I could take or leave Valentine’s day (given the choice, I’d opt for ‘leave’). Fortunately, there’s another, nerdier occasion to celebrate in early February – National Clean Out Your Computer Day.

This year, the auspicious event falls on Monday, February 12^th. Even if you like Valentine’s day, the space in between the two dates should give you enough time to recuperate, and enjoy both. How lucky!

The idea behind National Clean Out Your Computer Day is to remind us to dedicate some time, once a year, to organising and cleaning up the files and data on our computers. Initially proposed and sponsored in 2000 by the Institute for Business Technology, we have grown fond of the extra ‘holiday’, and the reminder to get our bits in order. In this article, we’ll share some tips to help you deal with the lowest hanging fruit.

Before we begin, we recommend making sure all of your data is BACKED UP. That is, make sure you have a completely redundant copy of all your files. We should all have this set up as a matter of good practice, but sometimes we need an occasion like Clean Out Your Computer Day to actually get it set up. If you don’t currently have any backups, stop now and set them up – you can use Apple’s built-in Time Machine software, something like Carbon Copy Cloner to make a clone of your entire hard drive, or a service like BackBlaze to keep a constantly-updated offsite copy of all your files backed up to the cloud (or, preferably, all three).

With that done, let’s look at some quick ways to clean up your Mac, and get back some space.

Desktop Folder

For many of us, the ‘Desktop’ folder on our Mac is a magnet for junk – it’s right there, easy to find, and easy to manage (up to a point). As a result, we can end up with piles of files scattered all over the place. Unfortunately, having a lot of files on your desktop can actually result in your Mac taking longer to start up, so we think you’ll agree it’s a good place to start cleaning.

The first step I take is to ruthlessly delete anything I no longer need – web pages relating to DIY projects I’m never actually going to do, screenshots from years ago when I was trying to explain something to a friend over email, ‘entertaining’ attachments from emails that have long since exhausted all their value – being brutal, using the Space Bar to preview selected files with Quick Look, and using the cmd + delete keyboard shortcut to send files to the Trash helps.

If there are files that you still need – perhaps you really are going to finish that DIY project – the easiest, laziest way to deal with them is to name them well (with any and all information you might need to find them again later), make a folder named ‘Desktop from #DATE#’ with today’s date, dump all those miscellaneous files from your Desktop in there, and dump the new folder into your Documents folder. This gets those files off the desktop, and you should be able to find anything that you need in future via Spotlight search – it’s the equivalent of stuffing a bunch of stuff into a drawer, if your drawer can hold a huge amount of things and is searchable…

If you are someone who likes having things more organised, you can really do as much filing as you want – you could make subfolders relating to projects, dates, etc. – but I’m trying to make this as easy as possible. Easy means more likely to get done!

Since most of these files will probably be small in size, and since the search on Mac has gotten so good, you should be able to find anything you need later and the overall collection won’t have too big an impact on the space available on your Mac (especially after you’ve completed the initial step of deleting un-needed files). Any files that are large enough to be significant, we’ll deal with later.

Final Note – don’t forget to empty your Trash! You can do this via the Finder menu, or by pressing shift + cmd + delete. Your space isn’t actually recovered until you delete the files from the Trash, so you will need to do this to see results.

Duplicate Files and System Files

Another couple of pieces of low-hanging fruit, we can clean up these problems with the help of some specific applications.

For duplicate files, we recommend Gemini2 – it’s a smart, dedicated app for detecting and dealing with duplicate files on your Mac. It’s free to try it out, so I recommend downloading it and seeing what it finds.

For cleaning up your System and cache files, we recommend Onyx – it is a long running, donation-supported application that can clear up a bunch of space with just a couple of button clicks.

Both of these apps do the heavy lifting for you, and will almost certainly give you back some more space, as well as cleaning out some things in the background that you didn’t even know were there – it’s like having a robot vacuum under your bed.

Dealing With the Big Stuff

After taking care of the low hanging fruit, the next most effective way to clean up a bunch of space on your Mac is to use an application to find out where all your storage space is being used, then see if there are any big files that you can get rid of.

To analyse where space is being used on your drive, we recommend DaisyDisk – it’s pretty, free to try, and easy to use.

