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Lee looks at a new addition to Setapp called MenubarX. Although it looks like a simple app launcher at first glance, it's much more than that. With MenubarX, you can create a number of mini-applications that sit in the menu bar, waiting for you to access, and that use very little of that precious screen real estate. You learn about many of its use cases in this screencast — and watch Lee play Wordle!

With over 230 apps to choose from, Setapp is a no-brainer subscription service for Mac and iOS. In this show, Don gives a brief overview of 8 utilities that are offered in Setapp, and that he uses daily to enhance his computing experience.

Utility applications that solve a problem you never knew you had can be a great find. iBoysoft MagicMenu does exactly that by simplifying the creation of a new file, accessing web sites or locations on your system, and even copying or moving files. It does all of this using a simple right click inside a Finder window on your Mac.

In this ScreenCastsOnline debut, Darcy showcases a few features from Macpaw's Gemini Photos, an app that he uses to manage his digital photo collection. This utility is equally efficient at sorting videos by size, extracting blurry photos, as well as revealing duplicates, all in their respective groups, so you can regain space on your device and on iCloud.

In his return to ScreenCastsOnline, Richard goes back to an app he knows very well and has previously covered, and that's Yoink. This time though, he focuses on some of the newest features, shows you some tricks, and discusses using Handoff to swiftly move between Mac and iPad.

Keeping your Mac secure should be at the top of your list of priorities when using your device day to day. One tool that can help with this is Pareto Security, a simple yet very effective tool for monitoring some of the most common security vulnerabilities found in macOS. Running in the menu bar, Pareto Security will carry out checks and provide you with a simple pass/fail status for each one, with instructions on how to resolve the issue.

Finder is a staple application for every Mac user out there, but it does have its limitations. CocoaTech's PathFinder 10 is an excellent alternative to Finder that builds on that feature set and adds a slew of new options to make managing the files on your Mac much more powerful. With Lee as your guide, you go over the basics of Path Finder and then dive into its more advanced features.

Don last covered CleanShot X back in June of 2020, and since then it's had no less than 33 updates!

This video takes you through most of those new and improved features that make CleanShot X the premier screen capture utility for the Mac, and one that Don uses daily. If you're a Setapp subscriber, you can also get access to 10GB of free cloud storage with CleanShot Cloud, allowing you to store your screen captures and recordings and easily share them.

When the New Year rolls around, building new habits — or breaking old ones — is an exercise many of us undertake. Using an application can help with this and Repeat by Lab11, a software company that specializes in producing wellbeing applications, can be a wonderful companion.

Available on the Mac App Store and through Setapp, Repeat doesn't just track your habits, it also goes to great lengths to explain the science behind how habits are formed.

After watching Lee's recent deep dive into different browsers on macOS, you may well find yourself using more than one browser to suit different needs. And if you are like the majority of users out there, you will have lots of tabs open at once, perhaps spread across a few browsers.

Tab Finder by MacPlus software allows you to search for the tab you want from one central location, rather than navigate the different browsers and losing time. You learn all about this clever utility in this episode.

With macOS Monterey due for imminent release, now is a good time to start preparing for the upgrade to version 12 of the Mac operating system. In this special Friday tip show, Don takes you through some standard tasks you should perform in preparation for this upgrade. He also explains the slight change he has made in his backup recommendations this time around.

Ulysses has just reached version 23 so we thought it would be a good idea to spend time looking back at some of the major iterations and feature releases that this excellent writing application has undergone in the last five years. (Hint: there are a ton and it's easy to miss some!)

In this roll-up video, Lee shows you the basics of Ulysses before diving in into features like Split Editor, Revision Mode, Grammar and Spell Checking, Filters, and more, on macOS, iOS and iPadOS.

There are many times when you have an idea and thought that is not fully formed and you need a space to think it through and connect the dots. These types of situations are perfect for a mind mapping application like MindNode.

MindNode is an application we have covered in the past but has had so many features added across both Mac and iOS versions that we felt we needed to do a MindNode Revisited show. In this screencast Todd Olthoff uses MindNode to handle the aspects of his own home remodel and finds that the application can handle everything he needs to get the job done and does it well across all his devices.

In this video, Lee takes a shift from the normal approach to our full videos and looks at a number of utilities that share a common theme: focus. These apps, included as part of the Setapp subscription, will help you achieve this.

Serenity will help reduce the number of notifications you hear, PliimPRO cleans your desktop and environment ready for giving presentations and screen sharing, NoNotify will let the applications control your Do Not Disturb settings, Time Out forces you to take regular breaks and finally, Be Focused allows you to work in focused blocks of time.

Remembering and accessing the available menu bar commands on your Mac can be a little daunting, especially for apps that you don't use as often. Paletro is a clever utility that can help you make sense of this. Lee introduces you to the app and shows you its many useful options so you can navigate your app's menus more efficiently with Paletro as your assistant.

