If you enjoy discovering hidden features of your Mac, then it’s a good idea to get acquainted with the Option key. The Option key is like that special book in a library that, when moved, causes a secret door to swing open. In this case, the secret that is revealed is a Mac feature that is hidden from most users.
Smart Folders have been around in one form or another since OS X Tiger. For a while, the Finder’s sidebar included a dedicated Search For section, with predefined Smart Folders that displayed apps and documents you used "Today," "Yesterday," or "Past Week." There were also Search For entries for "All Images," "All Movies," and "All Documents." These smart searches were a popular feature and served as an introduction to what Smart Folders could do. Now it's time to dig a little deeper and discover some of our favorite saved searches.
Some of Apple’s MacBook Pros (including the 16-incher) and the most recent MacBook Air come with the controversial Touch Bar. Some folks don't like it, but I'm a fan. If you are, too, you can customize it. If you’re not...
I recently purchased a 16-inch MacBook and immediately enabled Touch ID, which is available on most MacBook Pros and the latest MacBook Air. It lets you quickly unlock your Mac and make purchases using your Apple ID and Apple Pay with your fingerprint.
The Activity Monitor app can be used to troubleshoot your Mac, as well as evaluate how well your Mac is performing overall or with specific running processes (apps). In Using Activity Monitor Part 2, we’ll take a look at using this utility to explore your Mac's energy use, disk performance, and network performance.
By making some adjustments in the Energy Saver preference pane, you can better tune your Mac to run at peak performance, save energy, reduce potential data loss when power fails, and extend the runtime and battery life of portable Macs. In this Rocket Yard guide, we will explore the Energy Saver preference pane and see how you can customize energy performance.
December of 2019 marks 35 years since I purchased my first Mac. In all that time, I’ve never had an accident with any of them…but this past Saturday, all it took was a simple bump of a glass of water on my desk, and now my new 16-inch MacBook Pro is “not so new.” I want to share my tale of woe and provide readers of The Rocket Yard with a few tips on what to do to minimize the chances of something like this happening to them.
As many are wont to do, we here at Rocket Yard like to take some time to reflect at the beginning of each new year. We look back at what went well and what hurdles we encountered. We celebrate the victories and learn from the challenges. In 2019, we saw our readership grow by 29% – that’s a fantastic increase that we can only attribute to you. And for that, we thank you!
In the previous Pro Audio series article, we covered some of the most common types of audio effects. If you aren't already familiar with terms like delay, echo, and reverb, you might want to read that article before diving in here. In this article, I'll share some of my favorite plugins for delay, echo, and reverb along with a free option for each type. Also, keep in mind that most modern DAWs usually ship with at least one or two options for delay and reverb effects, so it's probably a good idea that you explore those for the purpose of comparing them against these third-party plugins. This is not meant to be an exhaustive list, but the plugins you'll read about below are some of my personal favorites and cover various budgets, from free to expensive.