You have to be a bit careful when deleting files, but since you have good backups in place (you do, don’t you?), you can probably clean up quite a bit of space – chances are there’s at least one video file somewhere that you no longer need but which is taking up a bunch of space.

Also, if you use a cloud service like DropBox, you can actually choose what gets synced to your computer – if you have files in your DropBox that you don’t need locally, turn syncing off for those files so they aren’t taking up your disk space!

And that’s it for now – National Clean Out Your Computer Day might be over, but even by just following those few steps above, you should have some more space on your computer, and perhaps will be slightly less anxious about how your Mac looks when it starts up…

To finish, doing this once a year is a good start but, if you found this process helpful, there’s nothing stopping you setting a reminder to run through these steps once every month or so.

Let us know how you go, or if you have any other tips to share – you can always add to this list!

Since 1984, from the first Mac computers coming off the assembly line, keyboard shortcuts have existed to simplify certain actions. While the most revolutionary aspect of the Mac was its doing-away with the text-only interface, we still have keyboard shortcuts in the operating system – sometimes they’re just quicker than using a mouse.

Command-A, which is used for selecting all the text in an area, Command-C which is used to copy selected text, and Command-V, for pasting copied text, are a few examples of some shortcuts with which you’re probably already familiar. Additionally, there are certain keyboard shortcuts that only work with certain apps. This post will shed light on some important key combinations that you can use to save time while working, and you’ll also get a little history lesson in the process.

Before we go any further, let’s take a trip back to the foundation of macOS. Mac products today can trace their operating system to NeXTStep, the operating system used on the NeXT workstations from the second computer company created by (Apple founder) Steve Jobs. NeXTStep originated from Unix (so did Mac OSX, now macOS), an operating system that was first introduced by the researchers at Bell Labs in the 1970s.

Around that time, in 1976, two developers created a text editor known as EMACS – Editor MACroS for TECO. Despite its age, certain commands from the EMACS editor are still functional on the Mac today – in dialogue boxes, Safari address bars, TextEdit windows, and several other MacOS apps.

Some of those shortcuts include:

♣          Control-a: Position your cursor at the beginning of the line

♣          Control-b: Same thing as the arrow to the left

♣          Control-d: Deletes letters to the cursor’s right

♣          Control-e: Position the cursor at the last part of a line

♣          Control-f: Same thing with the right arrow

♣          Control-h: Same thing as clicking on delete

♣          Control-k: Delete the characters on the right side of the cursor

♣          Control-n: Same thing as the arrow pointing down

♣          Control-o: Works like the return key, but the cursor remains in the same place

♣          Control-p: Same thing as the arrow pointing up

♣          Control-v: Transports the cursor towards the end of a line or document

The great thing about these ancient EMACS shortcuts is that most of them also work with iOS when you use an external keyboard! Of course, this is because iOS has OS X – that is, UNIX – heritage.

To wrap up, here are some other keyboard shortcuts that can also take advantage of your keyboard’s arrows and are especially useful for moving around:

♣          alt/option + up arrow: Proceed to the opening of a paragraph (the preceding line break)

♣          alt/option + down arrow: Proceed to where the paragraph ended (the subsequent line break)

♣          alt/option + right arrow: Proceed to the last part of the word, then to the last part of the subsequent word, and continue like that

♣          alt/option + left arrow: Proceed to where the word starts from, then move left towards the beginning of the subsequent word, and continue

♣          Command + left arrow: Proceed to the start of the current line or the character farthest to the left on that line

♣          Command + right arrow: Proceed to the last part of the current line or to the character farthest to the right on that line

♣          Command + up arrow: Proceed to the beginning part of the document

♣          Command + down arrow: Proceed to the last part of the document

We find both both Command-Down and Command-Up are super useful in Safari, because these shortcuts take you straight to the top or bottom of the web page you’re viewing.

If you have a preferred keyboard shortcut that wasn’t listed here, let us know in the comments!

Despite my long history as a Mac user, I recently had an embarrassing encounter with a TouchBar MacBook Pro – the machine had frozen, and I wanted to do a force restart. While this should have been completely simple, I couldn’t work it out!

