HCS Blog

At Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference in June, the company threw back the curtains on macOS 13 Ventura, iOS 16, iPadOS 16, and watchOS 9. These operating systems won’t be available until September or October of 2022, and we usually recommend waiting some time to upgrade—particularly for macOS.

Even so, it’s not too early to think about how these operating systems might impact your plans to buy new hardware in the next six months. Any Apple device you buy now—or have bought in the last few years—will be able to run the new operating systems. But some devices that can run the current macOS 12 Monterey, iOS 15, iPadOS 15, and watchOS 8 won’t be able to upgrade to their replacements later this year. And some older devices that can upgrade won’t support all the new features.

A large screen—or several screens!—increases productivity by helping you see more content at once. It’s a big help to refer to a Web page in one window while writing in another, for instance, or to check your calendar while composing an email. But the more screen real estate you have, the easier it is to lose track of the tiny pointer arrow. Happily, Apple added a clever trick for finding the pointer to macOS—quickly slide your finger or shake your mouse back and forth horizontally a few times to enlarge the pointer briefly.

(Featured image based on an original by iStock.com/Fanliso)

We all get too much email, and while Mail can’t help you get less (other than by making it easy to unsubscribe from mailing lists), it does provide shortcuts for processing your mail more quickly. Regardless of whether you’re using iOS, iPadOS, or macOS, you can swipe on messages in the message list to perform various actions—some of which you can customize. It’s an efficient way to work through email quickly.

Swiping on the iPhone and iPad

In iOS and iPadOS, when you swipe a short distance right on an unread message (from left to right), Mail displays a Read button. You can either stop swiping and tap it or keep swiping to the right to mark the message as read. If the message has already been read, that button changes to Unread. This swipe is great for those who like marking messages as unread to keep them around for later processing.

Many people have an Apple TV in the living room, hooked to a large-screen TV. It’s a great streaming media box for Apple TV+, Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, and a slew of other services. It even supports a bunch of games. Don’t let the Apple TV’s consumer focus fool you, though. It’s also a highly useful device for businesses in two important ways: digital signage and presentation display.

Apple TV for Digital Signage

For businesses that need to post signs, it’s easy to print something out and stick it on the wall. But that can get out of hand quickly, and once you have more than a couple of sheets of paper posted, people won’t read them. And, let’s face it, a piece of paper taped to the wall isn’t exactly eye-catching. Professional-level design and large-format printing can help, but then costs start going up quickly, and print signs aren’t easy to update.

Everyone is accustomed to using the Copy and Paste commands on the Mac, but fewer people know that you can also copy and paste between your Mac and your iPhone and iPad. Apple calls this feature Universal Clipboard, and it’s so deeply integrated into macOS, iOS, and iPadOS that it can be easy to miss. You won’t find a switch for Universal Clipboard or any other mention of it in System Preferences or Settings.

To use Universal Clipboard, all you have to do is copy some content—a bit of text, an image, a video—on one device, switch to another device, and paste it into an app that can accept the copied content. It’s a great way to move data between your devices. (When going from Mac to Mac, you can also copy and paste entire files in the Finder.)

Back in the early 1980s, DOS filenames couldn’t be more than 8 characters long with a period and a 3-character extension. That was limiting, so when Apple developed the Mac operating system in 1984, it allowed longer names and eliminated the need for an extension, although Mac OS X’s Unix roots meant a return of the filename extension in 2001. Since then, filename restrictions have loosened to the point where it’s easy to think that they no longer exist.

If only that were true! In some ways, the situation has become even cloudier, thanks to additional limitations from file-sharing services like Dropbox, OneDrive, and Box. (Google Drive’s native Web interface reportedly has no naming limitations, but files whose names contain Windows or macOS forbidden characters may not sync via Google Drive’s desktop software.) Plus, people tend to move files between operating systems more than ever before—if you’re sending a file from your Mac to a Windows user through Dropbox, you need to make sure that all three can deal with the filename.