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Transparent effects have had a prominent place in the user interface of Mac OS X ever since the Mac got a face lift with recent versions of MacOS Mojave, High Sierra, Sierra, OS X El Capitan and Yosemite. Many users like the transparency found throughout the window title bars and sidebars, but some users may not like the feature, and additionally some Macs can gain a performance boost by turning off the eye candy effect of translucent UI elements.
Disabling transparency also has the side effect of making the user interface look slightly different, as the window title bars, buttons, and sidebars will no longer pick up some color cues from items behind the window. Whether or not any of this is desirable to a Mac user likely depends on personal preference, but it’s easy to toggle on and off again so if you decide it’s not for you, there is little effort to switch things up.
How to Reduce Transparency in MacOS and Mac OS X User InterfaceThe setting is called ‘Reduce Transparency’, but really it disables transparency entirely throughout all interface elements that had a translucent appearance. This setting exists in MacOS 10.14.x, 10.13.x, 10.12+, 10.11.x, OS X 10.10.x and 10.11.x and later, earlier releases do not have the option:
Pull down the Apple menu and choose “System Preferences”
Select the “Accessibility” control panel and choose “Display” from the options list
Look for “Reduce Transparency” and check the alongside this option to disable transparent effects throughout the Mac OS user interface
Close out of System Preferences as usual
In terms of UI appearance, the effect is subtle.
Here is what a Finder window titlebar looks like without transparency disabled, it follows the typical understated grey appearance that has been part of the Mac UI for decades:
With transparency enabled, the default setting of Mac OS X, the same window titlebar picks up color from UI elements that are behind the screen or going on in the same window, in this case it’s a blue hue:
Aside from the difference in appearance, the settings change can also improve performance quite a bit, particularly on some older hardware, and it notably reduces the CPU usage of the WindowServer process. In fact, this is one of those adjustments that can be made to settings to speed up Yosemite in particular, though the effect carries forward into Mac OS X 10.11 as well albeit less notable.
Users will also find that disabling transparency can boost the frame rate of drawing items on screen in Mac OS X, which is observable on some Macs directly if they had stuttering animations in things like Mission Control, but it can be measured with the FPS FrameMeter gauge of QuartzDebug for users who are more technically inclined as well.
It’s worth mentioning that another option is the Increase Contrast setting in Mac OS X, which disables transparency as well while simultaneously making window and UI elements look a bit more obvious, which can be helpful for those who find the newer Mac OS appearance overbearing.
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Take Screen Shots From The Terminal In Mac Os X
Aside from the keyboard shortcuts, Grab, and other screen shot apps, you can also take screenshots of your Mac OS X desktop directly from the Terminal with the ‘screencapture’ command.
Here is a detailed overview of this utility and how to use it, which allows capturing screenshots from the command line with ease.
The Basics: Taking a Screen Shot from the Terminal in Mac OS XFirst up, launch the Terminal (/Applications/Utilities/) and then type the following:
screencapture test.jpg
That is the most basic format of the command, it’ll take a screenshot of your entire screen and name it ‘test.jpg’ in the current working Terminal directory, which is typically your user home. You can always specify another location just by choosing a path for the screenshot, here’s the Desktop:
screencapture ~/Desktop/screenshot.jpg
Send the Screen Shot to the Clipboard via Command LineIf you want to send the screenshot to your clipboard rather than to a file, attach the -c flag, but don’t assign a file name or path:
screencapture -c
Now that it’s in your clipboard you can just paste it into Preview, Photoshop, Pages, or whatever else you want to use.
Take a Screenshot on a Timer from Command LineOne of the better features of the Grab utility is that it lets you take screenshots on a timer, so you can setup an app or situation on the screen and capture things like alert boxes, menus, button actions, etc. You can also specify a timed screenshot from the Terminal:
screencapture -T 10 timedshot.jpg
The -T flag needs to be followed by whatever amount in seconds you want to delay the screen shot by, in that example, it’s 10 seconds which is also Grabs default.
Specify a Screen Shot File Type with screen capture from Command LineMake a note that the capitalization of these flags matters, if you use a lowercase -t, you’ll be trying to specify a file type for the screenshot instead, like so:
screencapture -t tiff sample.tiff
You can select a variety of file types to export to, including png, pdf, tiff, jpg, and gif.
Taking a Silent Screen Shot from the Command LineIf you plan on scripting out something with the screencapture command, you might not want the shutter sound to fire. To silently take a screen shot just use the -x flag:
screencapture -x quiet.jpg
This is a one time thing so you’ll have to always specify -x, it’s not a permanent change to make the screen shots silent.
Send the Screen Shot from Terminal to a New Mail MessageAnother neat trick is sending the screenshot directly to a new chúng tôi message:
screencapture -M mailme.jpg
This takes the screenshot, saves it as chúng tôi then automatically opens a new Mail message with that screenshot attached to it.
As with all command line tools, you can add the flags together to perform a variety of functions in a single command. If you want to see the other options available to you, just use the traditional -h flag with screencapture:
screencapture -h
This will list out all of the available flags and what they do, and there are a variety of additional options available, like ditching the shadow, automatically launching in Preview, choosing Window Capture mode, and more. You can see a screen shot of the screencapture commands at the top of this post (redundant?).
