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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!

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.

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.

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.

Pages has two document modes, and while Word Processing gets all the attention, Page Layout is where the real design power lives. In this tip, Lee shows you how to switch from Word Processing to Page Layout mode, turning the Pages canvas into a free-form design surface where every element, whether it's a text box, image, or shape, can be placed exactly where you want it. Using a missing dog poster as a real-world example, Lee walks through building a complete design from scratch, covering text boxes, character spacing, image placement, and shape layering. You also learn about grouping objects and using the Arrange controls to stack everything in the right order.

The macOS Dock is something you use dozens of times every day, but how much thought have you given to setting it up properly? In this episode, Lee walks you through customising the Dock, from the essential options to a handful of hidden tips and tricks.

He then introduces DockDoor, a free, open-source app that adds one of the most-requested missing features on the Mac: live window previews right from your Dock! Hover over any Dock icon and instantly see every open window for that app, switch between them with a click, and even close or minimise windows without leaving your current app.

DockDoor goes well beyond basic previews. An enhanced Option+Tab window switcher brings Windows-style app switching with live thumbnails, and you can optionally replace the native macOS App Switcher with a richer version, too. There's a lot to discover with DockDoor, so definitely worth a look.

Lee is a nerd that has to work with spreadsheets a lot in his professional life and over the years has had to learn some of the more advanced functionality that Numbers can provide. So in this show, he's decided to share some of that with you and look at some functions that may have previously seemed quite daunting.

If you want to know how XLOOKUP can make pulling references from other tables a breeze, how functions like SUMIF and COUNTIF can add another dimension to your summaries, then this is the video for you. You also learn how to use nested functions, validate data entry, and format text automatically with functions like PROPER and TRIM. Lee had a lot of fun recording this one and certainly hopes you enjoy learning new tricks in Numbers.

After winning the MacStories Mac App of the Year award for 2025, Lee decided he really needed to give Bloom a spin to see if the plaudits were well-earned. It's safe to say that when it comes to looking for a replacement for the macOS Finder, Bloom is a market leader. As well as configuring different layouts and saving them as workspaces, you can customise the inspector with custom one-click actions and show metadata information that is otherwise hidden.

On top of this, you can organise your files with custom workflows, rename them in bulk with a variety of parameters and regular expressions, and so much more. In this video, Lee walks you through Bloom in great detail.

In last week's show we laid the groundwork for this week's video by looking at the basics of Reminders, Apple's built-in task manager.

In this episode, Lee dives in a little deeper and walks you through organising your various lists using Subtasks, Sections and tags. He also shows you some example scenarios for using Smart Lists that you may want to adopt. You also learn how Apple Intelligence can help populate your lists with reminders on the fly.

Lee wraps up the series by showing you some useful automations using Shortcuts that may give you some inspiration for upping your Reminders game even more.

Reminders has undergone something of a renaissance in the last few years and is now a serious option for the majority of Apple users who want a tool for organising their tasks. For years, it was regarded as simplistic, however now there are features that are persuading some power users to make the switch from other task management apps.

In this first screencast of a two-part series, Lee walks through the basics of creating tasks directly in Reminders as well as externally. He also looks at strategies for creating groups and lists to keep your tasks organised. This lays the foundation for Part 2, where you will learn about Tags, Smart Lists and Reminders automation.

AirDrop has been around for a long time now, however Lee finds that when he talks to family and friends, whenever files or photos need to be shared between them, it never appears to be the first thing they think about using. It's a shame as when it's used properly, it is so much quicker than other methods of File Transfer.

In this video, Lee offers a refresher in how AirDrop can be used to share files between devices with the same iCloud account, as well as with others. He also goes over NameDrop, Proximity Sharing and SharePlay, more recent additions that can all be useful in the right context.

To use AirDrop you need iOS 7 or later, macOS 10.10 or later.

The NameDrop, Proximity Sharing, and SharePlay via AirDrop features all require iOS 17 or later.

Just when he thought he knew lots about macOS, Lee discovered some functionality by accident when moving some windows. The small icon, to the left of the file name, can do a surprising amount if you take the time to build a workflow. In this video, Lee shows you how to drag and drop files, rename them, assign them tags as well as create a version control strategy all from the Title Bar of an application window. A genuine tip video!

The Clipboard on macOS can be a source of frustration, when it doesn't do what you expect. However, with a little bit of finesse, it can do some great things. In this video, Lee walks you through some of the basics of using your Mac's Clipboard as well as some functionality that you may not have known was there, such as copying and pasting edits in Photos.

Lee wraps up with two quick automations using BetterTouchTool and Keyboard Maestro to help you access your Clipboard history faster.

Following on from his recent show organising and optimising his Photo Library, Don turns his attention to his iCloud Storage organisation. In this tip show, Don explores why his iCloud storage has grown and uses a tool to identify large files and folders to either download and archive or simply delete.

It's time to look at the latest iteration of macOS and get to grips with some of the new features and improvements. Whilst we covered lots of generic app features last week in the iOS/iPadOS 26 video, macOS has had it's own, personal touches. There is a significant improvement to Spotlight, with added functionality for launching actions, shortcuts as well as accessing your clipboard history. The menu bar is now fully customisable, and you can also create automations from Shortcuts that have the potential to impact your productivity for the better. There's a lot of new stuff to cover, and Lee walks you through the most significant changes in this bumper show.

Lee loves having little sticky notes around his desk, that have little bits of information, like phone numbers he's jotted down, important information relating to the project he's working on that he knows he needs to go back to.  Everyone loves a sticky note, however not as many people know that there is a built-in Stickies application on macOS.

In this video, Lee not only shows you how to create and format sticky notes to your liking, he also works around the lack of support for Stickies in the Shortcuts app and walks you through a couple of scripts you can create to automate the creation of Stickies with just a keystroke.

Whilst scouting through some recent Indie app releases, Lee happened upon a wonderful utility for macOS that helps streamline your Desktop items. If you are the kind of user who loves having a desktop full of files and folders, yet finds it gets overloaded, InfiniDesk is for you, as you can create individual virtual desktops that house subsets of these items.

This tip video starts off with an overview of macOS Desktop Spaces and how they work, and concludes with a walkthrough of the InfiniDesk application.

In the first set of apps by the prolific developer Sindre Sorhus, Allison taught you how to use Dato, Aiko, and Velja. She's back with four more small but powerful apps from Sindre.

Plain Text Editor for Mac, iPad, and iPhone gives you a place to get your thoughts down without distraction of things like formatting.

Online Check simply tells you when your Mac has gone offline, and when it goes back online.

If Dato was too much in a calendar menu bar app, Today might be for you. It only shows you the things on your calendar today.

Any Text will let you create text widgets on your lockscreen or home screen of your Mac, iPad, and iPhone.