Available as an in-app purchase from the App Store or as part of your Setapp subscription, Paste allows you to copy, organize and paste all sorts of information across all of your devices.

In this screencast, Don takes you through the core functionality of Paste on both macOS and iOS and shows you how to use the app using real world examples.

In this week's tip, Don introduces you to TextSniper, a utility on macOS that can capture text from pretty much any digital source, including images, diagrams and videos. You learn about its features and various options, alongside real-world examples.

Performing a computer action sometimes involves a lot of mouse clicks and key presses to get to the end result you're looking for. Keysmith is an application that can record these actions and chain them together to form macros. Those can be invoked with a hotkey and save you lots of time!

In this screencast, Lee shows you the basics of how to create a macro. He then runs through a few of his real-world examples that will surely inspire you to create Keysmith recipes of your own.

Over time, your Mac device can get bloated with applications, old files, and system junk, to name a few. All of this can result in slower performance, usually when you are trying to do something of importance!

Enter CleanMyMac X, a one-stop solution for managing storage, keeping applications optimised, and your computer protected.

In this video, Lee walks you through the functionality that this toolbox application has to offer, including running regular scans, carrying out maintenance scripts, uninstalling application, and more.

In this screencast, Rosemary shows you ForkLift, a dual pane file manager packed with useful features. Whether you have servers to connect to, invisible files that you need to work on, or folders that you want open side by side in a single window, ForkLift comes to the rescue with functionality not available in Finder.

If you live on a small screen or have a lot of menu bar items, you need Bartender. This great utility, which has gone through a major redesign only for Big Sur, brings huge advancements in how you can control your menu bar items. With Allison as your guide, you learn about Bartender's many features and how to best customize them for your specific workflow.

Finding files on your Mac can be a difficult and sometimes a frustrating task because of their sheer number — we all have so many! HoudahSpot is an application that allows you to do refined searches to get just the files you are looking for and includes several useful presets right out of the box.

We have covered HoudahSpot in the past so this screencast from Todd focuses on the updates that version 6 brings to the search party.

Setapp is a wonderful service that gives you access to hundreds of top-quality macOS apps for a monthly or annual subscription. The service has been enhanced to now allow some iOS companion apps to be enabled using the service.

This week Don explains the principles behind the changes and demonstrates how to install and enable one of the apps featured in Setapp for iOS, MindNode.

You can subscribe to Setapp using the ScreenCastsOnline affiliate link.

AdGuard is a cross-platform application for ad blocking as well as a host of other privacy-related functions. Available on both macOS and iOS, this app makes the browsing experience faster and less irritable. No more ads taking up acres of screen real estate. It also allows you to stop websites and advertisers from tracking your every move and even filters out ads from Mac applications. AdGuard is available direct or as part of a Setapp subscription on the Mac, and via the App Store for iOS.

In this episode, Don takes you through the installation and configuration of AdGuard and demonstrates many of its benefits, on both the Mac and iPad.

Ghostnote 2  is a fantastic app which allows you to 'pin' formatted notes and to-do lists to many different types of objects on your Mac, including individual emails in Apple Mail.

Want to add some notes to a website? Just navigate to it in Safari and open Ghostnote. You'll be presented with a blank note where you can enter plain or formatted text, lists, even clickable to-do lists. The next time you open the website, that note will be available in Ghostnote 2.

In this week's tip, Don demonstrates different types of objects supported by Ghostnote 2, along with some practical examples. You also learn about its note browser, and how to set up keyboard shortcuts for quick access.

macOS Catalina has a tremendous screen capture and screen recording utility built right in - an app called Screenshot. In fact, it is so good that it's difficult to justify using third-party apps for screen captures. However, after reading some brilliant reviews for CleanShot X, Don decided to give it a go: "Wow! I knew within a few minutes of using it that it was my new go-to tool for screen captures."

CleanShot X combines several tools into one and has some pretty unique features. Think of it as a screen capture workflow tool that is customisable to fit your particular needs. In this week's tutorial, Don takes you through all the features of this robust and extremely powerful utility, including all the capture modes, annotations, and the free CleanShot Cloud service.

Well recommended.

This week, Lee shows you two applications that expand on the Dock and Application Switcher functionality in macOS: uBar and SuperTab.

uBar replaces the Dock on your Mac with a horizontal bar that is reminiscent of the one in Windows, and that provides additional options to interact with your open apps, as well as quick access useful tools, like Activity Monitor and any you System Preferences panes.

SuperTab can be configured to launch files, folders and applications, and take screenshots. This flexible utility can also open websites and automatically type text and keystrokes for you, and includes a great feature called Meta-Folder.

