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Paste without Formatting on the Mac

Posted on by Posted in Blog, Mac, productivity, Tip

Paste-without-keysWhen you copy text from a Web page, PDF, or word processing document, OS X usually includes formatting, so the words you paste may be 56 point blue italic if that was what the source text looked like. That may be appropriate at times, but often you want the text to take on the (more restrained) styling of the text where you’re planning to paste it. Rather than reformatting after pasting, in most Mac apps, try using the Edit > Paste and Match Style command (sometimes called Paste Text Only or Paste without Formatting) to paste the text such that it takes on the style of the surrounding words in the destination. Apple’s default keyboard shortcut for this is Command-Shift-Option-V, but some apps may use a different one. If you regularly need this capability in an app that doesn’t support it, consider using a clipboard utility app, like Keyboard Maestro, to make your own universal Paste Text Only hotkey.

 

What’s a Retina Display?

Posted on by Posted in Article, background, Blog, Explainer, hardware, iPad, iPhone

You’ve seen the term in Mac names—iMac with 5K Retina display, MacBook Pro with Retina display, and so on. But what is a Retina display, and why should you care? The short answer is Retina displays are high-resolution screens on which graphics are extra sharp and text is super crisp. Here’s the longer answer.

First off, a little background. The LCD screens used in Apple’s displays use a grid of “pixels”—the smallest possible dot whose color can be controlled—to create all the text and graphics you see. The first Mac needed 72 pixels in each direction to draw a 1-inch square, giving it a pixel density of 72 pixels-per-inch (ppi). Thanks to manufacturing advances in screen technology since 1984, the iPhone 6s Plus screen can fit a stunning 401 pixels into each inch. As pixel density goes up, the pixels get smaller. With a 72 ppi screen, it’s easy to see each individual pixel in a character, and the higher the pixel density, the harder it becomes to pick out separate pixels.

Low-and-High-resolution

When Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone 4 in 2010, he said that for a screen that’s held 10 to 12 inches from the eye—about the distance at which many people hold their iPhones— the human eye can’t resolve individual pixels if it’s about 300 ppi. At longer distances, it becomes harder to discern small details, so most people won’t be able to pick out pixels on a screen viewed at arm’s length, such as an iMac display, if it’s about 220 ppi.

A “Retina display,” then, is any screen whose pixel density is high enough that someone with 20-20 vision cannot see individual pixels at the standard viewing distance used for that device.

For the Mac, the necessary pixel density for a Retina display is about 220 ppi. Larger iPads have a pixel density of 264 ppi, and the iPad mini checks in at 326 ppi. From the iPhone 4 through the iPhone 6s, pixel density stayed at 326 ppi, but the iPhone 6s Plus upped it to 401 ppi. The tiny Apple Watch screen is about 330 ppi.

Practically speaking, a Retina display looks better than a non-Retina display. Put a 27-inch iMac with 5K Retina display (218 ppi) next to a non-Retina 27-inch Thunderbolt display (109 ppi), and the difference will be noticeable, particularly with text. If you suffer from eyestrain, reading on a Retina display will likely be easier and less tiring, since the words will be clear and crisp, without any of the fuzziness on the edges that you see on lesser displays.

Happily, there are few decisions to make when it comes to Retina displays. All recent models of the iPad, iPhone, iPod touch, and Apple Watch have Retina displays, so you’re good there. In the Mac world, however, not all MacBook models have switched, and Apple still sells some non-Retina iMacs and the non-Retina Thunderbolt Display. Plus, not all Macs can drive an external display that would be equivalent to a Retina display, even if Apple were to update the Thunderbolt Display to Retina. So if you’re buying a Mac now and there’s a choice between a Retina and a non-Retina option, be sure to compare them in person before deciding.

One last thing. It’s important to realize “Retina display” is an Apple trademark. So you won’t see any other manufacturers talking about their products as having Retina displays.

Find Buried Options in the iOS Settings App

Posted on by Posted in Blog, iOS, iOS 9, productivity, Settings, Tip

iOS-9-Settings-icon-full-sizeiOS 9 offers about 40 top-level categories in its Settings app and seemingly innumerable options in those categories. How can you find a little-used setting, particularly since Apple sometimes moves things between categories during major iOS releases? The solution is the Settings app’s hidden Search field. To reveal it, pull down on the main settings screen (iPhone) or left sidebar (iPad). Tap the Search field, enter text describing the setting you want to find (try typing Fa to find Facebook, FaceTime, and Safari Favorites), and the results appear immediately. Tap a result to jump to it, but also notice that each result shows a path, so you can find that setting manually in the future.