If you really wanted to get creative, you could do things like setup an automatic mail a screenshot function based on Mac desktop events, or even assign a key to for the clipboard function and create your own Mac Print Screen button to duplicate that keyboard clutter that Windows users so dearly love, but those are topics for another post.
Finally, if you’d rather stick with the familiar Command+Shift+3 commands, don’t forget you can change the screen shot file type and save location, but that’ll require a quick trip to the Terminal as well. That command is the same in Mac OS X 10.7 and prior versions too.
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How To Use Icloud Password To Login & Unlock Mac Os X
Rather than remembering a separate password and set of login information for unlocking a Mac, OS X offers the option to use an iCloud password to login to the computer at boot, reboot, authentication, locked screens, and all login windows instead. This is a helpful feature for users who like to keep things simple and use a single login and password for all Apple related tasks on their Mac, since the Apple ID can access iCloud, the App Store, iTunes Store, Mac App Store, FileVault, and quite a bit more.
Enable iCloud Password Login and Unlock Mac with OS X
Using an iCloud password for logging into and unlocking a Mac requires a modern version of OS X that has iCloud configured, and the Mac must have internet access to set this up:
Go to the Apple menu and choose “System Preferences” from the dropdown menu
Choose the “Users & Groups” panel and select the primary Mac login from the left side, this is the account you will associate the Apple ID / iCloud password for unlocking and using
At the prompt “Would you like to change the password for “User Name”, or begin using your iCloud password to log in and unlock this Mac? You will only need to remember one password if you use your iCloud password to log in to this Mac.” – choose “Use iCloud Password…”
Enter the old password, then login with the iCloud account (your Apple ID) and the associated password, choosing “Use iCloud Password” to set this as the login for the Mac
Close out of System Preferences when finished
The next time you’re at a login screen, either after system reboot, on network logins, at Fast User Switching login, a locked Mac screen, authenticating the root user, authenticating for administrative purposes, or just about any other imaginable situation where you’d be unlocking a Mac with a login screen in OS X, you’ll now use the Apple ID and iCloud password to login to the Mac.
Effectively, your Apple ID becomes your user name and the iCloud password becomes your login password. Once this is configured, you” use that iCloud Password to login & unlock Mac OS X.
While this does reduce the total number of logins and passwords necessary to remember, one potential issue with using the iCloud password for unlocking the Mac is that if you happen if you course if you lost your Apple ID password and login details, you’d need to recover it before being able to login to the Mac, as the Apple ID would no longer be able to function as a backup password in a forgotten password situation, which is something you can do when you have a separate password configured for logging into OS X and for the general Apple ID and iCloud experience.
If you decide you don’t want to use the iCloud password for your own unlocking and logging in purposes, you can still set it as a valid network login option for not only your own user account, but for other iCloud users with an Apple ID as well.
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How To Enable Offline Dictation In Os X Mavericks
Last year, when OS X Mountain Lion was introduced, a new feature, Dictation, was also introduced to the blogosphere. This Dictation service gives users a quick way to enter text into practically any application’s text input fields by simply speaking into your computer’s microphone, provided the application supports the aforementioned feature.
A bad thing about this service is that it requires an Internet connection to work. When you speak, the audio sample is sent to Apple’s servers, where it is converted into corresponding text, and return to your Mac where it is inserted into the application. This unnecessary requirement made a quite useful service somewhat inconvenient, especially if you wanted to enter longer paragraphs. It also made having an active internet connection necessary for using the Dictation feature, which made some people quite disappointed.
In Apple’s new highly anticipated OS X Mavericks, Apple has changed this by offering offline Dictation, a local service that runs on your machine instead of requiring to connect to Apple’s servers.
This much-needed change comes with a couple of key benefits as outlined below:
1. No Active Internet Connection Required – Instead of requiring users to wait for audio samples to be uploaded and processed by Apple, you can use this service even when there is no network connection available.
2. Continuous and live dictation – Instead of limiting the length of spoken phrases and then waiting for the entire audio recorded to be returned as text, you can now see the live processing of your phrase as it is entered word for word into your document as you speak it.
If you want to enable this offline Dictation feature, simply open up “System Preferences” and go to the “Dictation and Speech” section. Here you will find a checkbox, “Use Enhanced Dictation”, which allows offline use and continuous dictation with live feedback.
One thing to note is that enabling this feature requires a fairly large download, about 491 MB in size for me. Some others have reported it between 700 and 800 MB, so we suspect that this is dependent on your chosen language.
There are also a number of dictation commands to help you with the formatting and punctuation. These are just the same as they are in Mountain Lion, however they become much more useful with this new enhanced dictation feature. Apple provides a full list which can be accessed here, and it contains things like “all caps”, “smiley face”, “new paragraph” and “next line”.