Eventually, I managed to sort it out, but thought it would be wise to share it with you, in case you end up in the same situation.

The freeze happened when upgrading the MacBook Pro to one of the macOS High Sierra betas. I went through the installation as per usual, but the MacBook Pro ended up stuck in a loop of rebooting, before showing the login screen. I shrugged, entered my login details, and everything seemed OK.

Not long after, I noticed the screen of the MacBook Pro was stuck on a loading bar. I gave it some time, but after waiting for almost 30 minutes, I got impatient and thought I’d better force reboot and try again.

All previous Macs that I’ve used in recent years have had a simple way to perform a force reboot—all you needed to do was hold down the power button and the laptop would force shut down. Since the power button had a similar function on older Mac versions (i.e. shutting down and turning on the machine), I started looking around for the MacBook Pro’s power button…

(The MacBook Pro’s (near) invisible Touch Bar power button.)

Can you see it? It wasn’t visible to me! Even after using this MacBook Pro for months, I had never bothered with the power button – the computer would wake from sleep whenever it was opened, and would quietly go back to sleep when closed. Thinking about it now, it must have been turned on at some point, but I had just forgotten about it!

The key, quite literally, is to look at the Touch Bar’s right end, where the Touch ID button is located – this Touch ID sensor is actually the power button as well. This was obvious once you know, but I had never noticed due to just thinking of it as the login key, using Touch ID.

In the end, all that was required to force reboot a MacBook Pro was to push and hold down this Touch ID button.

I think this is a clear example of where the simplistic design of Apple might have accidentally made something more confusing intially (as a suggestion, perhaps they could have added a power symbol somewhere on, or near, the Touch ID button?). The only documented hint that suggests that the Touch ID button is doubling as the power button is hidden within a support document about accessibility features of the Touch Bar.

We might just be stupid, but hopefully sharing this will help someone else avoid the trouble we had!

Do you share our shame at not knowing which button on our Mac was the power button, or maybe have run into something similar? Help us out, let us know what simple problems you’ve been stumped by!

Outlined in this article are some of the most important new features of iOS 11 in case you need some motivation to upgrade. These are just some of the features, but we think they’ll make clear just how big an update iOS 11 is – especially for the iPad.

• The Files App

(The Files App: iOS 11’s “Finder”.)

One of the most noticeable things in beta testing OS 11 was the Files app – it’s basically bringing the macOS Finder to iOS, and finally giving you full control over your files. Once you have added all your cloud services such as Box, iCloud Drive, Adobe Creative Cloud and Dropbox, you can use the Files app to search through browse all your files, on all of these. This new control over your files is available from within other iOS apps, shared between your other iOS devices, and on your local device, all thanks to the Files app.

• QuickType Keyboard

(QuickType Keyboard.)

In an attempt to make typing on your iOS device much faster, especially for iPads, this new keyboard (see screenshot above) displays numbers, letters, and symbols at the same time as the alphabet. For example, rather than switching to the ‘numbers and symbols’ keyboard, in iOS 11 you can type the “&” symbol by simply flicking down on the “F” key – you can see above that this key also displays a grey “&”.

This feature might seem strange, or take a little bit of time to get used to, but it makes typing on the iPad pro much faster when using the built-in software keyboard.

• The Dock

 This is a feature of the big iPads, not so much the phones. If you have used a Mac before, then you’re probably familiar with the idea of the Dock. It’s basically a shelf for your most used, and most recently used, apps that fades away when you are using an app, but can be brought right up by swiping from the bottom of the screen. It helps you to switch easily between apps and also makes opening new apps quicker. You can drag whatever apps you want onto its left hand side, and your most recently used apps are displayed on the right hand side for easy access.

• Multitasking

 (It’s also possible to place Slide Over items on the screen’s left side.)

Have you ever opened an app on your iPad and wanted to have another available at the same time? This feature was introduced earlier in iOS via Split View and Slide Over, but it has been made even better in iOS 11.

Now, to add a second app to your screen, you can bring up the dock, tap and hold on the app you want to add, then drag it to the side of the screen that you want it to go (refer to the image above).

That’s it! Two apps side by side.

