You switch on your Mac, and you’re feeling productive. But there are many features that could allow you to be even more efficient in your work, and some don’t even realise they exist.
Here, we hack the Mac with five tips that are guaranteed to help you make the most out of it.
1. Show scroll bars
You may be running a version of macOS that automatically hides scroll bars. Whilst this is great for maximising the space available on your screen, their lack of presence can cause confusion. Many find themselves particularly frustrated when they can’t determine the length of a webpage.
Thankfully, making them visible is easy. Simply go into your ‘System Preferences’ and pick the ‘General’ section. Here there is the ‘Show scroll bars’ option, with the choice to select ‘Always’.
2. Spark ‘hot corners’
With this function, you can trigger specific actions when your mouse hovers over a particular corner of your screen. These include starting or disabling the screensaver, displaying the dashboard, desktop or notification centre, and opening up the launchpad.
Using hot corners will make it significantly quicker to perform tasks. To decide which actions to trigger, you’ll need to go into the ‘Desktop & Screen Saver’ section of ‘System Preferences’.
3. Close running apps quicker
Switching between multiple apps isn’t only time-consuming and aggravating to the user when trying to find the one they need – it also eats up a lot of RAM space. This makes your system slower, in turn causing even more frustration.
You probably don’t require each to be open at the same time, but locating every app to close can be a task in itself. There’s a keyboard shortcut that makes this simple. Pressing the Command and Tab keys will give you a clear display of the open applications. You then run through them by continuing to hold these keys, and press ‘Q’ to quit the selected one, or ‘H’ to hide it.
4. Turn off notifications
Whilst the notification centre is great for alerting you when there is something urgent to deal with, sometimes the sheer amount of communications can reduce your productivity.
The ‘do not disturb’ feature, accessible through the notification centre, can be automatically set for a day. This silences any further alerts. There’s also the option to have this feature set for specific times, or when the display is sleeping or mirroring other devices. If you still want to receive calls, then you can choose to allow this.
5. Preview files
Sometimes you’ll want to have a peek at a file to see its contents, rather than opening it up using the specific program. There’s the option to right click on the file in the Finder and select ‘Quick Look’, but there’s also a keyboard shortcut that speeds up this process even more.
You simply press the space bar when you’ve selected the file and the preview mode will open. If you’ve chosen multiple files, use the arrow keys whilst in this mode to flit between them.
With these tips, you’ll find yourself feeling much more productive when working on your Mac, even when you’re out of the office. Yet unfortunately these can’t help the issue many have with Apple devices: the hefty upfront cost to purchase them.
Thankfully, there’s a hack for this as well with Lease Loop. Instead of worrying about cash flow, you can choose a leasing option for your devices that suits the needs of your business. For further information, get in touch with us today.