Quick–fire questions & answers
HOW TO DISABLE THE VOLUME BUTTONS ON MY iPHONE?
If you put your iPhone in any sort of cradle or clamp, for example when using it to fly a drone, its volume buttons may be pressed unintentionally. To fix this, open Settings and tap Sounds & Haptics > Ringer and Alerts. Then disable Change with Buttons, and control the volume there using the slider instead.
WHY DON’T MY TEXT MESSAGES SHOW ON MY MAC?
Unlike iMessages, text messages are only received on your iPhone and other devices with cellular connections, and don’t arrive through iCloud. To see them on other devices, on your iPhone use Settings > Messages > Text Message Forwarding for your Mac and other devices.
HOW TO FORWARD ATTACHMENTS BY DEFAULT IN OUTLOOK? This default has changed in Microsoft Outlook. Open its Preferences, select Composing, and for each account checkmark “When replying or forwarding, use the format of the original message”. This also retains the original message format, however the two features aren’t controlled separately.
HOW DO I PLAY A MOVIE ACROSS SEVERAL KEYNOTE SLIDES? Drag a movie file in a supported format to the slide in which you want it to start playing, then repeat with all subsequent slides in sequence. On each, select the movie, click Format, then Movie, and turn on “Play movie across slides” except on the last slide, where it should be turned off to ensure it stops there.
HOW TO USE FORMATTED TEXT IN A TWEET? Styling normally uses embedded fonts and styles, but tweets can contain only plain text. Textlicious from the App Store uses unusual Unicode to mimic styling, although you should know this is disruptive to those using screen readers.
HOW TO COPY TEXT FROM ALL WEBSITES IN SAFARI?
Some pages block copying of text, but the plug–in StopTheMadness from the App Store changes that. Click on its icon in Safari’s toolbar, and set the default options for all websites with “Cut, copy and paste” checkmarked, to enable copying of all text.
WHY CAN’T I OPEN SOME OLD SOFTWARE CDS? This happens if they use an older HFS format, which is no longer supported in Catalina. A Mac running older macOS should be able to read them, otherwise check if you can download that software or its current version.
HOW DO I CHANGE THE PRIMARY CONTACT FOR AUTOFILL? Open Contacts, select the card you want to set as “My Card”, then in the Card menu, use the “Make This My Card” command. Next check this in Contacts, and by opening Safari’s Preferences, clicking on the AutoFill tool, then on the top Edit button.
SHOULD I USE HFS+ ON AN EXTERNAL HARD DISK?
APFS is designed for SSDs, and can get slow on hard drives because of fragmentation of files and the file system. The exception is backup storage for Time Machine: because its backups are added to rather than changed, APFS works well on hard disks only used to store backups.
HOW DO I BACK UP SNAPSHOTS IN BIG SUR?
Snapshots are copies of the information inside the file system of a volume, and are saved to its container. The user can’t copy them: the only software that does copy them is Time Machine, which uses them to make backups.