All Current Tutorials

If you're sick and tired of the constant exchange of emails to try and schedule a meeting or book an appointment, WhenWorks might be your ideal solution.

WhenWorks is an iOS app for iPhone or iPad that integrates with most calendar services.

As a host, you set up some event types and rules, then send out invitations. The recipients (called guests) receive the email invitation and can pick a suitable date and time from a web-based service - they don't need to be WhenWorks users themselves.

Once the guest picks a time slot, your calendar is updated and an email confirmation is sent out. Either the host or the guest can reschedule or cancel the appointment with just a few clicks. Want to have single point of contact without sending out invitations every time? You can make your available time slots public and send anyone a web link.

If you need to set up one-to-one meetings on a regular basis, WhenWorks can be a tremendous boon!

Following on from the recent update shows, a final quick update on Pages, Number and Keynote.

In this tip video, Don takes a look at some changes to Smart Annotations and Drawing in Pages, as well as the common changes in Charting and the support for displaying LaTeX or MathML equations across all of the iWork Apps.

PowerPoint for Mac makes it easy to create, collaborate and effectively present your ideas. Designed for Mac with full Retina display, it helps you create beautiful presentations in no time.

Join Richard as he shows you basic functionality in MS PowerPoint on Mac and iOS.

Two quick updates in this week's tip show:

Text Expansion

Back in episode 0738, we covered using the built-in features of Text Auto-correction in both macOS and iOS. This is an easy way to use abbreviations to expand to simple words and phrases. However, text expansion is not just limited to simple words and phrases. It can also be used for multiple paragraphs, making Text Auto-correction so much more useful! In this tip, Don shows you how to create a multiline text snippet that will sync across your devices.

Subtitles or Captions in Safari

One of the main support issues we come across are people being unable to switch off subtitles when viewing tutorials on the ScreenCastsOnline website or, even worse, seeing two sets of subtitles displayed at once. This is easily fixed and is due to Safari itself displaying subtitles. In this segment, Don shows you how to easily switch both sets of subtitles off, giving you an uninterrupted view of your tutorials.

OmniFocus 3 is out for iOS, and it makes managing your tasks even easier. While the biggest change is the adoption of tags, there are several new features in OmniFocus 3 that can take your task management to the next level. Whether you're new to OmniFocus or you've been using it for years, there are several compelling reasons to upgrade to version 3.

In this tutorial, we'll show you how to use the different perspective views to filter your tasks, how to harness the full power of tags for getting things done, and even show you how to set up a few custom perspectives of your own.

The iWork suite of Pages, Numbers and Keynote has been updated to allow you to record audio clips into your word processing document, spreadsheet or presentation slide, directly from your iPad or iPhone.

In this tip video, Don shows you the common method for creating and editing these clips.

In addition, he also demonstrates how these clips are presented and can be replaced or updated in the macOS versions of the apps. You can also include audio in those, but it's necessary to record your audio externally - at least for now!

Sending and storing files and folders in the most secure and efficient way means you need to adopt some or all of three core technologies - compression, archiving and encryption.

Thankfully, these are all available via macOS, either as part of the OS or in the Archive Utility application.

In this week's tutorial, Allison starts with some definition of just what compression, archiving and encryption means and the many standards that are available. In the next part, she goes over the many options available in Archive Utility. Whilst Archive Utility is available and provides basic functionality, it's possible to use additional features and functionality with an inexpensive 3rd party app called Keka.

Keka was updated to version 1.1 during the post production phase of the tutorial, so we've added an extra section describing the additional features and changes to the UI in v1.1.

We've covered many applications for enhancing your digital images before, but never one quite so simple yet effective.

Photolemur uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) to analyse your photos and apply selective enhancements to make them pop. No need for a multitude of tweaks to different settings; Photolemur applies them automatically. All you can do is adjust the level of enhancement and that's the beauty of this simple app. It works in either standalone mode for single of multiple photos, or it can be used as a plugin for Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop, as well as an Apple Photos extension.

In this week's tip video, Don takes you through the different ways Photolemur can be used and shows off some of its stunning results.

Following on from the recent Pages 2018 update tutorial, Don explores in this week's tutorial the 2018 updates to Numbers and Keynote, Apple's spreadsheet and presentation applications.

Numbers

As Apple have rewritten all of the iWork applications with the same code base, many of the new features are present in all three applications. With Numbers, some specific improvements have been made to controlling the import of external files on both the Mac and iOS, as well as some long-overdue enhancements to sorting and filtering in the iOS version.

Keynote

The Mac version of Keynote receives all of the standard updates delivered with Pages and Numbers including new shapes, image galleries and collaboration, and more. Most notable however is the addition of Apple Pencil support in the iOS version, along with the ability to animate line drawings on your slides. No Apple Pencil? Then you can use your finger!

