Foreign. Welcome, everyone, to Mac Chat. And I have Michael Babcock here with me. Hey, Michael, how's it going?
Hey, Chris. It's going good. This comes out this coming Thursday, right? Like the 17th?
It sure does.
Okay, Just wanted to make sure. I almost said my birthday is tomorrow, and then I realized that my birthday is actually like just under a week. Well, it is a week. It's the 24th, so a week from when this comes out.
Awesome. Excellent. Well, an early happy birthday.
Thank you.
That's awesome. Yeah, that's great. Well, it's great to have you along here on Mac Chat. Yeah. And we have a lot of really cool things to talk about. Some updates, some maybe little pesky bugs or things we want to change. And then I have a lot of tips and then Michael will come along with whatever he wants to add in here too.
So I'm just along for the ride.
Oh, you're more than along for the ride. You're co piloting, right?
There we go.
Yes, yes, yes.
I feel sorry for this plane.
Different plan, different platform.
There you go.
Is that Google? Oh, wait. Anyway. Oh, well, I don't know. Microsoft. I don't know my. I use ChatGPT exclusively, so that's why I don't know what I'm talking about. Yep.
Are you. Are you implying that ChatGPT teaches you stuff that may not be accurate?
No, it's just that I don't know who creates what other. Whatever those AAs are.
Gotcha.
Anyways, love it. Oh, my goodness. Well, recently, so Koia got an update and we have 15.4 and it came out, I believe, the end of March. And I was really happy about at least one thing that I discovered that it helped me with, and that was that sometimes I would get stuck on the dock. Did you ever get stuck in the dock and couldn't get out?
I only got stuck on the dock when you brought this up and I'm like, no, that can't be. And then I went and tried it and I'm like, oh, that is because I don't use the dock too often.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
Oh, I always use the dock. So.
So we'll have to talk about how we open apps then, because I think. I think that you use the dock because that's how you open apps, right?
Uh huh.
Yeah. So. So what happened and what did they fix? And. And we'll have to talk about opening apps.
Yeah, we sure should. So when I got stuck in the dock, I was very frustrated. Had to restart my computer. I don't know, it was just so frustrating. Now the escape key reliably works to dismiss the dock. Who knew?
Hey, it does. I just tried it. That's awesome.
Yeah, I was very excited, like that's the way it should be. So I use the dock except if something isn't on it, you know, to open apps. How about you?
I am very fond of a utility called LaunchBar. Have you played with LaunchBar at all?
You know, I haven't. I've heard of it, but I haven't messed with it.
It's a Spotlight replacement. So when you install LaunchBar, it guides you through disabling the command space keystroke for Spotl. The reason I like Launch Bar when it works, I'm having a little love hate relationship with it right now. But I think it's a Michael issue and not a Launch Bar issue. Sometimes we gotta be able to distinguish the difference in those type of issues. But one of my favorite things is I hit Command space and this puts me into Launch Bar automatically. I go into the preferences. Actually, if you type in launchbar, unmute show. Damasi did a 36 minute tutorial on all the settings he changes on his Launch Launch bar to be more efficient with it. One of those is he hides it from the menu bar, which means it doesn't appear in your Command tab order. So when you hit Command space, this puts you in Launch bar, the first thing you can do is start typing what you're looking for. So if I need to open Drafts, I can hit Command space, type in dra, and right there is Drafts. But more importantly, which makes it even faster, is if I type doctor and press and hold the letter A, that actually opens drafts instead of just bringing you to Drafts. So if you press and hold the last letter of the abbreviation and we're going to talk about this, I think maybe sooner rather than later now, because I'm bringing it up. If I hit command space, I can also hit the tilde key, for example, and that puts me at my home directory and then I can tap the right arrow and that'll put me in a list of all of my files in my home directory. And then I can up and down arrow through it. But if let's say I type app, that puts me into my applications folder and then I can down arrow through my applications and let's say I find Drafts, for example, or again if we just type dra, that'll take us right to Drafts. Command option A is a pretty useful shortcut. That's to assign your abbreviation. So instead of Me having to type doctor and press and hold A. I actually assigned the abbreviation D. So when I hit Command space and then I press and hold the letter D, I'm instantly in Drafts. But what's more powerful about that is, for example, if I hit Command space and I press and hold U, I'm in our Unmute Dropbox folder and I don't have to navigate to Dropbox and go through all those settings. So I am a very huge advocate of Launch Bar. One last thing that I'll mention that it. Well, two last things that it'll do is let's say you have a file and you find a file that's in the digital bytes drop here folder and you want to move that to the used folder you can actually press. You can find the file in Launch bar, Press tab that takes you to actions for that file. And then find the folder that you want to move it to and hit Enter. And Launch bar says, would you like to copy this or move this? And you pick up and down arrow, you hit move and then you hit Enter. And then the last thing that I'll wrap it up with is Clipboard History. On Windows, I was recently introduced to a cool tool called Ditto for Clip Ditto Clipboard Manager. And that gives you the ability to manage your clipboard. And it will remember everything you copy, which means you can recall anything that you copy. And it's more powerful than the Windows default Clipboard Manager because that only remembers 25 entries. I think I've got like 450 entries in my Ditto Clipboard Manager. But Launchbar has a Clipboard Manager as well, which means if you hit and I've switched mine to Command option backslash, this will put you in a list of the items that you've copied to your clipboard. And that items is not text. So let's say you copied a file to your clipboard and you're like, oh, I need that file again. You accidentally copied text to your clipboard. Since then you can go back into the Clipboard history, grab that file, and paste it wherever you need. And Clipboard Manager also gives you Clip Merge. So often I need to copy three or four files from different locations. So I command C on a file and then I go find the next file and I command CC real quick. And you hear a little lock sound. And then you find the next file and you hit Command cc and then you can press Command V and paste all those files in one place.