• The Reformulated Control Center and App Switcher

(The new App Switcher (to the left) and the new Control Center (to the right) with the Dock at the bottom.)

In addition to bringing up the Dock, the gesture described earlier will also display the new Control Center and App Switcher (see image above). New to iOS 11 is the ability to choose which widgets show up in Control Center, and the App Switcher displays thumbnails of your most recently used apps, and their current state.

• Drag and Drop

Drag and drop is a feature that has been on the Mac since day one, and is now finally integrated into iOS. To clarify, ‘Drag and Drop’ is when you select one or more items, with one or more fingers, then drag them to a different part of the screen, or different app, before releasing, to move things around. This is a huge change, as it means you can pick something up from one app, and drop it into another app, simply and easily. As you might be able to imagine, it really shines when using Split View on your iPad – you can pick up a photo from an email, and drop it straight into a message, all without moving between screens.

• Text Recognition and Document Scanner in Notes

(iOS 11’s new document scanning function in Notes.)

This one might be hidden away, but is amazing! The Notes app has received a lot of good updates over the years, but this one takes it to the next level (refer to screenshot above). Basically, the Notes app will now recognize text that you ‘scan’ using your device’s camera, and even handwritten notes, and will convert that text so it can be searched. If you’re someone who has ever wanted to scribble a note on a piece of paper, take a photo of it, and be able to find it again later by searching for whatever it was you wrote down, the Notes app can now do that.

Instant Markup with an Apple Pencil

Like many of the features mentioned here, this one is most useful on the iPad Pro. The first part of the feature means that when you take a screen shot in iOS 11, it will appear on left side of the screen of your iOS device for some time. This is an improvement over how it used to work – new screen shots would be hidden away in your camera roll, and you’d have to do some digging to find them. In addition to this little change, you can now also pick up your Apple Pencil and start marking up the screenshot right then, as soon as you take it, from the screen shot itself – no other apps required.

Even when you don’t have an Apple Pencil, this new ability can still be super useful. If you’ve ever wanted to quickly, visually express something on your iOS device to someone – maybe helping a friend find a button, or showing a family member how to use an app – you can now take a screenshot, tap on it to edit it, crop it, and, if need be, add callouts, and send it on, all from the popup. The icing on the cake is that, once you have sent the screenshot, you can choose to save it to your device, or you can just discard it. This should help those of us with a photos album full of old, often-accidental, screenshots on our phone!

• Other Amazing Features
  • While not yet much of a thing here in Australia, it will soon be possible for people to send money to someone using Apple Pay on your iOS device. This is an interesting feature, which should make splitting bills, or paying back friends much easier.
  • New filters have been added to the camera, and your device will now save photos in the brand new HEVC and HEIF formats, which allow you to have the same amount of high-quality photos and videos, in a lot less storage space.
  • Siri now performs translations (English to Spanish, Mandarin, German, Italian or French).
  • The iOS 11 App Store has been updated, making it much easier to discover new apps, and giving developers more options for providing good descriptions of their apps.

These are just some of the big things that we like about iOS 11, but the best way for you to check it out is to upgrade your device! Try it out, and let us know what you think.

MacOS High Sierra has been out for a while – your Mac has probably been bugging you to upgrade – and it also went through a long public beta process. Fortunately for us, this means that there are relatively few bugs to worry about. That said, we so want to caution against assuming that upgrading your computer’s OS to High Sierra is necessarily a simple and straightforward experience. While testing the Beta, and running our own upgrades, we ran into some issues…

Luckily for you, there’s no need for you to go through the same experience we did, so we felt it would be helpful to share some useful tips as to some things you should do before upgrading your computer to macOS High Sierra, or really, any new version of MacOS.

1. Have a Bootable Backup Available
   We cannot overemphasise the need to always have and keep up-to-date backups – in addition to ensuring you don’t lose your files in the case of some sort of catastrophic computer failure, a bootable backup is always a good thing to have, especially given that there will be a big upgrade to a new version of macOS once a year. These are enough reason to ensure your backups are constantly up to date. As an aside, or consolation, for those of you without a bootable backup, there is a bootable section included in your Mac’s recovery partition if you ever get into real strife – you don’t need to worry about this, as your Mac just takes care of it for you, but it’s good to know it’s there if you ever need it.

