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In this tip Don covers some of the changes to System Preferences in Big Sur as well as some useful new features around Family Sharing and Apple ID.

In this tip, Rosemary is your guide on a tour of the refreshed Maps interface in Big Sur where you learn about bike directions, editor's guides, and the Look Around feature.

Not a lot has changed in Calendar and Contacts in Big Sur, other than the expected visual refresh. With that in mind, Don shows you some lesser-known features from both of these core macOS applications, and adds a little Automator trick as a bonus!

Finding the right solution for working with your photos on the Mac can be difficult with many options available on the App Store. One of the best options already exists on every Mac: Photos.

Photos has been growing over the past few years, adding more features and options for organizing, editing, and sharing your images. Since we haven't had a look at Photos in a while, this week Todd is giving you a fresh tour of the app running in macOS 11 Big Sur.

On behalf of all of us at ScreenCastsOnline to all who celebrate it, Merry Christmas.

This week's tip show takes another look at Apple Mail in Big Sur and explores some of the new features and enhancements to the existing functionality of the app.

The latest version of macOS, Big Sur, brings with it an overhaul of much of the core functionality. Here, Lee takes a deeper look at how the Control Center and Notification Center have been modified to look a lot more like their iOS counterparts. You learn how to configure both areas, and how to add and remove widgets from the Notification Center.

In this tip, Rosemary shows you some of the changes to the Home App in Big Sur, while giving you a tour of the application using her home setup.

This week's special tip video isn't a tip video at all!

After taking delivery of the Apple MacBook Air with the new M1 chip, Don decided to takes you through his first impressions of the performance of the new machine. It's quite an eye-opener!

He also explains some of the complexities that come with the various types of apps that can be run on these new M1-powered Macs.

macOS 11 - Big Sur - is Apple's latest OS for the Mac.

With it comes a fresh bright new look and some design refinements.

In this first look show, Don takes a look at some of the more important changes to macOS to get you off and running. We'll do some deeper dives in future tips shows.

There are lots of keyboard shortcuts and tools built into the operating system that can help you improve the speed of your text creation in macOS. Lee spent some time rediscovering some and learning others, all with the goal of making his typing more efficient.

In this week's tip, you learn many of the ones he uses each day.

In this week's tip video Don covers one of the surprisingly effective features of the Finder: file renaming.

Although there are plenty of dedicated third-party Mac applications that do this, we thought it was worth revisiting what can be accomplished using the built-in features of macOS.

A little-known feature of Safari on both macOS and iOS is the ability to browse in private. This allows you to keep your browsing history private as well as take advantage of some additional privacy features.

In this tip video, Don takes you through the standard usage of Private Browsing in Safari, on both the Mac and iPad, as well as pointing out issues to be aware of on iOS.

When Apple transitioned away from iTunes to a series of application in macOS Catalina, the way you manage your media changed in several ways. We briefly covered these changes and new apps in the past, but we felt it was time to take a deeper dive.

In this screencast, Todd gives you a tour of each one, beginning with Music. He also goes over the Home app, which can help you manage your audio sources, such as HomePod and AirPlay 2 speakers.

We all know custom keyboard shortcuts are a boon to productivity, but it's such a faff to set them up via System Preferences. Time-consuming and prone to typos, the traditional way of setting up custom keyboard shortcuts can present some friction.

CustomShortcuts by Houdah Software is a free, easy-to-use utility that greatly simplifies the process. No need to navigate System Preferences, as auto-exposure of available menus per application plus auto-completion, makes the creation of custom keyboard shortcuts a breeze.

In this tip video, Don takes you through that process using CustomShortcuts, using a few practical examples.

In this video, Lee continues the current theme of examining the core OS functionality of our devices in more detail, with another look at Spotlight on macOS. Spotlight is much more than an application launcher. Lee shows you how it can be used to convert units, get calendar and contact information, find specific files and folders, as well as get information about your favourite sports teams!

When working with videos, we don't always have time to fire iMovie or Final Cut Pro to edit and export our home movies. Whilst Photos gives you a few bits of functionality, QuickTime Player offers quite a bit more.

In this tip, Don shows you how to string together several movies using the QuickTime app on your Mac. You also learn useful single-key shortcuts (the same ones pro video editors use!) to play and trim your movies, or watch a ScreenCastsOnline tutorial.

It's so easy to build up a collection of hundreds and hundreds of bookmarks in Safari, and so easy to fall into bad habits of not organising them properly. By using a combination of Safari Bookmark folders and some clever tricks with descriptions, you'll soon be able to navigate your bookmarks in a flash and find any bookmark in an instant.

In this tip video, Don gives a refresher on creating bookmarks in Safari for Mac, along with some invaluable tips on organising and searching.

In this video, Lee invites you to take a closer look at the built-in macOS Help Guide. Whilst offering casual advice for the beginner when it comes to using core macOS features, you learn that this guide is also for advanced users, as Lee shows you some hidden gems along the way.

There are many good reasons you might consider doing a clean install on your Mac. Perhaps it has gotten sluggish over the years, you may have had a hard drive replaced which necessitates the process, or you'd like to have as close to a stock operating system as possible before installing the next major release of macOS.

But performing a clean install (some call it a "nuke and pave") may seem like a daunting task, one you may be reluctant to take on. In this week's show, Allison talks about all the reasons why you might want to do it, suggests some strategies to attacking the task, and then shows the process in action.

In this episode, Don looks at two new facets of macOS Catalina.

Sidecar - a brilliant way to utilise your Apple Pencil and iPad. Extend your Mac Desktop on to your iPad or mirror your Mac onto your iPad and control it with your Apple Pencil. Sidecar turns your iPad into a dedicated sketching and drawing tablet connected to your Mac.

Voice Control - it's now possible to do pretty much everything on your Mac with your voice. A full suite of navigation commands, cursor commands, dictation commands, text navigation and editing and more. It's really impressive how Apple has implemented such a feature-rich implementation of Voice Control.