We’ve all hit a Web page at some point that doesn’t load fully, looks wrong, or doesn’t work as it should. It’s not your fault, but here are a few things you can try on your Mac. First, press Command-R to reload the page. Second, quit and relaunch Safari. Third and finally, try a different browser, like Google Chrome, Firefox, Brave, or Opera.
Although not every app supports it, Apple has a technology called Dynamic Type that lets you set your preferred text size. In Settings > Display & Brightness > Text Size, you’ll find a text size slider, and you can see how it affects text in the iOS interface by moving around in the Settings app or looking at Mail.
If you want a size even larger than is available from the Text Sizes screen, you can get that in Settings > General > Accessibility > Larger Text. Turn on Larger Accessibility Sizes, and the size slider adds more options.
Sometimes, the problem isn’t so much the size of the text, but how light it can be. In Settings > Display & Brightness, there’s a switch for Bold Text. Turn this on, and all the text on the iPhone will become darker. Oddly, enabling Bold Text requires restarting your device, but there’s no harm in doing that.
If you have difficulty with aspects of the screen other than text, you can use iOS’s Display Zoom feature to expand everything by a bit. The trade-off is that you’ll see less content on the screen at once, of course, but that’s a small price to pay if it makes your iPhone easier to use.
To enable Display Zoom, go to Settings > Display & Brightness > View. Once there, you can compare the difference between the standard and zoomed views in three sample screens by tapping the Standard and Zoomed buttons at the top—notably, you’ll lose a row of icons on the Home screen. If you think zoomed view might be better, tap Zoomed and then tap Set. Your iPhone has to restart, but it’s quick. Unfortunately, if you decide to switch back to standard view, you’ll need to rearrange your Home screen icons again.
The iPhone’s full Zoom feature is particularly useful in two situations. First, it’s easy to invoke and dismiss if you need a quick glance while wearing the wrong pair of glasses. Second, if Display Zoom doesn’t magnify the screen as much as you need, the full zoom may do the job.
Turn it on in Settings > General > Accessibility > Zoom and zoom in by double-tapping the screen with three fingers. By default, the Zoom Region is set to Window Zoom, which gives you a magnifying lens that you can move around the screen by dragging its handle on the bottom.
Tap the handle to bring up a menu that lets you zoom out, switch to full-screen zoom (which can be harder to navigate), resize the lens, filter what you see in the lens (such as grayscale), display a controller for moving the lens, and change the zoom level. To get back to normal view, just double-tap with three fingers again.
So, if you want to be able to use your iPhone more easily when your reading glasses aren’t handy, try the features described above and find the right mix for your eyes.
There’s a French culinary phrase—mise en place—that means “everything in its place.” The idea is that, before you start cooking, you organize and arrange all the ingredients for the dish so they’re right at hand when you need them. In essence, mise en place is about being well-prepared for the task at hand.
You can, and we’d suggest, should do exactly the same thing on your Mac. After all, you probably switch back and forth between the same set of apps—perhaps Mail, Safari, and Messages, plus apps like Pages and Numbers—as you work. Most modern Macs have plenty of RAM to keep all those apps running at the same time. But when you restart your Mac or turn it on, do you launch every one of your standard apps by hand? There’s no need.
That’s because macOS has long had the concept of “login items,” apps that you’ve set to launch automatically whenever the Mac starts up.
You’ll find the login items in System Preferences > Users & Groups > Login Items.
You may already have some login items listed. These can be any apps that you want to have available right after starting up, and some utility apps may have added themselves to the Login Items list automatically because they need to be running at all times. For instance, your list might include iTunesHelper, which launches iTunes whenever you attach an iOS device.
If you’re not sure which app a login item goes with, Control-click the login item and choose Show in Finder. Then in the Finder window that appears, look at the path bar at the bottom (choose View > Show Path Bar if it’s not visible). That will usually give you the necessary clue to find the parent app.
Every so often, it’s a good idea to look through your login items and make sure they’re doing what you want. You can add new items for apps you’ve starting using regularly and remove items for apps that you no longer need running all the time. And you do want to remove unnecessary login items because they could be slowing your Mac down.
Here’s what you need to know about managing your login items:
It takes only a minute to put your Mac ingredients in place, and the next time you boot your Mac, everything will be ready to go!
Has your iPhone replaced your alarm clock? Would you like it to? Using an iPhone as an alarm clock has a lot of benefits. You can choose from a wide variety of non-obnoxious sounds or even pick your favorite song. It’s easy to set an alarm—no more holding down buttons and letting up at just the right moment! And it’s simple to verify an alarm so you don’t run afoul of AM/PM confusions. iOS alarms can repeat on specific days of the week, which helps college students get up for 9:05 AM classes on Monday/Wednesday/Friday but sleep in for 10:10 classes on Tuesday/Thursday. Plus, you can even choose whether to allow a snooze option.