 

Use Quick Look to Peek inside Files and Folders on Your Mac

Posted on by Posted in Article, Blog, evergreen, Finder, Mac, productivity, Solution

Finder icons sometimes hint at what’s inside, but if you find yourself opening file after file to look at the contents quickly, OS X has a little-known feature just for you: Quick Look. To give it a spin, find a file in the Finder, click it once to select it, and press the Space bar. If it’s a supported type of file, Quick Look displays a window showing the contents of the file. Press the Space bar again to close the window.

Quick-Look-Excel

If the document you’re previewing has multiple pages, you’ll see thumbnails that you can scroll through using your mouse or trackpad, or by pressing the Page Up/Page Down keys. But you aren’t limited to just viewing a file in Quick Look: click the Open in app-name button to open the file in its default app, or click the Share button in the upper right to send the file to someone else via email or Messages or another sharing service.

If you need to scan through a set of files in a folder, you can navigate between them using the arrow keys while the Quick Look window remains open — how you move among the files depends on the Finder window’s view. In List view, for instance, using the Up and Down arrow keys can be a great way to browse through a collection of pictures. You can even interact with the Finder while using Quick Look, which means you can delete an unwanted photo by pressing Command-Delete while previewing it.

Quick Look works well for comparing multiple similar files. Select a bunch of files and press the Space bar to open them all in Quick Look. The Left and Right arrow keys let you cycle through your selection; there are also Forward and Back buttons that appear in the top left of the Quick Look window. Next to those buttons is a Thumbnail button that displays the selected files in a grid—click any thumbnail to focus on just that item. To remove the distraction of your Desktop, click the Zoom button in a Quick Look window. You can start a slideshow from there, or just press Option-Space to open Quick Look in Full-screen view with the slideshow already started.

Quick-Look-penguins

So what file types does Quick Look work with? Not everything, but out of the box, Quick Look supports text files, RTF files, HTML files, images, audio, video, PDFs, iWork documents, Microsoft Office files, and even fonts. Third-party apps can extend Quick Look to support proprietary formats, too, and developers have even released independent Quick Look generators, as they’re called. If you want to look inside Zip archives and other compressed files, check out BetterZip, for instance, and if you write in the Markdown formatting language a lot, QLMarkdown is worth installing.

Quick-Look-BetterZip

Although it’s used mostly in the Finder, Quick Look is available elsewhere. For example, if you’re in an app’s Open dialog, you can select a file and press the Space bar to preview it right there. When restoring a file in Time Machine, use Quick Look to see if it’s the version you want. Most Internet file transfer apps, like Cyberduck, Fetch, and Transmit, support Quick Look, making it easy to preview a file on a remote FTP server. You can also preview an attachment in Messages by selecting it and pressing the Space bar.

Finally, note that if your Mac has a newer Apple trackpad, such as the Magic Trackpad 2, you can invoke Quick Look by force-touching a Finder icon (press deeply until you feel a click) instead of pressing the Space bar.

Quick Look takes just a moment to learn, but it can save you hours of time poring through files on your Mac.

Type Accented Characters and URLs Faster in iOS

Posted on by Posted in Blog, evergreen, iOS, productivity, Tip

Did you know that many keys on the small iPhone keyboard are hiding additional characters? To type an O with an umlaut, for instance, press and hold the O key, and a popover appears with accented variants of O. Without lifting your finger, slide it over the Ö and then pick it up to insert that character. This trick is also useful for getting different dashes (under the Hyphen), different currency symbols (under the $), curly quotes, and more. The most interesting one? When the Period key appears on the main keyboard screen, as it does in Safari or Mail when entering a URL or email address, press and hold on the Period, and you can quickly select from .us, .edu, .net., .org, or .com to finish the address you’re typing.

Build Travel Time into Your Calendar Alerts

Posted on by Posted in Article, Blog, How-To, iOS, Mac, productivity

We’ve all done it. You swing into a meeting late, and as everyone looks up at you accusingly, you mutter, “Sorry. Traffic was terrible.” Maybe it was, but if you’d left at the right time for the traffic conditions, you could still have arrived without being late. Happily, the Calendar apps in both OS X and iOS can build travel time into event alerts so you can leave at the right time. There’s a bit of setup, but once you form the habit of attaching locations to your events, you’ll get a reputation for punctuality.

First, if you’re working on an iOS device, make sure Calendar can access your location by going to Settings > Privacy > Location Services > Calendar and selecting While Using the App.

