Miscellaneous stupid Mac tricks, cool Mac tricks, and stupid cool Mac tricks Thread

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WhiteyFisk

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  • #241
    Tinlad said:
    I think it's mainly targeted for environments with large numbers of devices deployed, but for me it's been transformational for iCloud Drive even in my home environment. Previously it was flaky, with new files often taking ages to show up (or not showing up at all). With my Mac mini acting as a cache updates are immediately reflected on other devices.

    The software update side is less useful as my devices aren't homogeneous enough to make it worthwhile - i.e. the iOS 17.3 installer for my iPhone 13 is different to the one for my wife's 12 Pro, so caching is pointless.

    But for iCloud it's great. Can recommend trying it out if you have a suitable Mac.
    Click to expand...

    I've been using one since Server.app, and last year I wound up redeploying it on virtual machines running on a household hypervisor. There are some tricks you need to use with OpenCore, but i have two virtual Sonoma servers running on my Proxmox server. It's pretty sweet when OS updates are released. the iCloud user data portion of it is working well or at least seems to but sometimes reconciliation will take a minute if i've got the same document up on my iPad and a computer. It's faster and more reliable than OneNote at least?

    The cache service will refuse to run on macOS if sysctl says it's virtualized, so you can imagine what was required. It wasn't difficult once I learned about Lilu.kext.
     
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    Honeybog

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  • #242
    Here's one I just found by accident: doing a three/four finger swipe down on a dock icon will trigger App Exposé the same way it does when you do it with the active window. So, for instance, if you're in Safari and swipe down on Word, it'll open exposé for Word, even though it's not foregrounded. The nice thing is that the app doesn't even have to be running, but will still show the exposé list of recently opened documents (provided that the app makes use of "Show Recents").
     
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    DovePig

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  • #243
    Honeybog said:
    Here's one I just found by accident: doing a three/four finger swipe down on a dock icon will trigger App Exposé the same way it does when you do it with the active window. So, for instance, if you're in Safari and swipe down on Word, it'll open exposé for Word, even though it's not foregrounded. The nice thing is that the app doesn't even have to be running, but will still show the exposé list of recently opened documents (provided that the app makes use of "Show Recents").
    Click to expand...
    The same works with any mouse with a scroll wheel. Which kinda drives me nuts when I move the pointer down to the dock by accident when scrolling a long document with a Logitech mouse in a freewheeling mode...
     
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    Honeybog

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  • #244
    I honestly don’t know if this is more a stupid cool trick or a rant, but it fixed an issue I’ve been having for months, so I’ll put it down as a stupid cool trick:

    Despite absolutely nothing in the UI suggesting the possibility, a lot of options in Settings on Mac expose more advanced settings if you control+click/right-click on them.

    Notably, in Users and Groups, you can access advanced settings, which gives you a GUI for all sorts of command line bad ideas, like changing the default shell, user groups, and home directory.

    In my case, right-clicking in Printers let me completely reset all of the print preferences, which finally resolved nearly six months of having the print dialog crash every other time I opened it.
     
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    iljitsch

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  • #245
    Definitely not cool, but super useful.

    A while ago I complained about my AirPod Pros not charging after putting them in the charging case. I tried cleaning out the inside of the charging case to no avail. I even thought I had bent the connectors doing that, making the problem worse.

    I'm sure many of you have had the same experience.

    Turns out, wiping the stems of the APPs with a cloth with a little bit of force will solve the problem almost all of the time...
     
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    iljitsch

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  • #249
    Ok, not specifically a Mac thing, unless you use your AirPod (Pro)s with your Mac... But:

    I'm pretty sure I complained about the APPs sometimes refusing to charge after being placed in the charging case. I blamed all kinds of stuff for this: the contacts in the case being dirty, me bending the contacts when trying to clean them, random Apple software fails...

    But it looks like the answer usually is that the contacts on the AP(P)s are dirty. Wiping the ends of the stems with a cloth (usually my T-shirt...) almost always helps.
     
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    Honeybog

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  • #250
    Multi-platform and kind of obvious, but I guess I never thought to explore it: tapping in a textbox (mobile) or right-clicking (Mac) brings up the option to autofill contacts and passwords.

    If you use Apple for your password management, this is a huge time saver for those cases where a field isn’t recognized as a login field.
     
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    Jonathon

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  • #252
    Honeybog said:
    Multi-platform and kind of obvious, but I guess I never thought to explore it: tapping in a textbox (mobile) or right-clicking (Mac) brings up the option to autofill contacts and passwords.

    If you use Apple for your password management, this is a huge time saver for those cases where a field isn’t recognized as a login field.
    Click to expand...
    This integrates with third-party password managers too, if they provide a credential provider extension and it’s enabled in Settings. 1Password has one for iOS/iPadOS, for example. (They don’t have one for Mac, unfortunately, although the same APIs are available on Mac if they wanted to make one.)
     
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