If, for any reason you encounter problems with your High Sierra upgrade, you might get to the point where the only option left for you is to boot your device from your backup drive in recovery mode, clean your Mac’s boot drive, and then install a fresh version of macOS Sierra or macOS High Sierra onto your Mac’s boot drive.

Some very good backup utilities used in getting your bootable backups good to go include SuperDuper! by Shirt Pocket Software, and Carbon Copy Cloner from Bombich Software. These utilities are worth having, and we highly recommend them. Carbon Copy Cloner has just been upgraded to its new version 5 which provides a new user interface with faster operation – this is also the only backup utility that can help to back up the recovery partition. (See image below)

(Carbon Copy Cloner Version 5’s new user interface.)

2) Make sure macOS 10.12 Sierra Is Up-To-Date
Generally, we would assume you have been regularly updating your Mac each time a new update is made available. If you haven’t, this would be a good time to click on the Mac App Store icon in your dock, hit the update tab and check if you have any updates ready to install. The most recent version, as of writing this at the end of 2017, is 10.12.6. You can confirm the version number of your OS by selecting about this mac from the Apple menu (see image below)

(About This Mac shows that this iMac is running 10.12.6.)

3) Update Your Mac Apps

We should also stress the importance of ensuring your Mac apps are up-to-date. A lot of developers make use of the time between Apple’s World Wide Developer’s Conference in June and the release of a new version of macOS sometime in September or October, to make sure their device is completely compatible with the new version of the OS.

We know it is a lot more difficult to keep your Mac apps updated than it is your iPhone apps, as result of the fact that not all the apps on your Mac devices were purchased from the Mac App Store – some were purchased directly from the developer’s or a vendor’s websites. Most applications have a built-in way of checking for updates. For example, the popular TextExpander app has a ‘check for update’ item under the TextExpander menu, while some other apps automatically check for updates anytime you start your computer, or the app. Further, there are some apps like Google Chrome that do not check for updates, but rather just update the app automatically anytime an update is available, without you needing to worry about it. If there are any third-party apps that you rely on, it’s worth checking out their websites to see if the developer has released an update to make it compatible with macOS High Sierra, or if there are any known issues.

4) Disable Login/Startup Items before the Upgrade

We usually have apps that we use frequently, as a result we enable them to start up automatically any time we start up/login to our Macs. This is can pose a problem.

When we updated our machines to macOS High Sierra, the computer prompted us to upgrade, we agreed, and the installation process ran fairly well. The only thing that made us suspect something was awry were some pauses that made us wonder if everything was OK. We let the installer do its thing, and were finally able to restart, and login.

It was at this point that things started messing up. We could see our startup items popping up on the display, but after a while two worrying things happened: the screen was obscured by a dark translucency, and we could not make use of the keyboard or mouse.

We then realised this was as a result of a screenshot utility that had installed. The developers of that app have not been updating it consistently, and it was clear that something was happening during login that would start the app in a “full-screenshot mode”, this meant that it greyed out the display, and locked out the keyboard and mouse. Luckily, there is a way to prevent something similar from happening to you.

Some apps have the inbuilt option of starting up at login while others can be found under System Preferences > Users & Groups > Login Items. It is always good to take note of the apps that load automatically during login, and disable them from doing so before doing an upgrade, while leaving those added by Apple. Once you are done with the upgrade you can start adding them back from your notes. This could have saved us some panic!

5) Consider Waiting A Little While before installing macOS High Sierra

One last thing, unless you have a very urgent need to install macOS High Sierra – or any new version of macOS – immediately as it is made available, I would suggest you consider waiting a while, at least for a few days, before you install the update.

Apple usually tests its operating systems thoroughly with both developers and public beta testers, but once in a while an upgrade may sneak through that causes some significant issues for quite a number of users. You’re probably safe by now to install if you want to – just make sure you follow the steps above!

So think carefully before you carry out an upgrade. It is advisable you wait a day or two to check if others are having issues before you go ahead and try it out. If it seems like only a handful of people are having after a few days, then it should be pretty safe to upgrade your Mac.

Have you got any upgrade horror stories, or tips to avoid them? Let us know!