Use Quick Look to Preview Spotlight Results in Ventura

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When you search using Spotlight on the Mac, it provides a decent amount of information about each result, including name and other metadata. But what if you want to see what’s behind the search result? In macOS 13 Ventura, Apple added Quick Look support to Spotlight so you can easily preview the search results. Do a search, click or use the arrow keys to select a search result, and then press the Space bar to open it in a Quick Look window. It even renders websites!

(Featured image based on an original by iStock.com/Nastco)

It’s Time to Try Dictation in iOS 16 and iPadOS 16

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Apple has long provided a microphone button in the keyboard to invoke dictation on the iPhone and iPad. But, it wasn’t always easy to hit, and you had to switch back to the keyboard to fix the inevitable mistakes. (Apple’s dictation is a huge timesaver but far from perfect, particularly with homonyms and proper nouns.) With iOS 16 and iPadOS 16, Apple made the microphone button larger and repositioned it to make it easier to tap. More importantly, the keyboard remains available while dictation is active, enabling you to work with text manually during dictation. You can fix mistakes, reposition the insertion point, select and delete text, and so on. For instance, if dictation inserts the wrong word, double-tap the word to select it and speak the replacement. Or, if you want to add something, tap in the text to move the insertion point and start speaking again. Dictation can even add punctuation for you, but it’s a little haphazard at that, so you might want to disable that option in Settings > General > Keyboard.

(Featured image by iStock.com/fizkes)

You Can Now Upgrade to macOS 13 Ventura When You’re Ready

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When upgrading to a new version of macOS, we err on the side of caution, at least in our recommendations. (We’ve been using macOS 13 Ventura for some time now and often install beta releases on secondary machines for testing purposes.) Upgrading is easy, but if you upgrade too soon, the new macOS version could make key apps inoperable, create workflow interruptions, or cause other negative consequences. On the other hand, waiting too long can cause problems—it’s important to stay in sight of the cutting edge for security reasons and to take advantage of Apple’s advances. Upgrading is not an if question; it’s a when question.

That when could be now. There’s no reason you must upgrade to macOS 13 Ventura right away, but if you want to, you should now be able to do so without undue interruptions. Ventura has been quite stable and has received only three updates since its initial release in October 2022:

  • macOS 13.0.1 provided just unspecified bug fixes and two security fixes.
  • macOS 13.1 introduced the Freeform digital whiteboard app, Advanced Data Protection for iCloud, improved searching for photos in Messages, participant cursors for shared notes in Notes, and the option to play sounds in the Find My app. There were also a couple of bug fixes and important security fixes.
  • macOS 13.2 added support for Security Keys for Apple ID for those who need the utmost security, fixed a few bugs, and blocked more security vulnerabilities.

Apple may have another feature or two up its sleeve for Ventura, and we’ll undoubtedly see more updates to address bugs and newfound security vulnerabilities, but there’s no significant reason to wait any longer.

That said, you can continue to delay as long as you’re running macOS 11 Big Sur or macOS 12 Monterey and are staying up to date with Apple’s security releases. (Both have received important updates recently.) Earlier versions of macOS no longer receive security fixes, rendering them more vulnerable to attack. Reasons to delay include:

  • You’re too busy. The upgrade process will take a few hours, and it may take additional time to configure everything properly afterward. When you are ready to upgrade, aim for when a little downtime will be convenient.
  • You’re still using incompatible software. The jump from Big Sur or Monterey to Ventura isn’t a big one, so most modern apps should have been updated to ensure compatibility with Monterey by now. But if you’re still running macOS 10.14 Mojave or earlier with 32-bit apps, you’ll lose access to them if you upgrade. (That first happened with macOS 10.15 Catalina in 2019.) With Mojave no longer receiving security updates, you need to find replacements for those apps and upgrade soon.
  • You need consistent versions for workflow reasons. We’re unaware of any examples here, but it’s not inconceivable that a coworker could be stuck on an older version of macOS and thus older versions of shared productivity apps. If your upgrade would force you to update those apps and introduce compatibility issues when collaborating with that coworker, you may have to wait until your coworker can upgrade as well.

