Mac 911: How to get rid of the screenshot drop shadow in macos, plus get certified for a hard drive you erased
Solutions to your most vexing Mac problems.
WHY CAN’T FAMILY SHARING INCLUDE MORE THAN SIX PEOPLE?
Family Sharing allows Apple uses to select up to six people in their family who can pool icloud storage, share most apps, and view each other’s purchased media. It also lets parents more easily shape and monitors usage of their kids’ devices, providing more security and peace of mind.
But why is there a six-person limit? A Macworld reader with six children recently wrote in to explain how it affects his family after he tried to add his two youngest kids:
Now I can’t use screen time controls for them because I can’t add them to my family. And I can’t stop my oldest 20-year-old to make room because he relies on our Apple Music subscription
and app sharing. So I’m left with leaving the little ones unprotected, which is unacceptable. How do I get around this?
I should note before getting into the rest of it that you can enable Screen Time on individual and icloud-linked sets of devices without using Family Sharing. That requires setting a PIN on each device or on a single device in an icloud-linked set and enabling Screen Time on each device. It doesn’t offer centralized management, but it does provide protection. (Macs require Catalina, the first version to include Screen Time.)
Unfortunately, there’s no workaround for adding more people to Family Sharing. Apple likely picked six as a reasonably inclusive number. Only about 1 percent of households in America ( go.macworld. com/1phs) have more than six people in them, though that number includes both adults and children in a single household.
And the company ostensibly limited the number, and didn’t set it to something like ten, for a combination of licensing terms it sets with app developers and music and video partners, and to prevent groups of people sharing an account in order to share items and reduce Apple and its partners’ revenue.
To Apple’s credit, they do not say, “Covers the whole family.” Rather, they more carefully state, “Family Sharing makes it easy for up to six family members to share…”
One solution: Take a Solomon-like approach and split the family in two. No, not down the middle of each child, thank you, but pick one parent for one group of kids to run their Family Sharing and another parent for the rest. This doesn’t give you quite the same financial benefit in not purchasing things twice, but it does allow collective Screen Time management and sharing of some purchases.
Since more apps are shifting to in-app purchases for subscriptions and other features, and in-app purchases are not shared as part of apps that allow Family Sharing (which seems to be most apps), you see less of a benefit these days from shared app across a family.
Apple could use another option for Family Sharing, which is to rely on part on geographic verification. If you wanted to add more than six people total, you might have to opt in to letting Apple occasionally check—even in some privacy enhanced obscured way—that all the devices were usually clustered around the same address.
Spotify takes that tack for its family accounts, which are licensed to use only by people residing at the same address. The company routinely asks for verification ( go.macworld.com/spvr), too. Maybe that’s not the right approach.
HOW TO GET RID OF THE SCREENSHOT DROP SHADOW IN MACOS
To follow up on previous advice on controlling how macos takes screenshots, as described in “How to take better screenshot selections in macos, ( go. macworld.com/btsc)” you can also choose to include or exclude a border and drop shadow when you want to grab a window.
A thin border is supplemented in these screenshots by a drop shadow that provides contrast against a background. That’s a faux-real or skeuomorphic effect, as if a window is floating and casting a diffuse shadow, but it does make the window pop out more effectively when including it in documentation or an email.
macos puts those elements in by default when you use the CommandShift-4 keyboard shortcut and then press the spacebar while hovering over a window or menu to select it, and then clicking your mouse or trackpad or pressing Enter or Return.
You can remove the border and drop shadow by holding down the Option key while clicking. This lets you retain it when you want and disable it otherwise.
If you never
want a border and drop shadow, you can use the Terminal to make that change permanent. Open Applications → Utilities → Terminal and then copy and paste each of these lines in turn:
You can reverse that by swapping true for false in the line above and pasting in that line and the next again.
The downside of this change is that you can’t retain the border while getting rid of the drop shadow, which is useful for lightcolored windows or those with white edges. If you place the image into other software, you can typically set a border for it, as in Pages. Or, you can get an inexpensive photo editor, like Pixelmator ( go.macworld.com/pmtr) or Graphicconverter ( go.macworld.com/gcon), which makes it easy to add a bitmap border around the edge of an image.
HOW TO GET CERTIFIED FOR A HARD DRIVE YOU ERASED
It’s relatively easy to erase the contents of a drive on a Mac. But what if you’re asked to prove you did so? Some companies, government agencies, and other organizations have an internal or legal requirement to erase drives securely. While the IT department may handle this at large organizations, you might be asked (as one reader was) to provide documentation before disposing of a company computer.
Fortunately, this isn’t an odd request. And it’s not terribly expensive even for an individual to conform to. There’s a category of software that’s available across many different platforms from many firms that
is designed to not just perform erasure meeting a variety of industry or military standards, but can also produce a certification report at the end.