Oh, wow.
I love LaunchBar. It's the best. $35 one could spend.
Oh my goodness. That's great. So Command CC just keeps adding to the list of things you're going to copy.
Yep. And you can do that with text as well.
That is neat.
Yeah.
Wow. I have a lot to think about now. That's great. Well, maybe we can put a link to the to Damasi's little tutorial, you know, in our.
That's a good idea. Oh, I'll find it and do that.
That'd be awesome. Yeah, that's great. Yeah, I've heard of it, but I really didn't know what power it had. I didn't really know why I might want it. That sounds really great. That's awesome. Excellent.
Now that I've derailed your entire episode.
No, not at all. Nope. Yeah, it all started with hey, Escape now reliably dismisses the doc and then how we open things. Yes, I do open things from the doc, but I also open them from the Applications folder. Or I do use command space for the Spotlight search, so I probably lengthen my journey. But I guess everybody often does things the way you learn them and then you get introduced to new things and that's really cool. So in terms of other things that were fixed, that might have been slight bumps in the road for folks using, for instance, Braille displays with Mac. There used to be a problem for some folks in navigating to the wrong line with the left or right arrows, so that was kind of an issue. I don't regularly use a Braille display with my Mac. As huge a Braille fan that I am, I don't know.
Surprising.
I know, I know, it's crazy. I don't use one with my PC either and I'm trying to figure out why that is. I suppose because I didn't start out using one with the PC and for some reason I just, you know, I just use speech output. But one thing I have mentioned on previous shows is that my Braille display for me is my downtime device, you know, when I'm not working. And now even though yesterday I played with my Mac all day and was figuring out the ins and outs of different finder layouts and taking notes on things and all that sort of thing. It was for, you know, eventual teaching purposes, but it was on my own time and so I don't know, the Braille display for me just has it rings true to ham on my own downtime, you know, I think it's it.
Also, I appreciate those who have to use the Braille display, but when I have connected a braille display. By default, you are overwhelmed with information. And I wonder if that's something that like a sighted person deals with on a regular basis. Whereas text to speech, really you just hear where you are. Like yesterday I connected the Bi40X to the Mac for the first time and I had 78 being used everywhere. And I'm like, what is this?
You can turn that off.
Yep. I realized that, oh, that's identifying where the voiceover cursor is. And I went and turned that off. So I think that. And then I was reading my minutes from or my agenda from drafts on the Braille display, which was great except for anytime I moved focus with dot one or dot four chord, it would play the little voiceover sound. And so I went and turned those sounds off. And then the other thing that kind of threw me off a time or two again, kind of putting it on the same playing field as a sighted person is I did not put my computer do not disturb. So when someone messaged me, guess what? A message popped up on the display.
I know, yo. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think, I think we're in the habit, a lot of us, of choosing what we want to have input from, you know, because I. I feel like, at least I feel like overwhelmed by input in general sometimes. Like every sound might be important. You never know, you know. And so just trying to filter out what you don't need. And to have one less device sometimes to, you know, take in information is maybe what you're talking about and with all of the things that it would show you potentially. So yeah, that's interesting. Alrighty then. There was another issue that was fixed. Now, strangely enough, I don't really use Apple Music app on my Mac, but apparently some voiceover navigation was broken and it wouldn't navigate things in order. Did you experience that at all?
No, because I don't use Apple Music on my Mac.
