Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com.
On today's episode instead of focusing on some of the big new features in Mac OS Sierra
let's take a look at some of the little things, the tiny additions, that may be useful to
you.
So let's start off by looking at a very tiny change in the Finder that a lot of people
are really going to like.
Here I'm looking at a list of Documents and Folders inside a folder.
What a lot of people want is to be able to separate the folders from the files but not
go to the extreme of arranging everything by kind.
You now can go into Finder, Preferences and under Advanced you can select Keep folders
on top when sorting by name.
Now the folders are first and the files are after it.
Now while picture in picture video is very useful on iOS, on Mac we've always had windows
so we could be looking at a video like this online, we could shrink the window down and
do other work at the same time.
But we have true picture in picture ability now.
When you're viewing a video in Safari, and it works in iTunes as well, you get this picture
in picture button here.
It only works if the video is just basic H264 video presented in the web browser.
If you're looking at a special interface like YouTube presents you may not see this button.
So it's not going to work everywhere.
But when you click it you get a little picture in picture window that you could move around
to each corner.
You can even drag the edges to make it a little smaller.
You can take it back into the app that you're in.
You can hit a play button.
Then, of course, we can hide Safari here completely and the video still stays.
So I can launch another app and do something else and I can put the video in any corner
that I want and continue to watch it.
Anytime I want to jump back to Safari I hit this button and it brings Safari up again
and puts the video back.
So on Macs we're typing with real keyboards.
But on an iPad or iPhone we're using virtual keyboards and we get a little cool thing where
at the end of a sentence you can, instead of hitting period and then space you can do
two spaces and then get a period.
Well, you can have that now too on a Mac if you go into System Preferences, under Keyboard,
Text, Turn on Add period with double-space.
Now you get the period when you hit the spacebar twice.
Unfortunately, the Messages app doesn't get all the cool bells and whistles that you get
in iOS.
But there are a couple things that you get.
The first is you get big emoji.
What does that mean?
Well if you type a regular text message and add emoji to it nothing changes.
It's the same.
But if you only include emoji and no regular text the emoji is sent as big.
Now one feature Macs do get from iOS is the ability to use TapBack which simply allows
you to respond to a message like this with a quick action.
So I'm going to click and hold and you get these icons here.
You can just respond with one or more of them.
So a simple thing like a thumbs up and it appears like this and it is how the person
that sent it to you also sees it.
So you can do that.
You can also Control click and you get a tapback option there as well.
Now here's something that's going to make lots of people happy.
Have you ever wanted to rearrange these icons here at the top but have been frustrated because
some allow you to move them and some don't.
Well now you can move almost all of them.
So, of course, you can move the third party ones and you can do that using the Command
key and then dragging.
You can drag them in any order that you want.
You can use the default ones like Time Machine, the WiFi there.
You can even use the User there, even Spotlight and even Siri.
You can't move Notifications though.
That's always going to be in the upper right.
Like many I've always hated that the default text size in Notes is pretty small.
While you can change it in a new Note you just have to change it all over again.
But now you've actually got a preference here for the default text size.
So you can set it to be bigger and when you create a new note it's automatically big.
There is one more I want to mention but it's kind of hard to demonstrate.
It's the Shared Clipboard.
So if you have multiple Macs or maybe an iPhone or an iPad and they're all logged in using
the same Apple ID, if you Copy on one device, say a piece of text or even an image, and
immediately Paste on another device you'll Paste from across the devices.
Now it's a little imperfect when I tried it out because of course you have to wait a second
or two for the copy to be realized on the other machine and also it expires after some
time.
So if you copy something on your iPad and then later on in the day you sit down with
your MacBook you're not suddenly going to be surprised with what's on your Clipboard.
It only lasts about two minutes or so.
But still it's going to be a useful feature for a lot of people especially when you want
to transfer that critical little piece of text from one device to another.