Hello, my name’s Tom, and this is Proper Honest Tech.
If you use a Mac with a large external monitor, you’ve no doubt run into the same issue
that I found myself running into a little while back. The frustration of trying to accurately
position windows on your screen. I use a 32 inch display, and the issue is that if you
manually try to position windows into say, the corners or a 50/50 split of the screen,
it’s really fiddly and laborious, especially if you need to do this quickly while you’re
in the middle of working. Mac OS Big Sur does include some ‘tiling’ options, but they’re
unbelievably basic. You can click and hold the green button on any window, and either
go totally full screen with that window, or tile it to the left or right of the screen.
Kind of a wasted opportunity if you’re using a large screen.
Enter Moom, a very low-cost extension by a company called Many Tricks. Moom has absolutely
revolutionised the way that I use my Mac, and in this short video, I’m going to show
you what it can do.
Once Moom is installed, you can choose to use it as a dock-based app, as an icon in
the menu bar which is the way that I use it, or as an entirely invisible app, working in
the background of your computer. By heading into the app itself, you can choose to get
into some customisation options, which I’ll show you in a moment, but I’ve found that
if you simply select certain options within the app itself, you can save yourself a lot
of time and use the app in a number of really effective ways.
So for example, if I head into Preferences, by default with the mouse, you’ve got it
set to Zoom Button Controls. What that means is that Moom activates when you hover your
cursor over the green Zoom button on any window. So if I hover here, you can see that I’ve
got 6 options. The little person avatar is referring to my own preferred settings, which
I’ll come to in a moment. Then to the right of that, you’ve got presets for making the
app take up the full screen but leaving the menu bar visible up top, tiling the window
to the left or right half of the screen, or the top and bottom half of the screen.
But then if I jump back to preferences, I can also choose Snap to Edges and Corners.
This is really useful, this allows me to just grab windows and drag them to where I want
them, and you can see from this display how it all works. Better still, you can change
any of these. So for example, I don’t really use top half and bottom half, so I could swap
these out for something else if I wanted to.
Let me show you how this works. So I just grab a window, and drag it to a relevant side
or a corner, and there you go, Moom positions it for me.
So far, so good. But it can do other things too. I create screen capture videos for clients,
and because I use a 6K display, I don’t want to capture in full screen. Instead, I
need my windows to be in a 1920 by 1080 ratio, and I’ll capture them in just a portion
of my display. Then, when I export the videos, they’re the perfect scale and size for what
my clients want.
So with Moom, I can go to Preferences and Custom, and I can add a custom option in to
scale any window to a very specific set of dimensions. It’s the Resize option, and
you can see here how it works. So then when I want to use it, I just hover over the Zoom
button, then the custom icon, and there it is, a perfect resize option.
You’ve also got the option to ‘Arrange Windows’, which allows you to save a ‘snapshot’
of the windows the way you have them at the moment. This is great if you’re someone
who always uses certain applications, and you like to have them setup in exactly the
same way every time. Just configure your screen exactly the way you’re happy with it, and
save your snapshot. Then, when you open those applications in the future, choose the snapshot,
and Moom will do the rest.
And finally, if you’re a fan of Hot Keys, you’re covered too. Just choose Keyboard
here in the Preferences section, input your preferred Hot Key, and choose what you’d
like it to do!
I honestly don’t know why functionality like this isn’t baked into Mac OS, it’s
such a helpful tool for using your Mac on larger screens. But while it’s not, Moom
is a low-cost way of adding the functionality to your computer, only costing about $10 or
£10, and available direct from their site, or via the App Store.
So there you go, a powerful low-cost app that can really change the way you use your Mac.
I hope you found this video useful, if you did do please consider leaving a like and
subscribing to the channel for more content like this in the future.
See you on the next video.