macOS Tips and Tricks You Need To Know

Do you use macOS? If so, you’re in for a treat! In this blog post, we’ve collected some macOS tips and tricks that will help you get the most out of macOS. Whether you’re a power user or just getting started with macOS, we’ve got you covered. So be sure to bookmark this page and come back to find new tips and tricks every time you need them!

Every single year, there’s a pretty big update made to the macOS operating system. And this year we’ve gotten macOS Ventura, which like pretty much all of its predecessors, doesn’t really change a whole lot about the Mac and Mac OS experience. But in this article, we want to talk about a few key changes and updates, and features that we suggest.

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This powerful operating system offers a wealth of features and options that can make your life easier. From desktop customization to tips and tricks for better productivity, this post has everything you need to know. So whether you’re just getting started with macOS or you’ve been using it for a while, be sure to check out this list of helpful macOS tips and tricks.

1. Rich Results:

There have been some improvements made to it. It’s a bit more powerful than before. Now, a quick keyboard shortcut to bring up Spotlight if you didn’t already know is Command and Spacebar. That’s going to bring it up straight away. And if we want to actually use Quick Look and rich results within Quick Look.

So let’s say you wanted to find out how old a particular celebrity was, let’s say Tom Holland as an example. So if we type in Tom Holland’s age here, it’s actually going to show me the Wikipedia result and that’s a rich result. So it’s just going to get that information straight from a particular website and just spit it out right here in Quick Look. And if you go down and highlight that and press the space bar, it’s just going to straight up bring that page and bring it up in a little bit more detail.

So you can now see a little bit more about this particular person. You get his social media pages, some web pages, and a little bit more information about him here. And this also works for a ton more stuff. So let’s say, for example, the Population of Dubai, for example, you can see 3.3 million there. come down, press the space bar immediately, and get access to more information about this particular topic. But one of the best new features of Finder is Image Search.

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2. Image Search:

Now Image Search is really cool because it uses information from your images that are in Photos or Messages, Notes, or Finder. And it enables searching by locations, scenes, or even things within the images, like text or maybe a dog or a car. So for example, if type the word cat into my Spotlight window and scroll down here and click Show More where it says Photos from Apps.

You can see that it’s actually going to show you all the pictures of that cat, for example. So this is obviously my pet cat. And if click on one of these photos and press the space bar to do a quick look, it’s going to bring up those photos straight away.

Here’s another one and just works really well. Now it does work for other things. So if you want to search for a car, for example, or a particular place that you’ve traveled to. So If you type in Thailand, come down here to photos from apps again. It’s just going to show you all of these images and photos and videos and whatnot from that particular place. So just a really, really powerful feature all around. Moving on. If you like to play any kind of Apple Silicon games, there’s a new feature called the Metal Performance HUD.

3. Metal Performance HUD:

This is a new feature introduced with macOS Ventura and it allows you to monitor gameplay, performance, and things like FPS and memory usage. It’s supported on native apple silicon games like Resident Evil Village and also Rosetta. Two games, but not OpenGL. Or OpenCL. But if you want to enable it for native Apple Silicon Games, here is how you do it.

So first of all, go to your Applications folder, and then you want to find the native Apple Silicon Game that you want to enable it. You want to right-click, then you want to go show Package Contents. You want to go into the contents you want to select and then right-click on the macOS folder and you want to go New Terminal At folder. Then you want to type in “export MTL_HUD_ENABLED=1” then you want to press the Return key.

And then you want to press “./Resident and TAB and that’s going to essentially tell that line of code to execute on this folder. And then you want to press the return key on your keyboard. And as you have the top right-hand corner there, we get access to the Metal Performance HUD. It’ll tell you a couple of cool things like the resolution, the hertz of whatever screen you’re using, and also the FPS Min Max and GPU and memory usage.

