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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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Your iPhone and Apple Watch are packed with features designed to help in a genuine emergency — but they only work if you've set them up in advance. In this video, Lee walks you through several essential safety features: Medical ID, Emergency SOS, Fall Detection, Heart Rate alerts with ECG, and Check In. This gives you everything you need to make sure your devices are ready when it matters most.

Five minutes of setup today could make a real difference when you need it most.

Where iCloud and Finder give you basic, all-or-nothing backup and sync, the iMazing 3 utility puts you firmly in control. It lets you create unlimited local backup snapshots, browse and extract exactly the data you need, and transfer files freely between your device and your Mac, all without touching iCloud and with your data staying entirely on your machine.

In this video Lee takes a deep look at what iMazing brings to the table. He looks at backups and iMazing's snapshot approach which gives you a Time Machine-like history of your device. You learn how to extract and export your messages, WhatsApp conversations, contacts, calendars, notes, voicemails, call history, and Safari data. Lee also covers photo and media transfers, battery health monitoring, and iMazing Mini, the companion app that keeps your devices backed up automatically in the background.

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.

Whilst diagnosing a problem recently with some USB devices on his machine, Lee happened across a wonderful macOS utility called Hubble. Using this application he was able to get an instant diagram of the topology of his connected devices alongside hints and tips on how to resolve the errors.

In this video, Lee shows you how to set the application up and walks through the interface so you understand exactly what Hubble is trying to tell you, and how it can help you solve these types of issues.

Paste has been Lee's clipboard manager of choice for a while now and the developers have released two new features that really elevate Paste as a front-runner in its class.

In this video, Lee shows you how to search your clipboard history using Power Search, which allows you to filter searches based on application, item type, date, and more. You can also go back to a clipboard item entry in your 'timeline' of pasted items using another new feature, Jump To History, allowing you to quickly see other items you copied at around the same time.

Paste is available on the Mac App Store and as part of a Setapp subscription. For current pricing, see the link below.

Pages is Apple's long-standing and free word processor and page layout program, available on every Mac, iPad, and iPhone; a far more capable app than many people realise. In this first of a 2-part series, Lee gets you comfortable and confident with the essentials, so you can start producing great-looking documents straight away. He covers everything from launching Pages for the first time, understanding the two types of document, as well as a detailed tour of the interface. You also learn about paragraph styles, headers and footers, saving, exporting to Word and PDF, as well as the key settings worth adjusting before you do anything else.

Whether you're switching from Windows, are new to the Mac, or have had Pages sitting in your Applications folder for years without ever opening it, this video is for you.

If you watched our original Supercharge tip video, you'll know just how much this little utility can do to smooth out the rough edges of macOS. Well, Sindre Sorhus has been busy (very busy) and in this follow-up, Lee walks you through a whole raft of new features that have arrived since that first video was released.

From keeping your Mac awake on demand and muting your microphone with a single keystroke, to isolating your front window in an instant and capturing text from anywhere on screen, there's plenty here that will find a spot into your daily workflow.

Finder also gets some serious attention with this update, giving you even more context menu options for checking file dates, comparing identical files, stripping image metadata, and more. Whether you caught the original video or you're coming to Supercharge for the first time, this one is well worth your time.

Spotlight in macOS Tahoe 26 isn't just for finding files anymore. With Spotlight Actions, you can send messages, fire off emails, capture reminders, and trigger your favourite apps, all from a single keystroke.

Lee demonstrates in this video the most useful actions across both Apple's native apps as well as some popular third-party ones like OmniFocus and Drafts.

SoundSource is a menu bar app from the fine folks at Rogue Amoeba. This powerful utility gives you fast access to system devices, allowing you to control the settings for your Mac's output, input, and sound effect audio devices right from your menu bar.

You can apply per-application audio adjustments like changing the volume of any app relative to others as well as sending individual apps to different audio outputs.

SoundSource also lets you apply audio effects everywhere. You can make any app's audio sound great with simple built-in effects as well as support for Audio Units plugins. Join Allison as she takes you through its features and benefits.