Ventura won’t upend your experience of using a Mac, but it has numerous useful features, large and small. Along with the features mentioned above that shipped in updates, the new iCloud Shared Photo Library enables you to share photos and videos with up to five family members in a separate shared library. Stage Manager provides a new paradigm for window management. Messages lets you edit messages, undo sending, and mark conversations as unread. Similarly, Mail lets you undo sending, schedule messages to send later, and get follow-up reminders for replying. For better videoconferencing quality, Continuity Camera enables you to use your iPhone as a webcam, complete with Desk View for showing what’s on your desk during a call. The Mac finally gets its own Weather app. Perhaps even more important, Ventura shares some of these features with Apple’s other operating systems: iOS 16, iPadOS 16, watchOS 9, and tvOS 16. To take full advantage of those features across all your Apple devices, your Mac must be running Ventura.

However, we want to be upfront about one downside to upgrading to Ventura. Apple replaced System Preferences with System Settings. While we wouldn’t have described System Preferences as having a stellar user interface, it was at least familiar after decades of use. The new System Settings, which tries to mimic the Settings app in iOS and iPadOS, moves numerous settings around and makes some odd and unfortunate design decisions. You may find yourself relying heavily on its search field to find commonly used options.

Before You Upgrade

Once you’ve decided to upgrade to Ventura, you have three main tasks:

  • Update apps: Make sure all your apps are as up-to-date as possible. If you regularly put off updates, now’s the time to let them complete so you have Ventura-compatible versions.
  • Clear space: Ventura needs about 25 GB of free space to upgrade, and the Ventura installer itself is about 12 GB, so we recommend making sure you have at least 37 GB free. Don’t cut this close—you should always have at least 10–20% free space for virtual memory, cache files, and breathing room. Check by choosing About This Mac from the Apple menu and then clicking Storage.
  • Make a backup: Never, ever install an update to macOS without ensuring that you have at least one current backup first. In an ideal world, you’d have an updated Time Machine backup, a bootable duplicate, and an Internet backup. That way, if something goes wrong, you can easily restore.

Upgrading

After completing the above-listed tasks, ensure you don’t need your Mac for a few hours. There’s no telling exactly how long the upgrade will take, so never start an upgrade if you need the Mac soon.

Initiating the upgrade is just a matter of opening System Preferences > Software Update, clicking the Upgrade Now button, and following the instructions. If you’d like more handholding, check out Joe Kissell’s ebook Take Control of Ventura.

After You Upgrade

Part of the reason to set aside plenty of time for your Ventura upgrade is that there are usually cleanup tasks afterward. We can’t predict precisely what you’ll run into, depending on what version of macOS you’re running now and what apps you use, but here are a few situations we’ve noticed in the past:

  • macOS may need to update its authentication situation by asking for your Apple ID password, your Mac’s password, and if you have another Mac, its password too. Don’t worry that your Mac has been compromised by malware—it’s fine.
  • Some apps may have to ask for various permissions even though you previously granted them. Again, that’s fine and won’t happen again.
  • If you use your Apple Watch to unlock your Mac and apps (and you should, it’s great!), you may need to re-enable that in System Settings > Touch ID & Password (it’s an example of something that moved; previously, it was in System Preferences > Security & Privacy > General).
  • If you use Gmail, Google Calendar, or other Google services, you may need to log in to your Google account again.
  • Websites that usually remember your login state may require that you log in again. If you’re using a password manager like 1Password, that’s easy.
  • You may have to re-enable text message forwarding to your Mac. You do this on your iPhone in Settings > Messages > Text Message Forwarding.

With all that housekeeping done, it’s time to check out all the new features in Ventura!

(Featured image by Apple)

What Is Google Web & App Activity, and Should You Leave It Enabled?

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Earlier this year, some of our clients received an email from Google reminding them that they have Web & App Activity turned on. Those with a healthy dose of caution were concerned that it might be a phishing attack, but no, it’s legitimate. Their next questions were often, “Wait, what is Web & App Activity, and do I want it enabled?” Here are some answers.

What Is Web & App Activity at Google?

Simply put, Web & App Activity is a record of almost everything you do on Google sites, apps, and services. It includes your searches and activity in Google Search, Google Maps, Google Assistant, Google News, Google Photos, YouTube, and more. If you use Google Chrome as your browser, it includes your browsing history. It also stores usage and diagnostic information from Android smartphones. What’s less obvious is that Web & App Activity can even include information from sites and apps that partner with Google to show ads or that use Google services. Activity can be saved even when you’re offline or signed out.