This week, Rosemary revisits a useful app that we looked at back in 2018, Dropzone. Now on version 4, this menu bar utility for Mac acts as a temporary storage shelf where you can drop folders and files that you want to act on later. It also offers various actions so you can perform repetitive tasks more easily.

In this tip you discover the ins and outs of Dropzone 4 using common scenarios you might encounter while using your Mac.

This week, Lee shows you how to use a utility application on macOS that helps you deal with focusing when you have multiple windows cluttering your desktop.

HazeOver will fade out non-active windows and bring focus to the currently used window(s) in the active application, allowing you to work without the need to minimise application windows to remove distractions in the background.

In this episode, Lee shows you how to use the macOS version of MarginNote 3, a study aid that allows you to annotate a variety of text-based file types, as well as extract content to provide a more focused view on a topic.

You learn how to import documents, notes from Evernote, web pages, as well as annotate and highlight text. Lee also goes over creating mind maps to link subjects and ideas together, and shows you how to create a flashcard deck to test your understanding of a topic.

This week, Don shows you SideNotes, a macOS app that gives you a simple but effective way to create and organise notes from a side panel. Create notes using Markdown syntax, plain text or monospaced code blocks, and organise by colour or folders.

With support for drag and drop and the ability to paste directly from the clipboard, SideNotes is a useful application to have on hand.

Slidepad is a fantastic utility for your Mac. It allows you to have all of your most commonly used websites, webapps, documents, PDFs and more in a super useful slide-out panel.

Inspired by the Slide Over feature on iPadOS, Slidepad appears with a keyboard shortcut or by moving your cursor to either edge of your screen. It's easy to configure and is a great boon to productivity.

In this week's tip video, Don takes you through the setup and usage of Slidepad.

This week, we look at a clever macOS menu bar utility called Trickster. This application presents filtered views of your most commonly accessed applications and files.

After installing the app, Lee shows you how to set up and edit filters, configure file tracking, as well as some useful keyboard shortcuts.

A very neat menu bar app that gives you direct access to a host of utilities and system functions.

In this tip video, Don explores some of the options and demonstrates just how useful One Switch can be.

In this video, Lee introduces you to one of his favourite macOS applications: Unclutter.

You learn how to access clipboard snippets, store frequently used files for easy access, as well as making notes on the fly without cluttering up the screen, all thanks to Unclutter's clean interface.

TextSoap is a fantastic application that allows you to transform and manipulate text in many different ways. If you find you're constantly editing or fixing the same badly formatted text over and over again, TextSoap can save you hours.

Pre-loaded with many different pre-defined text cleaners, you can access the power of TextSoap through clipboard integration, a menu bar app, macOS services or even AppleScript.

TextSoap also allows you to create your own custom cleaners, with virtually unlimited flexibility.

In this tutorial, Don takes you through using the many different facets of TextSoap 8

CleanMyMac X is a fantastic utility for ensuring that your Mac is always kept in tip-top condition. We've covered the overall functionality of Clean My Mac X in several episodes but in this tip video, Don takes a look at a new module in CleanMyMac X and that's Space Lens.

With the advent of Ulysses 15, some great new features have been added to this very capable writing tool.

In this tip video, Don takes us through the important additions to Ulysses 15 on macOS.

This week, Lee walks you through two very different, and very useful applications for macOS, both available inside of Setapp.

If you are bored with the standard wallpapers that come with the operating system yet don't want the hassle of uploading your own photos and images, Wallpaper Wizard 2 is the application for you.

Endurance is for laptop owners who are concerned about their battery life. It's a menu bar application that will help you maximise the shelf life of your battery through various configurable settings.

By providing a temporary space to park your files and app data, Yoink makes moving those items around more intuitive and efficient.

This handy utility accepts any file from Finder, as well as data from almost any app. Whether you want to move or copy files to a different folder or hard drive on your Mac, or wish to collect images from a website before you move them to your desired destination, Yoink has got you covered. On iOS, Yoink is your shelf for all the things you drag, copy, and share.

This week Richard gives you a tour of Yoink, and shares a few of his favourite tips on the Mac.

TaskPaper is a plain text to-do list app for Mac that is surprisingly adept. It may feel like a plain text editor, but it's backed by a powerful outliner to help you fold, focus, and filter any size to-do list.

In this episode, Mike introduces you to the TaskPaper app and its formatting, which can be used in other applications. You'll learn how TaskPaper handles projects, tasks, tags, and notes, how to set up custom searches, as well as import and export from the Reminders app. Also covered is how to customize the stylesheets to make your own themes, and install scripts to extend the functionality of TaskPaper to make it do just about anything you might want.

MarsEdit is a very powerful and easy to use blogging tool that works with many blogging platforms, such as Wordpress and Tumblr. It gives you an easy way to style and upload images, add links, and preview your posts. More advanced bloggers will love being able to create macros for styling images and text. MarsEdit assists but also gets out of your way so that you can get down to the business (and pleasure) of blogging.