Next, you need to make sure the Time To Leave option is turned on. On the Mac, choose Calendar > Preferences > Alerts and select the Time To Leave checkbox. If you have other default alerts set for Events, you may wish to set that pop-up menu to None to avoid confusion. In iOS, go to Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendars > Default Alert Times and enable Time To Leave.

Calendar-TimeToLeaveSetting

Now follow these steps:

  1. Create a new event, and enter a title and the start time. Travel time doesn’t work with all-day events.
  2. In the Location field, start typing your destination’s name or address. You must be able to reach the destination within 3 hours to receive alerts about when to leave.
    Calendar is smart about this, offering matches from your contacts, from recently visited places, and then from place names and addresses near you. So you could type a friend’s name and pick their card from Contacts, or a place name like “Tompkins County Public Library,” or even a specific address, like “806 State Street.”
    Calendar-PickLocation
  3. Regardless, after typing a partial name or address, you must pick one of Calendar’s suggestions so it knows the exact location of your destination.
  4. The next step is a bit different between the Mac and iOS:
    • On the Mac, in the Travel Time pop-up menu (click once to reveal it), choose the automatically generated travel time for driving or walking, or, if your city is supported, public transit. You can’t change your starting location, which is based on the location of events in the previous 3 hours (it assumes you’re there!), your work address during work hours, your home address during off hours, or your computer’s location if all else fails. (The addresses come from the card in the Contacts app that is open when you choose View > Make This My Card.)
    • In iOS, tap Travel Time and in the Travel Time screen, enable the Travel Time switch. A starting location may be picked for you, based on your current location and time of day, or based on a previous event, but you can always tap Starting Location and pick a different spot. Then tap a travel time based on location for walking, driving, or transit, which will reflect both your starting and ending locations, plus the traffic conditions.
      Calendar-SetTravelTime
  5. Now it’s time to back out of the Travel Time screen and set alerts based on the travel time, which will take traffic conditions into account. By default, setting travel time creates an alert for Time To Leave, although you may wish to set a second alert that gives you a few minutes to get ready beforehand.
    Calendar-FinalEvent

That’s it, but with one important caveat. Calendar on the Mac doesn’t take changing traffic conditions into account, but Calendar in iOS 9 does. So if traffic can change quite a bit where you live, pay closer attention to your iPhone’s alerts than those that come from your Mac. Plus, when you see the alert on the iPhone, you can tap Options to open another alert that has a link for directions; tap Directions to view the travel directions in the Maps app.

Calendar-iPhoneEventAlerts

Once you get the hang of setting up events, getting custom alerts with directions is like living in the future!

Select List Items from the Keyboard

Posted on by Posted in Blog, evergreen, Mac, productivity, Tip

Even if you already know this tip, you may not have realized all the places where it works. When you find yourself in a list, as in a Finder window, an Open dialog, or a set of autocomplete options, you can usually press keys on the keyboard to navigate within the list. Press M, and you’ll drop down to the first item whose initial letter is M. If multiple items start with M, use the Up and Down arrow keys to move more precisely, one item at a time. And rather than clicking an Open or OK button, try pressing Return to activate the item. So if you assumed you had to use the pointer to scroll through lists and click list items, try the keyboard—it’s faster to type W than to scroll all the way down to WY in a list of states.

Goldilocks and the Three PDF Apps: Which Is Right for You?

Posted on by Posted in Article, Blog, Mac, productivity, Solution

PDF files are usually meant as digital representations of paper-based documents. Scanners generally create documents in PDF, ebooks are often distributed in PDF, and government agencies like the IRS make their paper forms available as interactive PDFs.

So it’s essential to have an app on your Mac that can work with PDFs, and in fact, such an app is included: Preview. But as good as Preview is, it can’t do everything you might want, and just like in the fairy tale of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, there are three popular apps for working with PDF: Preview is the first, and while it’s decent and free, Smile’s PDFpen and PDFpenPro offer quite a few more features but cost $75 or $125. The high-end spot is occupied by Adobe’s Acrobat Pro DC, which is priced at a hefty $450. Which PDF app is right for you?

PDF-Preview-iconYou won’t go wrong starting with Preview, which enables you to rearrange pages in a PDF, copy pages from one PDF into another, delete pages, and even import new pages from a scanner. Preview lets you navigate PDFs via the table of contents or thumbnails, and can display the pages in a grid. If you’re trading a PDF back and forth with a collaborator, you can use Preview to highlight text and add annotations. Preview even makes it possible to fill out interactive forms and sign documents. It has a search capability, although it’s a little weak, and you can bring up an inspector window that displays metadata about the PDF, although you can’t change anything in there apart from keywords.

