Apple always delivers slick and polish software, and macOS proves itself to be intuitive, very easy to operate. However, many of us don’t really put these options to good use.
Photo by Patrick Ward on Unsplash
Free up the Drive Space
If your Mac is running super slow right now, are you running low on hard drive space?
macOS can actually help you tackle that issue. In the top left of the screen, if you click the Apple menu and choose About this Mac, go to storage and click manage, there will be a range of options.
For example, you can automatically remove cloud-based files that don’t require local storage like movies, iTunes TV shows, and even your email attachments. To do this, select optimize.
There is also a manual control where you can click with your files to check the most significant and oldest files and decide whether you need them or not. This is also the ideal time to get rid of junk files you can go to https://macpaw.com/how-to/delete-junk-files-on-mac to learn how to do this effectively.
Combine App Windows into Tabs
You know you can open multiple tabs in a browser; however, macOS will let you arrange the windows of all the apps in the same way.
You’ll find that this will only work for specific programs, including all of the activity applications. In any app that supports tabs choose the window from the bar at the top of the page then click merge all windows to bring all of the windows together into a series of neat tabs.
Sing Folders
Apple has been giving new abilities to the cloud storage app, iCloud. For example, you can sync your desktop for this to the web if you have the space to do so.
In order to take advantage of this fantastic feature, open system preferences, and head to iCloud. When you are on this menu, go to iCloud drive and find options. You can pick which folders and apps you want to move automatically to a cloud storage account.
Screen Corners into Shortcuts
You can create a series of hot corners. You would hover your cursor over the different corners of the screen. You can launch a range of actions like start a new screensaver putting the display to sleep, or opening mission control.
But first, you need to set this up. Head to system preferences, then choose desktop and screensaver, now go to screensaver tab and click hot corners.
Productivity
When you’re in the zone in the middle of creating a month or a few months’ worth of content and marketing. They can be nothing worse than seeing notifications continuously on-screen on the right-hand corner.
Set your macOS to do not disturb so you can mute these alerts. Head to system preferences click notifications and click do not disturb. You can also set the hours that you want this to run to coincide with your working hours.
Battery drain
When you use the MacBook, one of the biggest drains on the battery is actually the display.
And if you don’t want to sit plugged into your mates all day, you’re going to want to save that battery power.
Open system preferences and go to energy saver, play around with some of the settings in order to make your battery last longer.
Spotlight
Well, the spotlight search tool is handy; it can sometimes be time-consuming. You can launch the Spotlight search tool with command and space, and it will let you find anything that is on your Mac.
However, you have probably noticed that the search parameters are rather broad. In order to limit this, go to preferences and click the spotlight followed by search results. Uncheck any of the less relevant categories like presentations or spreadsheets when you want to leave them out of the spotlight search.
Fine Tune the Brightness
It is easy to adjust the brightness of your Mac screen; you hit the shortcut button on the keyboard. But this will bring the intensity up or down in steps.
If you want to fine-tune this into smaller, more manageable increments, by holding Shift+Options(alt) and pressing the brightness buttons.
You can also go to display and system preferences and play around with the light levels a little bit more.
Stop Autoplay
There is nothing more annoying than researching on the Internet and finding ads and videos are also playing. Stop this open Apple's web browser Safari.
Click preferences and head to the website tab. Here you will find autoplay tickets, and on the bottom open the drop-down menu. This will stop all audio and video from playing automatically in the future, or you can block videos that have sound attached.
This will prevent your concentration being broken when you are in the middle of researching, which will improve your productivity.