Bet you didn’t know your Mac could do all this
Now that we’re getting ready for the release of macOS 10.14 Mojave, after its WWDC 2018 reveal, there’s no better time to look back and ask not what you can do for your Mac, but what your Mac can do for you – it may be more than you think. In most cases, your Mac can do with its native software, macOS High Sierra, what Windows 10 would require third-party software to perform.
And, once we download and install macOS Mojave, Macs will be capable of much, much more.
So, one of the key selling points of the best Macs is the fact that you don’t need to download or install anything to work as expected. It just works. Whether you have to combine multiple PDFs into one, sign documents, or even do some video editing, we here at TechRadar have gone out of our way to bring you the best Mac tips we could think of.
Neither formal nor exhaustive, this easily digestible list comprises the 50 top Mac tips we could think of and organizes them into bite-sized slides. Click or tap ‘Next’ to dive in.
Sign PDFs right in Mail
It might be the 21st century, but we’re still using squiggles on a piece of paper to agree to all manner of things. If you are emailed a PDF to sign, though, you don’t have to faff about printing it, signing it, then scanning it back in: you can actually sign it right in Mail.
Drag a PDF into the email you’re sending, hover over it then at the top right you’ll see a little button appear. Click it, and you get a range of Markup options, including one for signing documents. What’s more, you can either add your signature by holding a signed piece of paper up to the webcam on your Mac – and it does a fantastic job of cutting it out of the background – or by drawing on your trackpad.
Got an iPad stylus? Try using that instead of your finger!
Batch rename files
In OS X releases before Yosemite, renaming a group of files at once either meant third-party software or rolling your own rename script using something like Automator or AppleScript. These days, however, you can just select a group of files then select Rename either from the right-click contextual menu or from the drop-down button marked with a cog icon in Finder windows.
When you do, you get the option of adding text, replacing text, or applying a format such as a name and an automatically incrementing counter.
Quickly import with Image Capture
Although you could opt to import photos from your iPhone or DSLR manually via a pair of Finder windows, an easier way to do so is by using Image Capture. The long-standing feature isn’t new to macOS, but it has been overlooked by an overwhelming number of Mac newcomers. In it, you can choose to import all of your camera’s photos at once, directly to the folder of your choosing, or better yet, you can pick and choose which photos to store on your Mac while deciding whether to keep or delete the originals one-by-one.
What’s more, you can also connect wirelessly to a scanner to import scanned documents or photos to the directory of your preference. You can also link your camera to any macOS application that you want. So if you want Photoshop to open every time you connect your iPhone, Image Capture can be configured to make that happen.
Annotate PDFs and images
Preview is an incredibly powerful tool, and it’ll only get more powerful in macOS Mojave. Beyond letting you, well, preview PDFs and images, Preview allows for a ton of annotations for PDF that are compatible with Adobe’s PDF app, Acrobat, which is used by Windows users and companies – making it easy to share annotated documents with colleagues, regardless of the platform they use.
Make sure the Edit Toolbar is visible (from the View menu) and you’ll see you’ve got options for drawing shapes, arrows, speech and thought bubbles and more. There’s also the option to highlight text in different colours, strikethrough some text, add notes and type some text into boxes.
Send and receive SMSs on your Mac (and more!)
When someone sends an SMS – a text message in the original mobile phone sense – to your iPhone, it appears in a green bubble rather than a blue one, as would be the case if someone sends you an iMessage. Before Yosemite, SMSs would only appear on your iPhone where you’d have to peck out a reply, but now you can have them come into your Mac or other iOS devices when they arrive so you can reply to them from there too.
Your iPhone needs to be running iOS 8.1, but once it is, and once you’re signed into your iMessage account that also has your phone number linked to it both on your iPhone and on your Mac or other iOS devices, turn on the Text Message Forwarding option under Settings > Messages on your iPhone. Boom!
Read more: The 50 best Mac tips, tricks and timesavers