But you probably knew all that, more or less. (And if you’re on the “less” side, check out the Repeat, Sound, and Snooze options when you set up or edit an alarm in the Clock app.)
What we want to show you today is how to set your alarm with Siri, a useful technique that makes us feel as though we’re living in the future. We prefer this method for setting one-off alarms, like getting up early to catch a flight or sleeping in on the weekend but making sure we don’t miss brunch.
However, there’s a catch when using Siri. You can say, “Hey Siri, set an alarm for 7 AM” or even “Hey Siri, wake me up tomorrow at 8:45 AM.” When you do that, though, Siri creates a new alarm each time with whatever sound you last chose. Make a habit of that command, and you’ll end up with hundreds of alarms in Clock > Alarm, all of which will have been used only once. (Delete one by swiping over it from right to left and then tapping Delete.) There’s a better way—follow these steps:
Notice that we didn’t bother to set the time. That’s what we’ll get Siri to do, now and in the future! Use this magic phrase exactly, but replace Wake Me Up with whatever you’ve named your alarm:
“Hey Siri, change Wake Me Up to 8 AM.”
If everything works right, Siri responds politely, “I changed your ‘Wake Me Up’ alarm to 8 AM tomorrow.” And if you go into Clock > Alarm, you’ll see that it’s so.
On occasion, Siri doesn’t hear you right and will ask you to pick which alarm you mean. Or Siri may get confused—that happens to even the best assistants sometimes. Just try again, making sure to speak clearly, and it should work. If all else fails, you can always just set the alarm by hand.
But if you remember to refer to your alarm by name, Siri will do your bidding faithfully, and you’ll get to bask in the glow of living in the future.
It’s easy to find and open the Mac’s standard menus—all you do is click a word or icon. But did you know about the Mac’s hidden menus? They contain many useful commands, but the Mac’s user interface provides no clue to their existence. Here’s what you need to know.
These menus go by a few different names. Long-time geeks call them contextual menus, but nowadays Apple prefers to call them secondary menus or shortcut menus. We’ll call them shortcut menus here because they generally provide shortcuts to commands that are also available elsewhere.
Sorry, no. You have to invoke these shortcut menus in a special way. The most foolproof method is via a Control-click—hold down the Control key on your keyboard while you click the correct spot. Try it by Control-clicking an icon in the Finder.
Before the Mighty Mouse appeared in 2005, all Apple mice had just one button, so the Control-click technique was the only way to go. Since 2005, however, all Apple mice have provided multiple buttons, and since then, you’ve also been able to right-click to invoke a shortcut menu. Windows users who switch to the Mac are particularly accustomed to right-clicking, since Windows relies on it heavily. To right-click, click the target spot with the right-hand button on your mouse, or click the equivalent area on your trackpad.
If that doesn’t work, open System Preferences > Mouse/Trackpad > Point & Click and make sure the “Secondary click” checkbox is selected. Also, note whether “Click in bottom right corner” or “Click in bottom left corner” (or similar) is selected. (When changing the settings for a non-Apple mouse or trackpad, you may see different options or need to use software that came with the device.)
Right-clicking is great, but trackpad users can avail themselves of another technique, the two-finger click. If “Click with two fingers” is selected in the Trackpad preference pane, you can invoke a shortcut menu with a two-fingered click anywhere on your trackpad. We prefer this two-finger-click method because, with either click-in-a-corner method, we sometimes click in the corner when we want a regular click, not a menu.
We already mentioned the shortcut menu that comes up from a Finder icon. Most of its commands also appear in the Finder’s File menu, but the shortcut menu saves you a trip across the screen. A few favorites from that menu are:
Shortcut menus abound in the Finder: Control-click the toolbar of a Finder window to get commands for customizing it. Control-click a sidebar item in a Finder window to get info about it or remove it, among other possibilities. For a Finder window in List view, you can add and remove columns by Control-clicking the column header bar. And of course, you can Control-click icons in the Dock.
Most apps also offer shortcut menus, but the hard part is finding them. The trick is to Control-click any object or interface control you could conceivably customize or work on in some other way. To see what we’re talking about, Control-click a photo you’ve received in Messages, a message summary in Mail, or a graphic in Safari. Those examples are just the tip of the iceberg—try Control-clicking words, graphics, songs, icons, toolbars, sidebars, you name it!