Want to know more about your files or folders? Want to change its default icon? How about changing which files are opened by specific applications? All this and more can be achieved by using the Get Info panel built right into Finder on macOS.

In this week's tip video, Don takes you through the basics of mastering the Get Info panel.

One of the joys of having a Mac is having access to tools that allow you to automate common tasks which increase your productivity. BetterTouchTool is a unique twist on automating your Mac as it does so using various input devices that are connected to your Mac such as the Magic Trackpad, Mouse, Keyboard, and even your iOS device. Each of these devices can be set up using BetterTouchTool to run automations with the click of a mouse, taps on a trackpad or even by drawing gestures on your trackpad.

In this screencast we will walk through how to set these automations up on various devices. We will also show practical ways to set up your automations based on global settings or even on an app by app basis. So if you have ever wanted to run automations with minimal effort, then BetterTouchTool may be for you.

With the introduction of iOS 11.4 & macOS 10.13.5, Apple have delivered on Messages for iCloud. No longer are messages hit and miss on your various devices, now you can store an encrypted archive in iCloud for use by all devices.

In this week's tip video, Don takes you through some of the limitations of the old Messages architecture, demonstrates switching on the new Messages in iCloud and takes a look at how it works in operation.

This tip video was recorded prior to the release of macOS 10.13.5, so to setup Messages in iCloud on your Mac, open Messages - Preferences - Accounts - Select your iCloud Account and switch on "Enable Messages in iCloud"

Drafts is where text starts on iOS. It's a powerful application that allows you to quickly capture what's on your mind, then process and send that text just about anywhere on iOS. Version 5 of Drafts was released recently, bringing many new features and a revamp of the user interface.

In this first tutorial, Mike shows you how to get up and running with Drafts 5 by walking you through the interface and demoing several of the built-in actions included with the free version. He also explains how to modify and edit custom Actions (Pro feature), walks you through the different Modes and Settings, and goes over using the Messages and Apple Watch apps.

There are plenty of very capable and very sophisticated text auto-correction apps on the market. However, if your needs are simple, why not use the text auto-correction features built into macOS and iOS?

In this week's tip video, Don walks you through setting up and using auto-correction and auto-completion on the Mac and iPhone, and shows you how those text snippets sync in real time between devices.

State-of-the-art editing, reviewing, and sharing tools make creating and formatting documents in Word easy. Designed for Mac with full support for Retina displays, Word helps you create beautiful, professional-looking documents.

Join Richard for Part 2 of this series as he shows you additional features in Word such as adding tables and charts, formatting headers and footers within sections, collaborating, and marking up documents on iOS using the Apple Pencil.

Spotlight is great but HoudahSpot is so much better!

HoudahSpot gives you a more detailed and powerful interface into your Spotlight searches. By exposing a multitude of metadata attributes and combining that with a highly flexible and customisable query engine, you'll never lose a file again.

In this week's tip video, Don gives you some of the reasons why HoudahSpot is his go-to search utility on the Mac.

Keep It is an app designed to hold notes, videos, audio files, images, web links and any other kind of information you'd like to organize and be able to find later. No matter your organizational style, Keep It can handle it. Folders, bundles, tags, comments, coloured labels, saved searches - all methods are supported!

It is available for the Mac, and as a separate Universal app for iOS. Keep It is the destination for all those things you want to put somewhere, confident you will find them again later. Seamless syncing through iCloud allows you to use Keep it on all of your devices.

This week Allison dives deep into Keep It, goes through its many features, and shows you how it can help you make sense of all the pieces of information you want to keep track of in your digital life.

Following on from a request from a ScreenCastsOnline member, Don went on a quest to find out the best way to extract messages from the Messages app for use in emails or other applications. The best solution he found was PhoneView from Ecamm - but it does so much more!

In this week's tip video, Don takes you through the initial setup of PhoneView and demonstrates how easy it is to create PDFs, Text files, CSV files and more from your messages. You can even extract the media files and play them independently. PhoneView is also a great way to create permanent archives of your messages.

Pages is a tremendous application from Apple and is included for free with all new Macs and iOS devices. We've covered Pages in depth in previous tutorials but recently Apple announced some significant new features across the iWork suite.

In this tutorial, Don takes you through the significant new features of Pages on both the Mac and iOS. We'll look at Numbers and Keynote in a future tutorial.

Dropbox is fantastic service for cloud-based storage. With the Plus service and above, you can store up to 1TB of data within Dropbox - even more if you're a Dropbox Business user. Not many of us can sync our entire Dropbox account on our Mac however, so how do we manage with a Mac that has limited space?

In this week's tip video, Don shows you two very useful Dropbox features to help manage your storage: Selective Sync and Smart Sync.