another huge shift in how they approach consumer technology. Until now, the Mac has relied on innovation and development from Intel to move forward, but with the ARM Mac, Apple will have total control.

Mac features used to launch apps iphone
Apple produces its own ARM chipsets for iPhone and iPad, and may do the same for its ARM Mac

Rumors have circulated for a few years now about the potential of an ARM-based Mac. With the introduction of the iPad Pro and continued year-over-year improvements to Apple’s A-series chipsets, an ARM Mac feels almost inevitable.

The past decade has been bumpy for Mac users. Apple has had its own host of issues with designs they introduced, like the butterfly keyboard and cylindrical Mac Pro, but much of what has been holding back the Mac falls on Intel.

Since 2015 Intel has seen marginal improvements in their chipset capabilities and relied upon increased clock speeds and more demands on cooling than actual processor gains. This left Apple with little room to move when it came to innovating on the Mac platform.

Apple even had to implement custom silicon in their Macs to run in tandem with the Intel processors, thus taking some of the load off of the Intel processes.

The T1 was Apple’s first ARM chip in a Mac; used for improved security

If Apple controlled the development of all the hardware and software in Mac, just as it has with the iPhone and iPad, then we would see much greater leaps in performance over time. This would allow more room for innovations in design and add in additional use cases and hardware.

Note taking app macbook. Since the release of macOS Catalina, we have seen a slow trickle of Mac Catalyst apps. These are apps designed for iPad that have been formatted to work on Macs with macOS system architecture and Intel chipsets.

While Catalyst has yet to prove a great hit with developers, it lays the groundwork necessary for them to start programming iPad apps as if they were running in a macOS environment.

It is safe to assume that Mac Catalyst developed iPad apps will be easily transitioned, if not directly portable, to an ARM Mac. Catalyst also shows that Apple is capable and learning about making it easy to implement developer tools for transitions between platforms.

Do not be surprised if we see a “Mac Catalyst ARM edition” of some kind very soon.

Perhaps the most crucial development surrounding software for the ARM Mac is SwiftUI. This new language is universal and can easily be used for any Apple Platform during development.

In 2005, late Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced that the Mac would transition to Intel from PowerPC over a year starting in 2006. The entire Mac line transitioned to Intel processors in 2006, first ones in January, and the last in August. Mac OS X Snow Leopard launched in 2009 as Intel only.

Steve Jobs unveiling the NeXT computer, says system architectures shift every decade

Mac Feature Used To Launch Apps

To move the entirety of the Mac platform for millions of users, minuscule by today's user base, to a new system architecture with minimal issues was an incredible feat. It is impossible to determine the speed at which Apple will move Mac to ARM, but for everyday users, the transition will likely be invisible.

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Today's ARM chipsets can already handle most tasks an average user performs, and not having compatibility with Windows shouldn’t be an issue in a world where most data is in the cloud anyway. We do not know what kind of performance an Apple-designed “desktop-class” ARM chipset will produce, but it may be a few generations before the Mac Pro can kick Intel entirely. Lesser Macs meant for consumers and professionals who are not mapping star systems or making a Pixar movie will likely be just fine with ARM.

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The iPad Pro with the A12X chipset operates better than many consumer PCs and laptops, how will the ARM Mac perform?

Apple tends to be obsessive about consistency across a platform. It is hard to imagine Apple having their entire product line from iPod to iMac running on ARM and having one single Mac on Intel. This would lead to software compatibility issues and development forks in professional-grade tools.

Even with the entire line shifting to ARM, leaving the Mac Pro as is during the transition will work fine. When you do see a Mac Pro with Apple ARM inside, expect macOS to deprecate Intel Macs soon after.

Unless you are a professional who needs to run Windows and macOS on the same machine, or have very specific software that won't update to the new ARM architecture for a few years, you won't even notice this is happening. The biggest change for more casual users will be the lockdown of compatible software.

All of the software a user downloads from the web assumes they are working on a Mac or PC running Intel. This means when you buy an ARM Mac, you will not be downloading any of that software, which might be frustrating for users. iPad and iPhone cannot download apps from the web, and the same could easily occur for the ARM Mac.

The MacBook Air is a great candidate to become an ARM Mac since its small size restricts it from more powerful chipsets

Since macOS has a bit more control over software installation, Apple will likely enable settings for users to install compatible applications from the web. It will be up to third-party developers to make their software compatible, however, and could mean a minimal third-party software for some time after launch.

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If Apple is serious about an ARM transition, it will have to be behind developers all the way, and incentivize them to develop apps quickly.

If Apple restricts Mac software to the Mac App Store or makes it very hard to install from anywhere else, developers will need to offer their apps through official Apple channels. Otherwise, Apple could alienate popular developers and thus lose customers to Windows because of a lack of compatible software.

Another issue that is easily solved with licensing is Thunderbolt. Intel owns the rights to Thunderbolt and includes the necessary I/O for the ports in the Intel chipsets. Unless Apple comes up with its own version of Thunderbolt without violating patents, Apple will likely still be in business with Intel in some capacity.

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Rumors point to the fall of 2020 for the first ARM Mac. The now-defunct 12-inch MacBook would make the perfect candidate for the first Mac with Apple ARM inside. Some speculate a return to the “iBook” branding for such a device since it would essentially be a MacBook running on iPad chipsets.

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Reputable analyst Ming-Chi Kuo suggests a spring 2021 launch is more likely, repeatedly. Whichever is true, WWDC 2020 is the last chance for Apple to talk directly to developers about such a transition before it occurs, if it occurs before next year's WWDC.

To complicate things even further, WWDC will be held remotely via the internet in 2020 amid coronavirus concerns, making the transition announcement somewhat cumbersome as no developers will be physically present.

A developer transition kit is needed, and software too, because the hardware cannot launch without any software. It is likely that an official announcement from Apple is not far off. One Twitter leaker suggests there is a 12-inch device in development at this moment, and another leaker has since followed up stating the 12-inch ARM MacBook could be the first such product.

Another rumor corroborated the existence of a device, suggesting an ARM Mac laptop of some kind would be seen sometime in 2021. This device would host a version of the upcoming A14 chipset that is slated for the 'iPhone 12.'

Just before WWDC, Kuo released another note stating there would be an ARM MacBook by the end of 2020, with a 24-inch ARM iMac to follow.