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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:

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.

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.