Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let me show you ten tricks involving the Apple Menu.
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So the Apple Menu is the first menu at the top left corner of your Mac screen.
When you select it you get a standard set of commands that are there no matter which
app you're running. But there's a lot of hidden functionality there as well. Now the
first item there is About This Mac. When you select it you get this About screen.
You should be on the Overview section to start and there's a button there called System Report.
Click that and you get a far more detailed look at everything on your Mac, every detail
of every system. Now if your intention is to go there you don't need to first go to Apple Menu,
About This Mac and then click the button. You can simply hold the Option key down and About
This Mac changes to System Information. Select that and you go right to System Information.
Now the next two items are System Preferences and App Store. These take you to those apps
respectively. Now they are always there in the Apple Menu. So if you have those items in the Dock
it's kind of redundant. I usually remove System Preferences and the App Store from the Dock to
save the space and have less icons there. I know I can always get to them in the Apple Menu. Now what
about the opposite of that. The only way to get to About This Mac is through the Apple Menu and the
same thing for System Information. But you could actually find these as apps and add them to the
Dock and other locations. For System Information, use Go and go to your Applications folder.
Then in there look for the Utilities folder and go into that. In Utilities there's System
Information. You can add this to the Dock if you like or access it through Launchpad.
Now About is a little harder to find. It's not in your Applications folder. You can find it by going
to Go and then Computer. Then at the top level go to your Hard Drive and then to System and then
from there to Library. Under Library you'll find a folder called Core Services. In Core Services
you'll find a bunch of special apps and inside the Applications folder in there you'll find About
This Mac. You can actually add that to your Dock and then access it from there or drag an alias to
the Finder or even hold the Command key down and drag it to the Finder Toolbar to add it there.
Now the next item in the Apple Menu is Recent Items. This shows recent applications you've used,
recent documents that you've opened, and recent servers you're accessed.
At the bottom you'll see Clear Menu which will clear everything out. You can control how many
items appear in the recent items section by going to System Preferences and then General
and into a setting in here, Recent Items, and you could choose five, ten, fifteen, twenty, thirty,
or fifty. So customize it to fit your needs. If you selected None then Recent Items disappears
completely from the Apple Menu. Now another thing about Recent Items. When you go to it
and you click an item in here it will launch the application or open the document or
go to the server. But if you hold down the Command key these all change to Show In
Finder. So instead of opening a document you actually want to see its location
you can hold the Command key down, then select it, and it will bring it up in a Finder window.
The next item is Force Quit. This will bring up the special screen that allows you to Force
Quit any application currently running. But you could also hold the Shift key down and Force Quit
changes to Force Quit and the currently running app. In this case the Finder. But it could be any
app that you have that is at the front. Notice the keyboard shortcut updates as well. This
will try to force quit that app without taking you to that extra screen to select it first.
Now the next three commands here are Sleep, Restart, and Shut Down. The
first thing I want to tell you about them is there are keyboard shortcuts for these
on most Macs. But you won't see them listed here. How the keyboard shortcuts work depend on the Mac
you have. If you've got a Mac, say an iMac with a keyboard and it has an eject key on the keyboard,
you can actually use the eject key in combination with other modifier keys to Sleep, Restart,
or Shut Down your Mac with the keyboard shortcut rather than going to the Apple Menu. This also
should work on keyboards that have a Power button but not on keyboards that have Touch ID button
like the latest of MacBook Pros and MacBook Airs. Now another thing about these options
here is Restart and Shut Down both bring up extra menus. So if I select Restart it will bring up
this screen here asking me to confirm, checks on other user, does things like that. You can
tell it's going to do that because of the three dots. Anytime there are three dots, like with
Force Quit, it means there's going to be an extra step before the action is actually performed.
But if you hold down the Option key then you can see the three dots disappear from Restart and Shut
Down which means that it will do it just with this command. So I can easily Restart with this
command or Shut Down with this command as long as I'm holding the Option key. Notice the same
is true for Log Out. Without the Option key down it gives me three dots. It's going to prompt me
like that. But with the Option key held down it won't give me the prompt.
Now another way to access some of these items here is using Hot Corners.
You could go to System Preferences, and then you could access Hot Corners in
Mission Control, and then the Hot Corners button. I can set a corner of the screen
to put the display asleep. Then with that selected if I move my cursor up to the top left corner
the display will go to sleep. I don't even have to click. Another option is
Lock Screen. So that's another way to do the Lock Screen command here. But do note both Lock Screen
and Log Out also have keyboard shortcuts using Control Command Q or Shift Command Q.
Now my last tip is about accessing the Apple Menu using just the keyboard. Go to System Preferences
to check to make sure you have this setup. It's under Keyboard and Shortcuts and then Keyboard.
You'll see here Move Focus to the Menu Bar. If you have that turned on and set to Control F2
you can access the Apple Menu by using that. You may have to hold down the fn key in addition to F2
in order for this to work. It depends on your setting here in the Keyboard section. So I can now
use this keyboard combination and now you could see the Apple Menu is selected. If I use the Down
arrow I can now open up the menu and then the down arrow will continue to go through the items. I can
either use the right arrow to go into recent items and the left arrow to go up out of it.
When I get to something that I want to use I can use the Return key or the Spacebar to activate.
So there's a look at getting the most out of using the Apple Menu on your Mac. Thanks for watching.