That sounds like a lot, and it is! One reason there’s so much is because Google is such a dominant provider of services on the Internet today. Google Search is by far the most popular search engine, only recently has Apple Maps competed head-to-head with Google Maps, YouTube is the main source of video on the Internet, and so on. It’s hard to avoid Google, even if you wanted to, which most people don’t.

In addition to offering a lot of services, there are two more reasons why Google collects so much information about its users: personalization and advertising:

  • Personalization: When a service knows what you’ve searched for and how you’ve used it in the past, it can adjust its behavior to improve future usage. For instance, Google Search can suggest search results that are nearby you if it knows where you are, and YouTube can recommend videos based on what you’ve watched previously.
  • Advertising: The bulk of Google’s revenue comes from companies that pay Google to display their ads. We’re talking hundreds of billions of dollars per year, which is why it’s important to Google to learn as much about you as possible in order to give advertisers the best chance of enticing you to click their ads.

For many (most?) people, there’s a tension between personalization and advertising. You want Google to know more about you so its services work better, but you may not want the company to know so much about you that it can charge advertisers a higher price for access to you. Ad-driven companies like Google claim people prefer personalized ads, but most people we talk with dislike having ads—particularly for already purchased items or past vacations—follow them around the Internet. That’s what Apple is channeling with its Tracked video.

How Should You Configure Web & App Activity?

What you should do depends on how much benefit you feel you derive from the personalization of Google apps and services, and what you think about personalized ads. On your Activity Controls page, Google provides a single master switch that lets you pause Web & App Activity, though you’ll have to acknowledge that it may impact your experience of Google sites, apps, and services signed in to your account. Make sure to scroll down on this page to access the settings for Location History, YouTube History, and Personalized Ads.

By clicking the icons for each service under “See and delete activity,” you can get a sense of just what Google has recorded about you, and you can delete data manually if it perturbs you. Google can also automatically delete activity older than 3 months, 18 months, or 36 months. The utility of keeping data longer is if you want to review what you did in the past. Google says that auto-deleting data sooner will reduce personalization, but that feels like a stretch.

There are two important subsettings:

  • Chrome: In the Web & App Activity card, under Subsettings, there’s a checkbox for including Google Chrome history and activity from sites, apps, and devices that use Google services. We suggest disabling this—it seems unlikely that it would improve your Internet experience sufficiently to warrant the privacy intrusion.
  • Audio: You’ll also find another checkbox for voice and audio activity, which Google uses to improve its audio capabilities. The reason to turn this setting off is that human reviewers may listen to your audio samples. Google anonymizes and deletes the data after 7 days, but it may still feel icky to have people listening to your audio clips.

Scrolling down, you hit cards for the three major privacy settings that Google separates from Web & App Activity. (You can also access these on Google’s Data & Privacy page, where you can also start a privacy checkup.)

  • Location History: With this setting on, Google knows where you go with your devices, even when you aren’t using a specific Google service, to give you personalized maps, location-based recommendations, and more. If you look through this data and are creeped out by the fact that it shows your every movement, turn it off.
  • YouTube History: This setting saves the videos you search for and watch to provide better recommendations, remember where you left off, and more. This option may feel innocuous as long as you don’t mind your video watching being associated with your account—if you’re viewing content that would embarrass you if it got out, perhaps disable this setting.
  • Ads: You can disable personalized ads from Google, which prevents Google from using your information to help advertisers entice you to buy more stuff. You’ll still see the same number of ads, but they should be less aimed at you personally.

Finally, there’s a grab-bag collection of lesser-known Google services that track your activity. To find these and delete the data they stored about you, go back to the Web & App Activity card, click Manage All Web & App Activity at the bottom, and then click Other Activity in the sidebar. It includes controls for Google Pay, Google Wallet, Google Workspace search history, YouTube channel subscriptions, YouTube “Not interested” feedback, and many other Google-related services. Most of this stuff seems unobjectionable, but delete it if it bothers you.

It’s hard to say if leaving any of these settings on or turning them off make a real difference in your life. If Google collecting all this data bothers you, try disabling everything and see if the lack of personalization makes for a worse experience. Or pick and choose based on things that perturb you more (like location tracking and ads) or less (like YouTube history). There’s no harm in testing!