4. Live Text:

Now, moving on, we get some more updates to the live text feature. So for example, if you’re using a video now, you can actually just pause the video and just copy any text that you see within that video. So, for example, if you’re a student and you want to copy text from a lecture or a PowerPoint or something that you’re watching online if you’re in Safari. You can copy and paste the text into the editor or Word document of choice and it’s all going to appear there.

But if you close down Safari and come into Chrome, it actually doesn’t work. So it really does depend on the actual browser you’re using, which is really annoying. As usual, most of these really cool features only work when you’re actually using what Apple intends you to use, in this case, Safari. Now, a potential workaround to this is if you download that particular video and open it up with the QuickTime app, you can have the option to actually copy and paste all of this text within the video.

5. iPhone as a Camera:

You can use your iPhone camera as Desk View, and as a webcam. If you open up QuickTime Player and then come up to file a new movie recording, it will generally default to your webcam straight away. But if you come down and click on the little arrow icon next to the record button, you can actually select your iPhone camera. And if you do that, it’s actually going to change the input to your iPhone.

Now, if you flip iPhone around into portrait mode, you can see that this is basically going to work exactly like a webcam, a better quality webcam. So this is a really cool feature because you can actually set up your iPhone on a tripod. For example, you can preview everything on the big screen, and you can actually then record directly from your iPhone into the internal SSD or external SSD of your Mac and bypass whatever storage is on your iPhone.

And for most models, that’s pretty limited. So for example, if you want to get into making YouTube videos, or you want to record some kind of talking head thing for a job application or to send to a friend like a birthday message, this is just a really cool and powerful feature that allows you to record a little bit better quality of the video.

6. Mail App:

So let’s also talk about the Mail app because this particular app has been really lacking over the past few years, especially if you have a Google account. Now if we come in and reply to a particular email and then going to hit up next to the send button if you drop down, you can actually schedule this to send.

Like it’s a very, very basic feature and pretty much every email client has had this for the last ten years. Now Apple has finally decided to bless us with this feature. Now, if you do send a particular email and want to undo it, you can see down there is actually a blue button that says Undo Send. And if you click that, it’s actually going to do exactly what it says, basically, undo that email. Now you’ll also be able to set reminders.

7. Clock App:

So if you open it up, you can see that we finally get access to, again, really basic features that have been available on the iPhone. For example, for like 15 years, you get the world clock. You can come down here, you can add different clocks here. You also get an alarm. So you can set this up. You can add whatever you want to add there, you can add it in. You get the same functionality as your iPhone, basically.

And you’ve got the Stopwatch feature, which works again, exactly like an iPhone or the timer feature. Now, this is really handy because a lot of you guys might like to cook with your MacBook sitting on the table there, watching some movies, or whatever. And you can now actually just have this up on your MacBook running on a big widescreen while you’re cooking, for example.

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8. System Settings:

Now, moving on, let’s talk about System Preferences and a couple of extra things that you get within System Preferences. Now, the appearance has changed quite a lot, and a lot of you may not like this, especially because the old version of System Preferences was basically unchanged for like eight years. If you just spend five to ten minutes getting used to this, it is a better layout. Everything is sort of grouped together and it’s just on the side here. It’s on a sidebar instead of just randomly grouped in little app icons. You can also come in and search for individual things.

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9. Background Sounds:

One feature wanted to discuss here is something called background sounds. This is a really cool feature because if you have medical issues like Tinnitus, or you just prefer some kind of background noise in the background while you’re working or trying to sleep or read whatever, you actually come down here and you can actually turn background sounds on.

So you can actually change this to balanced noise, bright noise, dark noise, ocean, rain, or stream. So this is a really good feature because if you have Tinnitus or you just like these background noises while you’re working, you don’t have to go onto YouTube or pull up a web browser or a phone or whatever, you can just bring it up straight in macOS. That’s a really good addition from Apple.

Last update on 2025-01-15 / Affiliate links / Images from Amazon Product Advertising API