Make the most of Sierra’s built-in tools
New features and helpful advancements in familiar apps combine for great timesavers
T he latest operating system comes with an ever-evolving collection of apps that greatly add to your Mac’s total value. Many of them have gained helpful enhancements in Sierra, and new features, such as Siri, offer you fresh ways to work.
Though the bundled apps and built-in features can each be used in isolation, some interact to save you time. Sierra detects new people and events in more apps than just Mail, and adds them to Calendar and Contacts if that behavior is enabled in the latter two apps’ General prefs. Let’s look at other fun and practical things it offers.
Tweak the menu bar
Previously you could move only some of the icons at the right end of the menu bar. In Sierra, by holding ç you can drag almost all of them into whatever order you want. This includes Spotlight, which used to be fixed in place. Notification Center remains the exception; it’s pinned at the far right, though this makes sense given the feature slides in from the right.
To remove an item provided by Apple, hold ç, drag it downwards and let go when a cross appears. For third-party items, look in their menu or their app’s preferences.
Siri
Siri will likely prove to be the biggest productivity enhancement of all in Sierra. As well as forecasting the weather, giving you travel reports and telling you what’s playing on the radio, it understands queries such as “Show me the Excel files I worked on this week,” “Launch Word,” and “Send a message to Bob.” Your interactions with Siri are shown in a floating window, so you can continue working in another app while it walks you through each stage of a multistep operation – such as sending a message – entirely by voice.
If you need images to use in a document, say, you can ask Siri to “Search the web for Golden Gate Bridge” and then drag results from its window onto the page. Notice the results pane has a + in the corner; click this to add the results, or any other list such as recent Pages documents, to Notification Center for reuse.
In Siri’s pane in System Preferences, you can choose another voice for it, change the mic it uses, and assign a different key combination to invoke it.
Photos
There’s a new Places album that reintroduces a feature that was lost in the transition from iPhoto. It pins your photos on a world map so you can quickly revisit them by where they were taken. There’s also a useful new way to temporarily add short notes and annotations about edits you intend to make later. Double-click an image’s thumbnail to view the picture more closely, then press ® to edit the photo, click Extensions in the sidebar and choose Markup. Use the tools near the top left corner to draw on the photo, add shapes and type words, all of which can later be removed.
When you’re viewing a photo (but not editing it), click Details to reveal related pictures, which are determined on the basis of where or when the photo was taken, or content in it that the app has identified.
Notes
After previously gaining the ability to make memos that contain more than just text, the version of Notes in Sierra (and iOS 10) enables you to collaborate with other people over iCloud. From the note you want to share, click the icon of a person on the toolbar, and enter email addresses or phone numbers of people you want to work with. Invitations can be sent using Mail, Messages, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or AirDrop, or by copying and pasting a link into another app or service.
There’s a useful productivity addition in Mail that’s easy to overlook. At the top right of the message list is a circle with three lines in it; click that to turn on filtering for the mailbox or search results you’re viewing. Initially, the messages below are filtered to show only unread ones. To the left, click the filter’s description to set its criteria, such as whether a message is flagged, sent directly or copied to you, has an attachment, or is from someone you’ve set as a VIP contact. Click the icon again to turn off the filter; the app remembers your criteria choices for individual mailboxes.
Safari
If you’re transcribing an event or following a how-to on YouTube, say, you can pop the video out of Safari and play it in a screen corner. In YouTube, right-click a playing video and (without selecting anything) right-click on it again, then choose Enter Picture-in-Picture; the video moves into a screen corner and can be resized and repositioned – hold ç and drag it to place it anywhere, not just in a corner.
iTunes
Like Safari, iTunes supports Picture in Picture, so you can place video in a screen corner and have it stick there even if you switch to a fullscreen app. Since PiP snaps to screen corners, you can quickly move video out of the way to reach something under it. iTunes can now show lyrics in its main window and the MiniPlayer, and you can control playback with your voice thanks to Siri.
Enable secondary click
Though there’s only one discernible button on Apple’s trackpads and mice, you can perform a right-click (known as a secondary click) to access contextual menus – enable it in System Preferences. You can turn it on for both kinds of device separately in the Mouse and Trackpad panes. Trackpads offer an alternative option of pressing either their bottomleft or bottom-right corner for a secondary click.
Desktop navigation
Swipe left or right between desktops and fullscreen apps using four fingers on a trackpad or two fingers on a Magic Mouse. Double-tap (lightly) with two fingers on a Magic Mouse or swipe upwards with four fingers on a trackpad to open Mission Control and switch to another window. Turn on App Exposé in the Trackpad pane and you’ll find that swiping down with four fingers shows windows only from the active app.
Dip out of your apps
Spread your thumb and three fingers apart on the trackpad to move all your windows out of the way and access the desktop, enabling access to things you’ve saved there. If you need to drag one of those files into an app, press ç and the Mission Control key (also labelled £ on most Apple keyboards) after you start to do so and your windows will instantly slide back into view.
Open Launchpad
Performing the previous gesture in the reverse direction – pinching your thumb and three fingers together – opens Launchpad, where you can open apps with a single click on their icon, like the Home screen on iOS devices, or you can type to filter the apps and then select one with the arrow keys and ® .
Swipe through Safari
With two fingers on a trackpad or two on a Magic Mouse, swipe left or right to go backwards or forwards through the pages you’ve visited in Safari. This also works in Chrome, as well as in some document-based apps, such as when viewing PDFs in Preview.
Make use of For ce To uch
On a trackpad with Force Touch (Magic Trackpad 2 and many, though not all, in MacBooks since 2015), you can apply more pressure past the initial click to pull up extra info about certain items under the pointer. On a file icon it previews the file’s contents in Quick Look; on an address it shows its location on a map; and on a word in a web page or Mail message it shows the definition and may also provide links to a matching Wikipedia page and other online sources. You can apply this to tracking codes and flight numbers to see their progress, too.