(Featured image by iStock.com/ValeryBrozhinsky)

The Amazingly Convenient Way to Scan Documents Using Your iPhone or iPad

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On occasion, we all need to scan a document—an invoice, a recipe, instructions from a book—but far more people have an iPhone or iPad than a hardware scanner. Luckily, Apple has built a scanning capability into iOS, iPadOS, and macOS for some years now. The next time you’re faced with a piece of paper that you need in digital form, follow the instructions below.

Scan Directly with an iPhone or iPad

The little-known key to scanning with an iPhone or iPad is the Files app, which lets you scan one or more pages and save a PDF anywhere you like. Since it’s particularly easy to use iCloud Drive with Files, it’s a good way to create a file you can work with on your Mac later. (You can also scan into a note using the Notes app, but that’s mostly useful for storing information rather than creating files you can upload to the Web, send via email, or share in other ways.)

  1. Open the Files app, tap Browse in the toolbar, and navigate to the folder where you want the scanned document to end up.
  2. Tap the icon at the upper right and select Scan Documents.
  3. The camera viewfinder appears. At the top of the screen, note the controls for the flash (the lightning bolt), the color filter, and the Auto/Manual toggle (below left). Immediately tap Auto to switch to Manual—we recommend using Manual until you’ve become fluid enough with the controls to let your device scan for you. You seldom need to change the flash setting, but you can force the flash on or off if you like. Similarly, the color filter option defaults to a color scan, but you can set it to grayscale or black-and-white if you want. It’s easier to make that change afterward.
  4. Hold the iPhone steady so it can detect the edges of the paper. When it has, tap the round white shutter button to take a photo (above left). In Auto mode, it will just keep taking images for you, which is efficient with multiple pages but stressful if you aren’t ready.
  5. Examine the scan to see if it looks good. You can drag the corners to adjust the selection to capture just paper, or if the image isn’t right, tap Retake for a do-over (above right). When you have it as you want it, tap Keep Scan.
  6. If you want to scan additional pages, put them in the viewfinder and repeat Steps 4 and 5 (below left). Or, if you’re done, tap Save and jump directly to naming your file (below right).
  7. If a page isn’t exactly the way you want it, tap the image well to the left of the shutter button to make changes. On the edit page, the crop icon at the bottom returns you to the previous screen to adjust the corners again. The color filter icon lets you choose from Color, Grayscale, Black & White, and Photo—stick with color or grayscale for most documents. If the document came in at the wrong orientation, tap the rotate icon. If the image still isn’t to your liking, you can retake it or tap the trash icon to delete it. If you’ve scanned multiple documents, you can swipe between them. Tap Done when you’re finished, and return to Step 6 to save.

Scan to Your Mac with Your iPhone or iPad

It’s easy enough to save a scanned document to iCloud Drive or another file sharing service so you can access it on the Mac or move it from the Files app to the Mac. But if your goal is to scan directly to the Mac, you can do that too.

In Preview, choose File > Import from iPhone > Scan Documents. (Preview will know about all your devices, so it will have sections for each device.) A dialog will appear on the Mac, and your device will immediately switch to the scanning interface.

Everything works just as it does if you initiated scanning from the device, including the Auto/Manual switch and the need to tap Save when you’re done. However, instead of saving the document to Files, it will appear as a new document in Preview, where you can work with it like any other PDF and save it to your drive.

Final Thoughts

There are two caveats to scanning documents using your iPhone or iPad:

  • This approach to scanning does not do optical character recognition (OCR) to make the scanned text selectable—the resulting PDF pages are just images. Online tools can perform OCR on a PDF; we’ve seen good results from AvePDF’s OCR PDF tool. This might not be a good idea with sensitive documents.
  • Scanned documents tend to be large. If your scan ends up too big to share via email, for instance, other online PDF compression tools can shrink files. If you use AvePDF to OCR your document, another click on its Hyper-Compress PDFs tool can compress the same document by as much as 90%.

Overall, you’ll probably get better quality from a hardware scanner—particularly a flatbed—because it’s easier to position the pages perfectly, the light is stronger and more even, and there’s no need to deskew (straighten) the scanned page images, as Apple’s software attempts to do when you’re not directly over the page. But it’s hard to beat the convenience of a quick scan with your iPhone when quality isn’t paramount.

(Featured image by Adam Engst)