This certificate is backed by the company having run though its own set of certifications with industry groups and labs that test the software to make sure it meets the erasure specifications promised. Stellar’s
Bitraser File Eraser ( go.macworld. com/fers), for example, notes that
“This certificate helps you meet compliance with data protection regulations such as SOX, GLB, HIPAA, ISO27001, EU-GDPR, PCI-DSS, audits, and international guidelines, including ISO 27001.”
If any of those letters and numbers are important for your group, Bitraser File Eraser is $40 a year for a single-user license, and it’s up to date for macos 10.15 Catalina.
ishredder from Protectstar ( go. macworld.com/ishd) also meets the bill for macos through Catalina with “deletion algorithms like DOD 5220.22-M ECE, Peter Gutmann, DOD 5220.22-M, HMG Infosec No.5, German BSI-2011-VS, US Army AR380-19 and more.” It’s $19.90 for an individual license for its professional version, which includes one year of updates and support. It has a
“military edition” that adds more military standards for erasure and a more comprehensive report.
Instead of purchasing software, you may also be able to find a local electronics recycler—like the non-profit Interconnection ( go.macworld.com/incn) in my town of Seattle—or data-security firm that offers a one-off price for erasing a computer’s internal drive with the necessary certification report or extracting and destroying a drive with a paper trail for your needs.
HOW TO SWITCH UP YOUR APPLE ID IF YOU’RE LEAVING AN ORGANIZATION THAT NEEDS ACCOUNT ACCESS
An Apple ID is a powerful hub for one’s Apple-centric identity. However, what if you use your Apple ID within an organization—an organization that needs access to Apple Id-linked purchases, email, developer resources, and other Cupertino-connected sites and services— and you’re retiring or moving to another place of employment?
Take measures before it’s too late for the handoff. This is especially important when two-factor authentication (2FA) is enabled, because your former group could wind up locked out of an account.
First, Apple lets you change the address associated with an Apple ID under a variety of circumstances. The easiest method is if you’re using an address that’s anything but an Apple-managed one that ends in mac.com, me.com, or icloud.com, as you can change that address to anything—including an Apple-managed one. (I provide the step-by-step instructions in this November 2018 column ( go.macworld.com/nv18).)
In an institutional environment, like a college or company, where the Apple ID is an address managed by the organization, I suggest that the folks taking over the account create a new account that’s more generic. One reader is retiring from his college, and the Apple ID for his team’s Apple Developer project is his address, which will retire with him.
Instead of pointing the Apple ID to another individual’s address, the group could create apple-id-dev@anycollege.edu and use that. Internally, that address could forward to one or more individual tasked with managing associated Apple services. Then, if Apple changes Apple ID policies about modifying the email address in the future, this change protects against any limitations.
(Another solution may be preserving someone’s old email address and setting up a permanent auto-reply that explains they have left or retired, and only using the incoming email box to check for verification messages or to send email required to verify access for Apple or other services.)
If someone is using a personal mac. com, me.com, or icloud.com address, there’s no way to shift that over to another address. Apple only allows Apple IDS to move among third-party email addresses. With an Apple-managed address, you can only swap among available aliases, shown at appleid.apple. com ( go.macworld.com/iapp) when you log in and click Edit to the right of the Account section and then click Change Apple ID. For me, since I’ve had an
Apple account for so long, I can pick among mac.com, me.com, and icloud.com with the same account prefix; for later Apple service joiners, you may have only two choices or no choices at all.
Second, since two-factor authentication is almost certainly enabled for any Apple ID currently in use because of how Apple has encouraged or required its use, consider also adding additional trusted phone numbers to the Apple ID account. This can help prevent loss of access in case something goes wrong with the primary email address before or after changing it.
A trusted phone number can receive either a text message via SMS or a call with an automated voice that speaks a code. You can add a trusted phone in three ways:
> At appleid.apple. com, click the Edit button to the right of the Security section, and then click Add a Trusted Phone Number. Follow the steps for verification.
> In IOS and ipados, go to Settings → account name → Password & Security, tap Edit next to the Trusted Phone Numbers label, tap Add a Trusted Phone Number, and follow the steps.
> In macos Mojave and earlier, open the icloud preference pane, click Account Details, click Security, and click the + (plus) sign below the list of Trusted Phone Numbers. Follow the steps to verify a number.
> In macos Catalina, open the Apple ID preference pane, click Password & Security, click Edit to the right of Trusted Phone Numbers, click the + (plus) sign at the bottom, and follow the steps to add and verify a number.
Now, you have a belt and suspenders in case when the original email account something goes wrong and you need additional connections to the Apple ID if you have to contact Apple for help in recovering access. ■