Me. You not either I use it from.
A HomePod mini or my phone usually is my interaction with Apple Music. I use it quite a bit on a regular basis, but not from the Mac.
Yeah, yeah. It just seems a bit unwieldy. It's just so much easier on the device you can talk to or your phone. So. Yeah. So in terms of updates though, here's where we get to talk about the infamous mail categorization which I turned off as fast. Fast as I could. Yes.
Yeah.
Oh my word. Why they got to meddling in there, I'll never know. So, yeah, you have primary transactions, updates and promotions and then the all mail. So I Quickly. Oh, I turned that off for sure. So what I did was I went to the menu in the Mail app and I went down to view and then down to show categories and make sure it is unchecked.
And I just did that. So now I have my real mail back. And there's a lot of powerful stuff in that view menu. So if you haven't checked it out yet, you should go check out some of those options. Oh, so nice to have a packed inbox again.
Yay. At least you know that someone didn't put it somewhere that you weren't expecting.
Yes, yes. Well, thank you for that tip, Chris. And if you're encountering that, I. I want to. So there's a reason Apple spent time and effort to be able to categorize your mails easily. I want to like it, but my brain doesn't work that way because I expect to go into my mail and find all of my messages. What about you?
Yeah, definitely. I don't want someone else deciding what's a promotion, what's, you know, what's important or not. I. I just don't. And I. It feels very like Big Brother to me. I don't know.
Yeah, I gotcha. And if for some reason you haven't figured it out, because I know that they changed this in iOS 18, I believe it was 0.3. In the mail app, you can go to the More button at the top right corner and then go to List View and that'll bring all of your messages into one view instead of having to go to different categories.
Definitely did that real soon too.
Yeah, me too. I think I listened to your digital bite or Marty's or someone's. I'm like, ah, that's how I fix it. I'm going to go, go fix this now.
Absolutely. Yeah. So I definitely, definitely turned that off. So, you know, another thing I also turned off is Apple Intelligence. But if I did have it on, I would be able to access several languages. They've added French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Brazil, Spanish, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, English Singapore, and English India. So they've apparently added some, you know, languages for Apple Intelligence to work with.
So you don't use any Apple Intelligence?
Nope.
Okay.
Okay. I'm just kind of.
I use it for summarizing messages and notifications and it does not do that good of a job with that.
Looks like I'm not missing anything then.
No, no, not right now.
No. I don't know. I just, I'm frustrated with how slow the rollout is, how over promise and under deliver And Apple is usually not that way. So I just. And also, I don't know what it's going to do to things like this male categorization until I figured that out really quick. Like, I don't know what it's going to do to things, if it's going to, you know. So I just tell my students, just turn it off and when it gets better, I'll let you know. I mean, it's certainly their choice, but I just don't want it doing things that I don't know that it's doing.
Now on technically working, Damasi mentioned an issue he's having and I'm wondering if you're encountering this too. And my brain goes, oh, you're having that issue. Let me upgrade and see if I have it. Because I won't have the issue. And now I'm facing it. Do you use ChatGPT from the web?
I do.
Okay. Are you able to read your messages in Safari? Because I cannot. I have to copy and neither could he. We have to copy our message with Command Shift C and then paste it somewhere to be able to read.
Yeah, that is what I was experiencing today. Now it read it out in one fell swoop to me the first time. But I couldn't go and interact with it and arrow up and down through it.
Yes, Yep, I am encountering that too. So that is a little gotcha that if you're having that issue, it is not just you. I can confirm that prior to this update that I did on Friday, I could read just fine. After this update, I could not read. Now the conspiracy theorist in my mind goes, well, you know, ChatGPT is doing so darn good. Apple's gonna be like, you should try our Apple Intell Intelligence. We're going to make it so you can't read it.
That's funny. Well, what I'm wondering is if it would matter what browser you use. Because if I have issues with Safari, I try Chrome and sometimes things are fixed. And I have a little tip for us later on about that.
Okay.
So I would try it in Chrome and see if it behaves any better.
Sounds good.
Yeah, I was experienced that. What happened? I know it just said that. I just sent it a query. It made me a beautiful answer here and I want to get to it, but I can't. And like, where'd it go? I know it's here.
Command Shift C is a powerful keystroke to copy the last message from ChatGPT. So I use that quite regularly. And then Shift Escape will Move your focus back to the edit box no matter where you are on the web page.
Excellent. Love it. So the command shift C is that. That's not related to the last voiceover?
No, that's VO Shift C. Command Shift C is specifically an OpenAI ChatGPT keychain.
