All Current Tutorials

We typically focus on protecting our digital assets whilst we are alive, but not much thought or planning goes into what happens to them when we die.

Kudos to Apple for introducing Digital Legacy Contacts with iOS 15.2. This is a mechanism built into iCloud to allow nominated individuals to have access to some of your iCloud data when you pass. Don shows you how to set it up in this video.

Timeline applications can often be seen as utilities that are only relevant to authors and novelists. Aeon Timeline, however, is an application that serves a variety of purposes. From project management through to creating legal cases, it is a complex yet intuitive app that allows you to plan effectively and plot milestones as your work progresses.

Lee shows you around this versatile software package using a real world example as well as a built-in one.

There are times when you just don't want to use a cloud service to sync your important documents such as financial or business records. This is when local sync can help by syncing all your files on your server, while still having them accessible on your iOS devices on the go.

In this screencast, Todd walks you through setting up local sync on both Mac and iPad, using Bonjour and WebDAV.

Parallels Toolbox is a menu bar app that includes 40 small utility apps. Many of these tools can be found as standalone programs elsewhere, but the magic of Parallels Toolbox is that they're bundled in one consistent interface, right at your fingertips.

With Allison as your guide, you discover Parallels Toolbox and how useful it can be in your day to day computing tasks.

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.

In this tutorial, Don takes you through some of the new features in Mail on macOS Monterey v12.1, including Mail Privacy Protection and Hide my Email.

In the second half of the screencast, you learn about two apps and one service Don uses each day to manage his email and keep things under control.

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.

Chronicle is a lightweight bill tracking option that can help you with your finances on Mac, iPhone and iPad. Available both as a stand-alone application and through the Setapp service, it offers a beautiful and practical solution to an otherwise mundane undertaking.

After an initial look at the two ways to acquire the app, Lee shows you how you how to set up your bills and income streams, log payments, view reports, synchronise between devices, and a lot more.

If you have external monitors as part of your Mac setup, managing them can be a tricky affair. Lots of them have menus that are hard to navigate, and ensuring that they all have the same colour settings can be frustrating.

Display Buddy is an application that helps with this, by allowing you to adjust the brightness, contrast and volume of all external monitors from your menu bar, as well as ensure all monitors are synchronised. You can even use Keyboard shortcuts to manipulate these as well as set presets and switch between different input sources. Lee shows you all of this in this short video.

Obsidian is another entry in the long line of personal knowledge management applications. It's one of the most feature rich, supported by a passionate community of users and plugin developers.

Lee runs through how to create your first Obsidian vault and how it's constructed. He then explains how to create and format your notes, link notes together as well as apply tags and search for them as your vault grows. You also learn about themes submitted by members of the community, and how to apply them.

Apple continues to improve and add new features to the iWork trio of applications. In this short video, Don takes you through adding live video sources to your Keynote presentation so your viewers can see you as well as your iOS or iPadOS device, if you so choose.

Don also demonstrates the multi-user presentation feature using two Macs, showing you how two people can collaborate and share responsibilities while doing a presentation.

In the last of Lee's series based on browsing the internet on macOS, he touches on one browser and one search engine that pride themselves on their levels of privacy and security.

Firefox, by Mozilla, is a great option for those who crave security but also need to work on different platforms. DuckDuckGo is an excellent choice for those who simply don't want to be tracked by third parties when browsing. It can be used as a full-featured search engine and as an extension for Safari. Lee shows you both in today's episode.

Service Station is a Finder extension that can show you relevant apps inside the contextual menu's Quick Action area. What you see there is dependent on the file(s) you select. With Don as your guide, you learn the basics of the app, and then start creating custom rules using an interface that will be familiar to Hazel users out there.

Creating and organizing your contacts is a very important piece of the productivity puzzle. Apple's Contacts does a fairly good job with this, but what if you want to do more?

In this episode, Todd takes a look at Cardhop for the Mac. This excellent app from Flexibits has a number of features that make it a joy to use. It supports natural language parsing and incorporates many useful tools to help you take control of your contacts.

James Thomson's PCalc has been a "cult hit" in the Mac and iOS community for many years. And with the iPad lacking a native calculator app, Lee shows you why PCalc is a popular solution amongst users with its wealth of configuration options.

You learn how to use PCalc to carry out basic calculations as well as convert units, refer to constants, use the built-in functions to carry out complex algorithms, and much more.

You may think pivot tables are for spreadsheet nerds, and there's some truth to that. Allison's goal, however, is to show you how enjoyable and useful they can be.

Now that Apple has finally brought pivot tables to Numbers, we can create them on our Macs, iPads, and even iPhones. Faced with a pile of data, pivot tables can help you can turn that mess into actionable information.

Allison uses data she's collected about solar energy generation and power consumption to demonstrate how to take a long spreadsheet and turn it into a simple 4x4 pivot table that answers the question, "Am I generating more power than I'm consuming?"

In this screencast, you take a deep dive into using Focus Modes on the Mac as well as iOS. Don looks at the basic features on both platforms, and shows you a neat way to create custom home screens for your iOS devices, that are based on the Focus Mode you select.

Continuing our profile of browsers in the Mac ecosystem, Lee takes a deeper look at Safari on macOS in this screencast. With competition from other browsers such as Google Chrome, Firefox and DuckDuckGo, Safari has been pushed to keep parity with its feature sets in recent years.

Lee shows you how to use this latest version of Safari on the Mac, and takes a leisurely stroll through the preferences, where you learn how you can modify them to make Safari behave the way you want it to. There is quite a bit there that you may not have been aware of!

It's been a part of macOS for a very long time, yet Calculator is a utility that offers quite a bit to the user. There are hidden depths to this app, far above the basic mathematical operations.

With his admittedly limited knowledge of the topic, Lee shows you the two other views that the calculator offers, Scientific and Programmer, and goes over some of the extra functionality that they contain.

Whilst Safari is the default web browser for many of us on macOS, Google Chrome has worked hard recently to shake off its reputation for taking up lots of machine resources. With a heavy feature set and ever-growing list of extensions available, it can be a great default browser.

Lee goes into Chrome in-depth in this video, looking at the basics of installing and setting up individual profiles, putting its many useful features to good use, all the way through to configuring your own security and privacy settings to make your browsing experience as comfortable as possible.