This is only one of the many addition Apple made to Mac Mavericks. However, we feel that this is not enough for Dictation to be a serious competitor to commercial alternatives such as Dragon Dictate. For example, Apple should add a quick and easy way to edit existing text and correct transcription errors, without using a keyboard or mouse. It would also be great if the system automatically learnt from your corrections over time, or allowed manual training through the addition of tricky words such as names and places to the dictionary.
Maybe in OS X 11?….
Shujaa Imran
Shujaa Imran is MakeTechEasier’s resident Mac tutorial writer. He’s currently training to follow his other passion become a commercial pilot. You can check his content out on Youtube
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How To Move Files Between Different User Accounts In Os X
If you have setup different user accounts on your Mac, you will know that each user account comes with its own settings and home folders, which can only be accessed by the respective logged-in user. By default, for security and privacy purpose, OS X doesn’t allow any user to access the files of another user. However, there are times where you just want to move the photos from your folder to your Mum’s user account so she can view them when she login. So what are the best ways to share files between user accounts?
Your main option would be to make use of the “Shared Users” folder to easily copy files and access them from different user accounts.
This “Shared Users” folders is located in the “Users” folder at the root level of the system drive. The Users folder also contains all the User Account Home folders. It also contains all the data that is created by each of OS X’s user accounts. Your Home Folder is additionally identified by an icon of a house. You will also find the Shared Folder within the Users Folder.
Now, as I mentioned before, each user’s Home folder is off-limits to any other users, but the Shared folder is there for all users to use freely when files need to be shared. Remember, this Shared folder is only for local use – we won’t recommend using it to share files between machines or between different devices on a network.
Here’s how to access the Shared Users folder on your Mac:
3. Type in “/Users/Shared” (without the quotes, of course).
4. In the Shared folder, you can add various files and folders to be freely accessed by different OS X users.
Now remember, the files that you put in this Shared folder are owned by you, meaning that other accounts may not have the permission to open, modify, delete or even see your files, so you’ll need to take extra care of that.
Shujaa Imran
Shujaa Imran is MakeTechEasier’s resident Mac tutorial writer. He’s currently training to follow his other passion become a commercial pilot. You can check his content out on Youtube
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Our latest tutorials delivered straight to your inbox
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4 Simple Typing & Writing Tricks For All Mac Os X Users
OS X has a handful of typing tools that can help Mac users of just about any skill level improve their writing skills and typing abilities. Whether someone is just learning how to type and needs a few pointers for common errors, to help recalling words, or even diversifying word choice and language a bit, that’s what these four simple tricks come in.
1: Use Auto Correct for Typos
As the name implies, autocorrect will automatically replace typographical errors with correct words. This feature is usually enabled in OS X by default, but here is how to double-check the setting:
From the Apple menu, go to System Preferences then choose the “Language & Text” control panel
Under the “Text” tab, check the box next to “Correct spelling automatically”
Contrarily, those just learning how to touch type may be better served by turning off autocorrections instead, since the word-swapping can cause confusion and frustration. Adjust the settings as needed, it’s just a matter of checking or unchecking that box.
2: Look Up Words with Dictionary Definitions & ThesaurusNot sure if you’re using the correct word, or if it has the meaning you intend it to? Or maybe you’re looking for alternatives to diversify your writing a bit? OS X has an easily accessible built-in dictionary and thesaurus that can help you out, and it can be used from just about anywhere:
Hover the mouse cursor over an existing word, then use a three-fingered tap on the trackpad or MagicMouse to summon the definitions
3: Use Word Completion Instead of GuessingWord completion is a powerful tool that helps to complete words by using a prefix. It can be summoned from just about anywhere and from any app with the Escape key, here’s how to use it:
Start typing a word, then hit the Escape key to summon the word completion menu, selecting a choice and hitting the Return key to type it out
For example, if you know a word starts with “pre” but you can’t recall exactly what it is, you can type “pre” followed by the Escape key to summon all words that have that ‘pre’ prefix. This can help when proper spelling is in doubt, or just help to jog your memory and recall the word in question.
Word completion is really best used with longer prefixes, but you can actually summon it starting from a single character. Just type a single letter, hit the Escape key, and see a lengthy list of word possibilities to scroll through. Commonly used words that begin with a single letter will appear at the top of the list, before showing the rest alphabetically.
Following this one up with the aforementioned Look Up tap trick can help to confirm whether the word is what you’re looking for or not.
* Note that some older Macs may use the F5 key instead of Escape to access this feature
4: Find Mistakes with the Spelling & Grammar ToolOS X has a little-known Spelling & Grammar Tool that can be run over an existing phrase or document just about anywhere. Don’t expect any miracles, but it does catch typos, some type casing errors, and common grammatical issues. Here’s how to use it:
Select text, or better yet an entire document, then hit Command+Shift+; to summon Spelling & Grammar Tool
Check the box for “Check grammar” and then check through the document with “Find Next” (or use “Change” to switch out a replacement)
It’s not perfect, but it is useful enough to warrant a mention, if for no reason than helping to sort out the frequent “there, their, they’re” mixups.
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Working with an iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch? Don’t miss some equally useful typing tips for the iOS side of things.
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