All Current Tutorials

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.

If you have ever tried adding a new entry to a Numbers spreadsheet on your iPhone, you will know how fiddly it can get: tiny cells, lots of zooming, and taps that often land in the wrong place.

Lee shows a feature built right into Numbers on iPhone and iPad that tackles this problem directly, using a growing vinyl record collection as his real world example.

Along the way, you see how a form can adapt to different kinds of data, handling everything from simple text and dates all the way to specialised entry controls. It is one of those features that is easy to miss, but once you know it's there, you're likely to never go back and type straight into a table.

BBEdit has a reputation for being a developer's tool, but this second installment shows just how useful it can be for anyone who works with text.

In this video Lee dives into grep (a way of searching for patterns in text instead of just exact words) and shows how it can untangle a genuinely messy real-world document in ways a normal Find and Replace was never designed to do.

From there, things move on to transforming text automatically, building up sequences of changes that can be saved and reused whenever you need them. It's the kind of feature that quietly saves hours once you know it's there, and there's plenty more still to come in the BBEdit videos ahead.

In Show 1541 Lee introduced you to Bloom, the Finder replacement that is full to the brim with features you never knew you needed. Well, the developer has kept busy with no less than ten incremental updates since then.

As that initial show was undoubtedly one of the most popular within the last year here at ScreenCastsONLINE, I'm sure there are some features you are going to love. They include improvements to Navigation and Search, the Inspector, Bloom's Appearance, Actions, and a lot more. Join Lee as he goes through several of them to you in this tip video.

If you're teaching or presenting on your Mac, KeyCastr helps your audience follow along by displaying your keystrokes on screen. It's fully customizable and can show exactly what you want, in the style you prefer.

Presentify complements it perfectly by letting you draw beautiful annotations directly on screen. Every tool is customizable and accessible via quick keystrokes, and a highlighted cursor ensures your viewers can follow your every move. In this video, Allison is your guide and show you in detail how to use this useful tandem.

Disk Utility is one of those apps that's been sitting in your Utilities folder for years, quietly minding its own business, and most people only open it on the worst possible day, when a drive stops behaving. In this Tuesday Tip, Lee takes the mystery out of Disk Utility. You learn how to make sense of that confusing sidebar, why your Mac shows several things all called Macintosh HD, and what containers, volumes, and snapshots are. Lee also shows you how to read what your Mac is telling you about your storage, including the oft-misunderstood question: how much free space do I have?

As you discover other actions like First Aid, Erase, Restore and even adding partitions to drives, you will soon realise that Disk Utility isn't quite as confusing as you may have thought it was.

BBEdit has been the gold standard Mac text editor since 1992, and version 16 is the best it's ever been. In this first of a multi-part series, Lee takes you on a complete tour of the app from the ground up, starting with what BBEdit actually is and why it's useful to far more people than just developers and coders. Whether you're a writer working in Markdown, a blogger managing a website, or simply someone who works with text and wants a tool that gets out of the way and lets you get on with it, BBEdit probably has something valuable to offer you.

Lee covers everything you need to get comfortable and productive in BBEdit 16: the window and all its components, the Navigation Bar, Text Options, the Status Bar, File State, working with multiple files, and much more. You also learn about using BBEdit as a writing tool, including Markdown editing and the built-in live preview.

When Apple removed app syncing from iTunes back in 2017, they took away something really useful — the ability to manage your iOS apps directly from your Mac. iMazing gives that control back, and in this TIP video we're diving into the Manage Apps section that we had to skip in our full iMazing show. You'll learn how to build a local library of your apps as .ipa files, download apps directly from the App Store through iMazing, and pull in apps from your purchase history — all stored safely on your Mac, independent of Apple's servers.

Once you have a library, the real power kicks in. You can install and uninstall apps across any connected device, check for updates and choose whether to keep older versions, and — one of the most useful features — view the full version history of any app and roll back to a previous release if an update breaks something you rely on. We also cover how to export your complete app list to a CSV file, giving you a sortable inventory you can open in Numbers or Excel. If you want the full iMazing picture, check out SCOM1581 — but this TIP stands completely on its own.

Apple's Contacts app does the job: It syncs with iCloud, it's free, and most people never think twice about it. But if you manage a meaningful number of professional relationships and want more than a glorified phone book, BusyContacts from BusyMac is a serious upgrade. In this show, Lee takes a comprehensive look at what makes BusyContacts stand out, covering everything from setup and account management through to the features that turn it into a lightweight CRM you can use day to day.

You also learn how Tags and Smart Filters let you segment your contacts, how the Activity List surfaces emails, calendar events, and social media feeds alongside every contact card, as well as the tight integration with BusyCal, which connects your contacts directly to your meetings, tasks, and journal entries. There is a lot to learn about BusyContacts, and Lee has got you covered.

As of this recording BusyContacts runs on macOS 12.0 Monterey or later.

When you pass away, everything stored in your Apple Account — photos, messages, notes, documents, years of memories — could be locked away permanently. Most people assume a family member can simply log in with their password, but Apple's Terms and Conditions explicitly prevent this, and Apple can close the account entirely if they discover the holder has died.

Fortunately, Apple has had a built-in solution since 2021 called Legacy Contact. In this show Lee walks you through everything you need to know to protect your digital estate. You learn how to set up a Legacy Contact (you can have up to 5) on iPhone, iPad, and Mac in just a few minutes, what data your chosen person will and won't be able to access, how to store your Access Key so it can actually be found when it's needed. You also find out the important fact about subscriptions: they don't cancel themselves! Lee also show you how your loved one's survivor goes about requesting access through Apple's Digital Legacy portal.

Your Mac ships with a folder full of powerful, free utilities that most users have never deliberately opened. In this show, Lee works through the macOS Utilities folder from A to Z, shining a light on twelve tools that have been quietly sitting on your Mac all along. He covers everything from diagnosing a slow system and managing audio devices, to picking colours from your screen, graphing equations in 2D and 3D, and giving your Mac a voice from the command line.

Some of these utilities are decades old, one is brand new in macOS Tahoe 26, and all of them are completely free, already living in your Applications' Utilities folder, and waiting for you to discover them. By the end of this video you'll have a whole new appreciation for what's been hiding in plain sight on your Mac.