In this episode, Allison walks you through the creation of a blog using MarsEdit 4, and explains the various tools that help you create, edit, and publish your posts. Along the way, you learn the benefits of using the Media Manager for your images, and using Markdown to write your posts.

This week we bring back the Mac Montage format. In this episode, Don takes a look at three of his favourite Mac applications (MacUpdater, Workspaces & Dropshare) and demonstrates how he uses them in his daily workflow.

Mind maps are a terrific method to capture and then organize ideas for any kind of project. iThoughts from toketaWare is a power user mind mapping tool. It's designed for the Mac and iOS, and also runs on Windows. With advanced features like built-in research tools, Markdown support, and animated slide creation, iThoughts might be the tool you need to help organize anything from a complex project to writing the next great novel.

In this week's show, Allison dives deep into iThoughts on both macOS and iOS to show you how incredibly useful and powerful this top-notch mind mapping application is.

One of the joys of having a Mac is having access to tools that allow you to automate common tasks which increase your productivity. BetterTouchTool is a unique twist on automating your Mac as it does so using various input devices that are connected to your Mac such as the Magic Trackpad, Mouse, Keyboard, and even your iOS device. Each of these devices can be set up using BetterTouchTool to run automations with the click of a mouse, taps on a trackpad or even by drawing gestures on your trackpad.

In this screencast we will walk through how to set these automations up on various devices. We will also show practical ways to set up your automations based on global settings or even on an app by app basis. So if you have ever wanted to run automations with minimal effort, then BetterTouchTool may be for you.

Following on from episode SCOM0719 - Travelling with your Mac, we take a look at how you can optimise your iOS device for security and privacy. We also learn how to configure a VPN to secure your network connections whilst out and about.

In addition, we look at the implications of using your iPhone or iPad as you primary camera and what steps you can take to backup your photos and videos when you are away from a decent Wi-Fi connection.

In this week's show, you'll learn how to quickly and easily create digital mind maps for collecting and sorting information and ideas. MindNode is an absolutely beautiful application for Mac and iOS that strikes a balance between form and functionality. With a great user interface that makes mind mapping approachable for anyone, MindNode is a great productivity tool whether you use mind maps for note taking, brainstorming, problem solving, book summaries, or anything else where thinking visually about ideas can be helpful.

With MindNode version 5, every part of the application has been reconsidered. It's a huge upgrade to previous versions, but because many of the changes are subtle, you may not notice it right away. Much of the design and layout has been completely revamped to make it easier to use and to discover the important features.

The full tutorial covers:

MindNode's pricing structure Application preferences Attaching Files and Stickers The Inspector and Toolbar Advanced Features Tasks Export options Styles and Themes Quick Entry iOS interface

Cloud Outliner is an inexpensive and yet powerful outlining app for the Mac, iPad, iPhone and iPod touch. Cloud Outliner is available through the Mac App Store or through Setapp. Outlines are stored within Cloud Outliner and can be synced across devices through iCloud (App Store version only), Evernote, or through Cloud Outliner's free syncing service.

The Mac app includes easily-discoverable menus, handy menu bar buttons or a vast array of keyboard shortcuts. The choice is yours on how to interact with Cloud Outliner.

The iOS apps include full functionality for editing outlines from the Mac app and use intuitive gestures for manipulating outline content.

Space is always a premium on your Mac, and keeping it uncluttered can give you a performance boost. Gemini 2 from MacPaw makes de-duplicating your Mac a breeze. It won the Prestigious International Design Award - the Red Dot.

Available from the App Store or via your Setapp subscription, Gemini finds identical files and even similar files on your Mac, allowing for automatic removal. It also gives you the option to manually select duplicates or similar files for deletion. Not sure if you want to delete immediately? Setup Gemini to move your duplicate files to a temporary folder before deletion - just in case.

iStat Menus 6 from Bjango is a terrific update to an essential Mac utility. This update brings a host of new options on how to display information about the performance of your Mac. New colors, new icons, new graphs; it's all about tailoring to your needs.

In this update show, Allison Sheridan will demonstrate the new features that have been added since her tutorial from July 2015, SCOM0513.

You'll learn about the enhanced options in tracking CPU/GPU performance, memory management, disk speed, network speed, thermal sensors, battery and power, including connected Bluetooth devices, date and time, and an entirely new section providing local weather.

The folks at Bjango have even added notifications to alert you of problems such as a process that has been chewing up too much CPU for too long, a sensor that's reading high temperatures, or if your disk is getting dangerously full.

Allison will also demonstrate a pair of utilities (iStat Server and iStat View) that allows you to monitor the computers (Macs, PCs or Linux boxes) on your network. This can be done from either an iOS device or a Mac.