All Current Tutorials

With macOS 27 Golden Gate, you now have the power to create your own custom extensions in Safari. We looked at a couple of examples of this in show 1607 however since then, Lee created a few of his own that he regularly uses and wants to share with you.

In this tip video, you discover how to create custom Safari extensions that give you a reading strip to allow you to focus on text, customise your own dark mode settings, calculate how many hours you need to work to afford that big purchase, as well as create a floating table of contents for those lengthy pages!

As a Project Manager, Lee is always keen to see how an application centered on using Kanban boards fares. Kan Do: Project Management from Stephen Robles is a cross-platform app that definitely passes muster.

With an emphasis on usability, Kan Do is easy to use, yet filled with features that allow you to customise it to your liking, with a growing feature set that will keep power users happy. Kan Do caters to all skill levels and in this video, Lee walks through it from start to finish, making sure you have the knowledge you need to make the best of the app.

AirBuddy started life as the little pop-up that showed your AirPods battery when you opened the case near your Mac, and version 3 has grown into something far more useful. In this tip, Lee looks at the new AirBuddy 3 and the handful of features worth your attention: the Dashboard that gathers every battery you own into one list, with alerts before anything runs flat; the new Action HUD that gathers connections, volume, brightness and playback into a single strip at the top of the screen, tucked around the notch on a MacBook that has one; Now Playing and the interactive desktop widgets; and Audio Input Lock, which finally stops your Mac switching your microphone to your AirPods halfway through a call. AirBuddy 3 needs macOS 14 or later, and it is available as a one-off purchase or as part of Setapp.

In this fifth instalment of Tiny Mac Tips, Allison brings even more ways to increase your skill level on the Mac. You may know some of these (and can say to yourself, "I knew that!") but you probably don't know them all.

For future reference, every one of the tips you'll learn is also available in text at the links below:

Lee rounds off the OS 27 series with watchOS 27, and while there is no dramatic overhaul this year, Apple Watch has become noticeably better at putting the right thing in front of you. Press the Digital Crown now and suggested apps sit at the top, chosen from what the watch thinks you are most likely to want at that moment, as it learns from what you have just been using. Siri AI arrives on your wrist, too, adapted for the smaller screen but carrying the same conversations you started on your iPhone or Mac.

There are also improvements to the Smart Stack, a new Find My app, and more. It's what Lee calls a conscientious update.

Following on from the first two OS 27 videos, Lee rounds things out by taking a look at some of the features that have come to Photos, Safari, and Notes, as well as a handful of smaller tweaks that you may have missed otherwise. Photos has some great editing improvements, with the ability to Extend a photo beyond its physical constraints and adjust the perspective with Spatial Reframing.

Safari allows you to organise wayward tabs by topic, create extensions with no coding knowledge at all and also set up notifications for web pages.

Then there are the bits and bobs, such as changing the alert volume for alarms so they don't mirror the ringtone, resizing of iPhone apps on iPad and much, much more.

Following on from part one, Lee picks up the OS 27 tour with the parts of Siri AI aimed squarely at getting things made.

There is writing generated from nothing more than a description, refined and then critiqued on request, and a much improved Image Playground that now does photo realistic results and lets you remove, move and add elements to a picture after the fact. Another welcome update is that Genmoji can finally understand what you are describing!

Additionally, f you find yourself daunted at the mere idea of creating your own shortcuts, you definitely want to check the end of this video, all about Shortcuts and how much more user-friendly it's become!

It is that time of year again, and this time Lee is doing it differently. Rather than covering iOS, iPadOS and macOS as three separate updates and videos, this first part of this OS 27 series follows the features themselves as they move between iPhone, iPad and Mac, since that's increasingly how Apple builds them.

The bulk of the episode belongs to Siri AI, which has changed more than any other part of the update. Lee looks at how Siri holds a conversation across follow-up questions, how it draws on personal context from your emails, messages and notes, how it understands what is on your screen, and how it now acts on what it finds rather than just describing it.

There is a dedicated Siri app with a saved history, and an optional hand-off to ChatGPT. This video also shows you what Visual Intelligence can do with a camera pointed at everyday objects as well as printed documents.

For those of you who spend a lot of time pointing and clicking in Finder, this video could well help save you some time. There are lots of keyboard shortcuts in Finder that allow you to both get to different locations quickly, as well as execute actions with ease.

In this video, Lee shows you how to navigate your folder structure, reveal hidden files, copy file paths, as well as access the different Finder views, all without having to lift your fingers off the keyboard.

We continue our deep dive into the world of Claude by looking at Claude Design and some of the iOS-specific features we didn't get a chance to cover in the previous two screencasts.

In this video, Mike shares real-world examples of how you can use these features. This includes setting up your own design system, turning a photo of a whiteboard brainstorm session into a clean Markdown file, and using Claude as a personal trainer by integrating it with Apple Health. You also learn how to send messages from your phone to your Claude Desktop using Dispatch.

Lee has been spending more and more time in front of his Mac, and getting increasingly concerned about what all those hours are doing to his eyes. In this Tuesday Tip he introduces Paperman, a menu bar utility that lays a soft, paper-like texture over your entire display. It is not a blue light filter and it will not tint anything orange. What it does instead is change how the surface of your screen appears, taking the glare and the harsh contrast out of everything you do.

It's a great utility that you simply have to try out!