PDF-PDFpenPro-iconPDFpen and PDFpenPro can do everything Preview can, and quite a bit more. When scanning a page, they can perform optical character recognition (OCR), which adds searchable and editable text to the scanned image of the document. Speaking of text, both apps can add to and change the text of a PDF, which is handy when you want to make a quick correction or update an old document. They also let you move, resize, and delete images in PDFs, redact sensitive information, find and replace text, add file and audio attachments, and export to Microsoft Word format. PDFpenPro goes even further, making it possible to turn a Web site into a PDF, export to Microsoft Excel and PowerPoint formats, create and edit a PDF’s table of contents, create links from URLs in a document, and more.

PDF-Acrobat-iconWhat more do you get with Acrobat Pro DC for more than three times the price of PDFpenPro? (It’s also included with an Adobe Creative Cloud subscription.) Since it comes from Adobe, the company that created PDF, Acrobat will work with complex and involved PDFs that could stymie the other apps. Acrobat offers high-end print production features, integration with Microsoft Office, and a side-by-side view for fixing suspected text recognition errors in an OCRed scan. Most important, if you need to edit PDFs frequently, Acrobat can reflow text across an entire page, add new lines to existing bulleted or numbered lists without reformatting, and clean up document photos to remove the background and adjust perspective.

Our recommendation? Start with Preview and see whether you need more features. If PDFpen or PDFpenPro will resolve your problems, they’re solid performers that don’t cost too much. But if you find yourself spending your days working on PDFs, particularly in a collaborative environment or with a lot of text editing, Acrobat Pro DC may be worth the money.

 

Find on Page in Safari in iOS

Posted on by Posted in Blog, iOS, productivity, Safari, Tip

Picture yourself looking for something specific on a long Web page on the small iPhone screen. Did you know that you can search through just the text of the page? Tap the Share button, and in the bottom row of icons, swipe left until you see Find on Page. Tap that, and then enter the word you’re looking for in the search field that appears. The Up and Down arrow buttons in the upper left of the keyboard help you find subsequent instances of your search term.

Why IMAP Is Better than POP for Email

Posted on by Posted in Article, Blog, evergreen, Explainer, iOS, Mac, productivity

When you read an email message on your iPhone and delete it, do you have to trash it again when you check mail on your Mac? Or is your email kept in sync such that if you delete a message on one system, it never even appears on the other?

If you fall into the first camp, your Internet service provider probably has you using an email technology called POP. Conversely, if you’re in the second camp, you’re probably using a different email technology called IMAP. Don’t worry what POP and IMAP stand for—they could be called Fred and Jane for all that it matters. What does matter is that if you’re using POP to read email on more than one device, you’re wasting time and effort.

Put simply, POP was designed in 1984 so that every email message would be downloaded from your mail server and immediately deleted from the server, so the only copy would exist on your Mac. But that made it impossible to check email from more than one computer, so POP’s designers made it possible for a message to be downloaded but not deleted, so it could be retrieved again by another computer. But the POP server has no way of knowing that the message was transferred multiple times, so each computer that gets it sees it as a fresh message, forcing you to delete or file it in each place.

In contrast, IMAP, which came along just a couple of years later in 1986, was designed to keep all your email on the mail server itself so multiple computers could access the same set of messages. And, most important, anything you do to a message—delete, file, or reply—in your email app on one computer also happens on the IMAP server, so if you check email from another computer, your email collection reflects all those previous actions.

Fast forward to today, where you might check email with your Mac at work, with your iPhone while at lunch, and on your iPad at home. If your Internet service provider is using IMAP, anything you do on any of your devices is reflected on all the rest. As an extra bonus, you can search through all your email at any time, from any device, which is great when you realize you need the address for today’s meeting after you’re in the car.

But some ISPs still rely on POP, and for those of you who have had the same email account for many years, even if your ISP supports IMAP, they may not have switched you over. If your email is stuck in the POP past, call your ISP and bring your email into the 21st century. If they aren’t willing to help, remember that you can always use your free iCloud email account instead or sign up for a free account with Gmail or Yahoo.

For those who are shaking your heads because you don’t want some IMAP server in the cloud to hold the only copy of your precious email, rest assured that it doesn’t have to be that way. By default, Apple Mail downloads a copy of every message and keeps it locally on your Mac too, so even if something bad were to happen in the cloud, you’d still have your local copy and your backups of it.

Life is too short to waste time dealing with the same email messages on multiple devices. Computers and smartphones are supposed to make things easier, not harder, so if you’re not already using IMAP for email, do yourself a favor and switch.