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Apple's built-in emoji picker on Mac leaves a lot to be desired. Using Rocket, from developer Matthew Palmer, you can search for and insert emojis, animated GIFs, images, and text snippets into any text field quickly and easily. It's a simple utility that is a joy to use. In this screencast, Mike shows you how Rocket works.

Obsidian is a powerful app, but it doesn't make it easy to capture things on iOS. Opening Obsidian requires your whole vault and all the associated plugins need to load, so until the developers add an improved workflow for mobile quick capture, iPhone users are left to figure out something using third-party apps. Funnel makes it easy to capture things quickly to Obsidian, including images — even if you don't use iCloud to sync your data. In this short video, Mike shows you how Funnel can assist you with quick capture of text and images in Obsidian, but it can also be used with several other apps to perform the same task.

There are many ways to display and capture the screen of your iOS device. You can do a screen recording on device and save the video to your Photo Album, use Quicktime on your Mac (when it works), or a third-party screen capture app like ScreenFlow. All of these methods only capture the screen itself, and each presents some challenges. Bezel is an innovative "plug-and-play" app that tackles those challenges. It generates high-quality videos on your Mac's desktop, identifying your device and adding a matching bezel, including its colour. With full rotation support and the ability to showcase multiple devices, Bezel is the ultimate screen display tool for screencasting and online presentations, using iPhone or iPad. In this video, Don walks you through Bezel's features and demonstrates how you can have two devices at once on your screen. He also adds a tip for configuring an on-screen pointer to help your viewers follow along, something we do here at ScreenCastsONLINE.

If you want to get to items quickly on macOS, you don't have to use a third-party launcher program such as Alfred, LaunchBar or Raycast. For years, there has been a built-in utility at your fingertips, and that's Spotlight, which has received a lot of love from Apple recently. It's more than just a way to get to your files and launch applications and in this video, Lee shows you many different use cases for it, many of which might be new to you.

Rather than showcasing a single app, in this full show Darcy introduces four applications designed and released by Amico Apps.

The first is a utility that allows you to quit multiple programs at the same time, as well as schedule app quitting due to inactivity. Another that makes accessing emoji on the Mac very easy, using shortcuts.

A third that is aimed at designers and overlays the golden ratio on your screen and finally, software to manage your calendars, reminders, notes and photos using widgets.

Bartender 5 is required for macOS 14 (Sonoma) and also comes with big improvements in capability. You can now create Profiles for the different contexts in which you work, and you can set up automations with Triggers based on apps, battery, location, WiFi network, time, and even scripts.Allison demonstrates how all of this works, and also shows you how this version of Bartender lets you style your menu bars like never before.

One thing all macOS users have in common is the need to interact with Finder when opening and saving files. Sometimes, the process of finding either the source folder for opening, or the destination one for saving can be laborious, involving a lot of pointing and clicking. Default Folder X allows you to streamline this experience, by sending you to default locations depending on the application or extension you are saving.

As well as this, Default Folder X now comes bundled with a Quick Search function, for getting to files, folders and applications quickly. Join Lee as he shows you around this long-standing feature-rich utility on the Mac.

Using Tailscale, you can connect any device securely and easily by creating your own private virtual network. Unlike traditional VPN services, Tailscale is designed to allow you to seamlessly connect your own devices and freely exchange data and remotely access. Using the free plan you can have up to three users and 100 devices connected. In this tip video, Don shows you how to set up your Tailscale account on a Mac and iPhone and share images and files. He also demonstrates sharing remote access to one of your devices.

As is traditional this time of year, Apple have released iOS 17 with so many features we couldn’t fit it all into one screencast. Follow along with Darcy as he demos new features for users of dual SIM, such as filtering messages and customising ringtones based on your number. Protect your eyes using Screen Distance, and explore new ways to sign in with your Apple ID using Passkey.

Chronicling takes habit and activity tracking quite simply to new heights. Darcy shows you how easy it is to automatically track the amount of times you use certain apps, go shopping or even walk the dog. Using a mixture of in-app design and the built-in Shortcuts app, Chronicling prides itself on providing a simplistic yet thorough approach to tracking across all your Apple devices.