Got it. I knew that. I thought of that for a reason. But if you add VO to the shift C to commit, what is it? Vo. VO shift C. E is copy the last utterance.
Yep, yep.
Okay.
And then command shift C is copy last message from Chat GPT. And if you want. Because you know, this is what people always need. Hold on, let me see. Let me see if I can do it. Because the. Okay, I believe Command shift. Oh, that's what it is. And if you want, VO shift Z will copy the. Will save the last spoken phrase from voiceover as an audio file. So if you need to show someone what something sounds like, that'll save it to your desktop as an audio file.
Oh, my goodness. Wow. Okay, so I'm hoping we're going to get a summary of all these keyboard commands when we're done with this. Right.
AI, get to work.
Yeah. That's awesome. Yes. And unless anyone's taking notes, I'm not. I'm following along with the things I've written down here.
So you'll have to go listen to it then.
I will have to listen to this again. Yep, yep.
That's how we get our numbers up.
That's right. At least two more listen numbers. So. Yeah, that's. That's really great. I love that. Yeah. So try the, the Chrome browser to see if you can read your Chat GPT entries that the things that it types back. And it's really good, by the way, about if I want things without all those stars and number signs and all that, I'll say write these instructions without special formatting. And it will do that for me because honestly, I don't need to hear number, number, number and star, star, star, and like, really? So.
So if you go into your settings in Chat GPT and you go to your prompt, you can append to the beginning of your prompt and say when. When sharing responses with me, please do not include markdown. And then that will prevent it always from putting the markdown in your messages for you.
Oh, nice. Then I'll forget it and then I'll wish I hadn't and then I have to send another message and then it has to rewrite it again.
Exactly.
That's good. And it does a good job with voiceover. Stuff and describing things and keystrokes, and it does pretty well, so that's really cool.
It's also good at helping me with Jaws stuff too, which is interesting.
So, yeah. Cool. So apparently now I don't use widgets, but apparently there are some new widgets, especially for Apple podcasts, for example, if you wanted a widget for the shows that you follow. And so I just wrote that little detail down.
So not only do I not use widgets, but I don't use Apple podcasts either.
I don't either, no. Yeah. I love Castro, so.
Yep. Did you know you can download Castro to your Mac?
Ooh, not sure if I did or not.
Yeah. The problem with it is Castro does not do dynamic synchronization. So if you want to synchronize, you have to go into your phone settings, go down to backup, backup your Castro, and then go into Castro on your Mac and restore Castro, and then everything will come through as it should, which I don't do, but I have the app on, and I always forget that I have it on until it needs an update.
Oh, no. Seems like a bit of a hassle to do that.
Just a little bit.
Yeah. Well, I'm usually relaxing on the couch with my phone anyway when I'm listening to podcasts, so that's probably what I'm inclined to do. So Also, there are eight new emoji, I guess, that came to iOS or iPad, and so I was amused to read about the new emoji. So we must have a lot of tired people in the world, because there's face with bags under eyes, Tired person. Okay. And there's a fingerprint, a leafless tree, a root vegetable. So that could be, you know, carrot, potato, onion. I don't know which one. A harp, a shovel, and splatter. I don't know what that means. It could be any kind of splatter, right?
Yeah.
Oh, my goodness, that would be funny. Okay, so of course, the Unicode Consortium okays all these things, and so I don't know how they get voted on or how that all happens, but apparently they thought we needed those eight new emoji. So I don't use emoji on my Mac so much. Sometimes I'll use it on my Windows computer, but occasionally I'll use it on my phones, but I don't generally use it too much.
So, you know, I always have something. If you press command space and you're using launch bar and you type emo, it will put you into a emoji indexing rule, and you Tap your right arrow and you have activity animals in nature, flag, food and drink objects, smileys, symbols, travel and places. And then if you tap right arrow and let's say you want a airplane, you type in air, and there's your airplane emoji that you can insert. So that's an option. And then there's also an app on the Mac called Rocket, which is a way you can hit a keystroke and then just type in the name of an emoji and then hit Enter and that'll insert the emoji.
Oh, wow. That's pretty cool. That's really neat.
So now all of Chris's work emails are going to start having raised flag emojis in the subject line.
Totally. Yeah, for sure. Well, actually, my work emails are on Windows and all I have to do is press Windows, period, and then I type what I need, what I want, you know, and I. I have some cool, like, little, you know, things in my emails, so I always use the.
Fire emoji at random.
Oh, wow. Okay.
Not sure if that's good or bad.