In this video, Lee returns to OmniFocus for the first time since version 4 landed, and finds an app that has changed a great deal more than its version number suggests. The headline is Planned Dates, a third date that sits alongside Defer and Due and answers the question neither of them ever could: when you are going to sit down and do the work. Lee shows why a task with a planned date and no due date is a far more honest entry than one carrying a deadline you invented to make yourself act.

With Mutually Exclusive Tag Groups, you can stop a task being both High Focus and Low Focus, the Repeats feature can finally end after a set number of occurrences (or on a chosen date) and the Forecast perspective gains summary dots and drag to reschedule, with modifier keys to choose which date you are moving.

Lee concludes with a short dip into Omni Automation. He goes through installing a plug-in from the library, running it, and going a step further with something that makes these plug-ins do what you want rather than what their author originally intended.

Lee is back with another weekly tip, and this one starts from an observation rather than a feature. Most of what he covers today lives in a single pane in Settings, Accessibility, and hardly anyone ever opens it. The name does the damage, because it tells you the contents are meant for somebody else. In fact it is where Apple has quietly put some of the most useful things iPhone can do, and the label on the door is putting everybody off.

Inside, Lee finds a way to hand your phone to a child and lock them into one app, a hidden pair of buttons on the back of the device that you likely were never told about, and an answer to the everyday problem of not being able to reach the top of a screen that keeps getting taller. There is more after that, including something your iPhone will listen out for on your behalf and a trick for anyone who has lost their voice. Lee wraps up with a final feature that fixes the one app you find hardest to read without changing anything else on the device.

Lee takes a look at Pastebot 3, the long awaited return of a Mac clipboard manager that has been a cult favourite in the Apple community for years. Tapbots left version 2 untouched for the best part of a decade, so this is not a tidy up, but a substantially different application. Starting from a first launch on the free trial, Lee works through the interface, the clipboard history and the Quick Paste window that puts everything you have copied one keystroke away, without ever leaving the app you are working in.

From there the show goes into Pastebins, that you build by hand, and Smart Pastebins that fill themselves according to rules you set. You also learn about keeping sensitive applications out of your history altogether, and dive into the filters that transform text before it's pasted. These are some of the main features that are making Lee consider switching to Pastebot full time.

In Show 1597, Lee looked at Brave's Browser and Search Engine and in this Tip video, he looks at two more products in the suite, namely Brave News, that gives you an aggregated news feed, directly in your browser, and Brave VPN which is an optional paid service that gives you a VPN on up to 10 devices. In this video, Lee shows you how to set the VPN up on both macOS and iOS.

If you've ever wondered whether there's a browser that actually looks out for you by default, rather than making you dig through menus and install a stack of extensions just to feel a bit safer online, this show is for you. Lee takes a proper look at Brave, the free browser built around blocking ads and trackers automatically.

In addition to the browser, Lee also looks at how Brave Search works. It can be used in any browser and contains some features that may make you consider switching search engines, even if you choose not to use Brave as your daily browser. You also learn the ins and outs of Leo, the built-in AI assistant that handles far more than a simple chat window.

Lee has stumbled across a macOS accessibility feature that turns out to be exactly right for anyone with a fading eyesight, but it's also quite useful for everyone.

The Hover Text option lets you magnify anything sitting under your Mac's pointer with a simple key press, and this week Lee shows exactly where to find it in System Settings. You learn how it behaves across everyday apps like Safari, Finder, and Numbers, to name a few. You're also introduced to the magic of Hover Typing, so this video is well worth ten minutes of your time!

Lee brings his deep dive into BBEdit 16 to a close with the final video in this three-part series; there's a lot packed into this one. Things start off gently with a look at reusable snippets of text, before moving into how BBEdit lets you organise a whole collection of files in one place, complete with its own settings for keeping everything tidy and identifiable.

Lee picks up the pace with a proper look at building and publishing a real website without ever leaving BBEdit, alongside some handy tools for capturing random thoughts and ideas along the way. Things wrap up with a look at BBEdit's built-in AI assistant, and a genuinely clever bit of automation that should appeal to anyone who likes their software to do a bit of the thinking for them.

It's a fitting send-off for an application that is bound to surprise you for some time to come.

This week's tip video looks at DeskMat, a neat little utility from Matthias at Eternal Storms Software, the developer behind favourites like Yoink and ScreenFloat. If your desktop tends to collect stray screenshots, downloads and files you've never quite got round to filing away, DeskMat gives you a one click way to tidy it all up, whether that's covering everything at once or just hiding specific files and folders.

Lee walks through getting set up, choosing how your desktop gets covered, and the handful of automation options that make DeskMat genuinely useful day to day, including a couple of clever touches for anyone who regularly shares their screen or presents to others. There's also a look at how to reach your files again without anyone watching being any the wiser. A simple app with a bit more depth than it first lets on.

I've been using ScreenFlow for a long time, but it's starting to show it's age and is honestly overkill for a lot of the simple screencasts I end up making to send to people. Dina has a simple feature set and uses AI in some pretty cool ways, like smoothing out your mouse cursor movements and giving you the ability to edit your video directly from a generated transcript. In this screencast, we'll cover recording options in Dina, all the standard features like backgrounds, adding animated zooms, displaying shortcuts onscreen, using callouts and annotations, and a lot more. We'll even show you how you can create your own free cloud hosting option for sharing your videos straight from Dina so people can view and leave comments on the web.