If you love to take photos and have done so for a while, it's likely that they're spread out in a bunch of different places: on your Mac, on external drives or within a specific photo application, like Apple's Photos or maybe Lightroom.Peakto by CYME software focuses on bringing all of those sources under one roof, and gives you the tools to manage that collection. Like so many other apps these days, Machine Learning is a bit part of its experience, especially when searching through your various catalogs. If you have trouble organizing your photos, Peakto may be just what you need. Join Todd as he guides you through its many features.

Covering apps and utilities is great but sometimes it's nice to dive under the hood and look at something that's been with us for a while, but may not have noticed or used at all.

Quick Actions in macOS are accessed via a contextual menu within Finder and allow you to access some tools for manipulating image and movie files, as well as access Shortcuts and Automator actions. Lee shows you how to both access and customise this menu, as well as add Shortcuts actions to it, allowing you to get to your favourite tools quickly.

Previously covered in 2017 by Todd, Curio has received a lot of updates over the years. Today Darcy takes you through many of them and shows you how one of the most robust researching apps on the market has become even better. Learn more about journalling, working with PDFs in multiple spaces, tagging, using web archives in your work, syncing figures, and so much more.

There are a number of different workflows that you can install with Alfred, the popular app launcher for macOS. However, one in particular has caught Lee's eye and he uses it on a daily basis to carry out currency conversions, date calculations, weight conversions and more. Calculate Anything is a versatile utility and in this video, Lee shows you how to install it, alongside the dependencies it requires to work. You also get a sneak peek into how the new Alfred Gallery will work when installing workflows.

Elephas uses the power of ChatGPT with its own customisations to help users with all their writing needs. It offers features such as intelligently generating press releases, marketing material and email responses, with minimal information provided. Darcy shows you in this screencast how the app goes beyond robot replies and truly generates writing that feels like it's from a real person. Whether you're using it for work or take advantage of its powerful smart brain to index and query your own PDFs, Elephas has you covered.

Shift provides people with complex workflows requiring many apps a platform to combine them all. In this video Darcy showcases how to add accounts from Slack, Dropbox, Airtable and more into a streamlined interface, allowing you to increase ease of access between them and a more focused environment for your projects. Shift is a great way to declutter your desktop of windows by bundling them all together into one, with dozens of apps available to integrate. You also learn how to add extensions within Shift.

Shottr is an extremely powerful screenshot tool that comes at a surprisingly low cost. Whilst it has a lot of the usual tools to capture and annotate that you'd expect, it also has advanced features such as the ability to blur or completely erase areas or even just the text. It also has optical character recognition to copy text from images, and it can read QR codes for you. If you're a web or app developer, you can measure elements in screenshots, find their pixel color values, and more.

Shottr can create scrolling screenshots to capture long web pages and other long-form elements. The annotations in Shottr are pretty and somehow playful without being silly. It's filled with keyboard shortcuts to make you as efficient as you want to be in taking screenshots and annotating them.

You may be wondering: Why cover an application that is a stand-alone menu bar utility for the calendar, when many calendar apps already have a built-in menu bar component? Well, Dato is a little bit more than that. You may be able to do all of the usual things such a utility should do, like get a quick peek at your agenda and add items with a keyboard shortcut. Dato, however, goes a little further by adding multiple time zones support, offering full-screen notifications for calendar events as well as offering a built-in date calculator. Join Lee, your tour guide, in this tip video showcasing a clever utility.

To conclude his series on Apple Watch, Darcy showcases many of the health focused apps and hardware available on your wrists. Watch along to learn how to check your heart rate, ECG and blood oxygen in the moment and share that information with medical professionals. And for people who exercise at any level, a full breakdown of the exercise app including custom workouts and mindfulness. All of this information is then shown through the Fitness and Health apps to give you a rounded picture of your health.

In show 837, Don covered Hook for macOS, an interesting utility that can link documents in both directions on your Mac to make it easy to switch between contexts and work on related documents stored anywhere on your computer. Since that screencast, the application has evolved and even has a new name: Hookmark. Now at version 5, it brings some new functionality and in this video, Lee revisits some of the core principles of the app before diving into its new features, as well as Hookmark's integration with several important apps, such as Drafts, Fantastical, and OmniOutliner.