Oh, that's pretty funny. I have oncoming taxis and trucks and homemade, like, food and, you know, all kind of stuff. So kind of fun. Yep. Lighten up the atmosphere. So also, I didn't know about this, but one of the other new updates is a quick start mode. So I guess. And I don't know how often I've done this, but previously, with your iPad or iPhone, you could scan a code on one on an Apple device and transfer the settings from that device to a new one that you might be setting up. Have you ever done that before?
Yep.
Okay.
Yep. I typically don't because I set my devices up as new most of the time, but I've done it before.
Yeah. So apparently now you can use your method back to do that code thing. So that's kind of cool.
That's kind of scary. What is it going to do like, huh? Okay, so it must copy over, like, your WI FI details and your icloud details and stuff, I would think. Yeah.
Yeah. So interesting.
I might try that.
Yeah. What's missing according to 9to5Mac, what's missing that's present in iOS? What we don't have on the Sequoia 15.4 is priority notifications and then the cooking section in the news app, which is on the phone. I haven't really.
There's a cooking section in the news?
Apparently. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mostly just go there to play the crossword puzzles and occasionally read a news article when you know, I can deal with what I'm reading about, but mostly I go and find the crossword puzzles and play them. I love those.
Okay. Yeah. And you can search for crossword puzzle at Unmute show and listen to Chris explain how to use those on the news app.
Yeah, absolutely. Yep. Came in handy the other day when I went to the dentist as I. I try to get my, like, thoughts, like, onto something mental and, you know, intellectual rather than physical. What's going on? And so they were also helping me with some of the. The assistant would look down and say, oh, I know that one. And so she'd give me the hint. And I was. My air. I was doing crossword puzzles on my phone in the dentist chair.
So I like.
Works really well for me. I also could ask them questions because, you know, I have your mouth full of tools and so you could ask them questions. That's kind of fun too. So, yeah, different purposes for your phone, so that's awesome. Well, do you have any other, you know, comments on those updates or anything before I move to lots of fun Mac tips? Of course. We. Not like we haven't given any already, you know.
Right, Exactly. No, I don't have any comments as from a Chat GPT does work in Chrome, so if you're having that issue, you can experiment with that. But B, thank you for telling me how to get rid of the categories, because I'm like, it's gotta be an easy fix, but I'm gonna wait till we record this before I go fix it.
Awesome. You're welcome. And I'm glad that Chat GPT is working on Chrome. That's great. Excellent. Yeah, awesome. Well, I have a number of Mac tips and things that I wanted to add to our collection. So recently someone on Mastodon that I follow asked, hey, List View or Column View when you're in finder? And so before we started recording, we were talking about this, and we both do this differently. So I'm just curious, which view is it for you and why have you chosen that view? Either List View or Column View.
Column View. And because I've used it ever since 1947. I mean, I don't know how long it's been, but I've always used Column View. And. And honestly, like I. Tomasi, for example, is a huge component of. Of using List View. He likes List View. So I've. I've thought about trying it, but then it just throws my whole day off.
Oh, no, you don't need your workflow thrown off.
You have.
Yeah, I. I felt Like Column View was too busy, too much stuff. And so I've used a Mac now for 12, 13 years, I would say. And I'm self taught, you know, so just taught myself what I know. Learned a lot from David Woodbridge, Woodbridge and all those Vision Australia tutorials and you know, Apple Vis and different things. But I generally have used List View because I felt like it was less complicated. Less to think about maybe. But the thing that could get confusing with List View is that when you're arrowing down through or vo down arrow through your files, you could wander into another folder because they're either, you know, collapsed or expanded, right? But when you're in Column View, if you're going down through your list of files, you get to the bottom of that column and you cannot go into another folder folder unless you consciously make an effort to go back to the left and find that other folder. Right?
Yeah, yeah. That's one of the things I think that I like about it because I'm playing with Column View right now. For those who don't know, you can hit Command 1 which takes you to Icon View, which honestly, I mean, I get what they're doing here, but don't do that. Command two will take you to List View and then command three will take you to Column View. And then there's command four for Gallery View, which I'm not quite sure about that one either. But you're right, if you go to Column View, when you get to like I'm on a folder called Bin, if I tap my right arrow key, then that puts me into that particular folder. Now if I hit command 2, I'm in list View and then I'm on Bin and what I try doing is hitting my right arrow and now it does say row two expanded. So I guess I could get used to this. Actually, it's not horrible.
Yeah. The only thing is when you get to the end of the contents of row two, it'll go down to the next folder and you have to be aware of where you are and when it changes. And so it's like this never ending vertical list which could trip some people up because you know, you have to be paying attention to the fact that you're in another folder now, right? And then when you're on the folder name that you can press left arrow and it's, it should collapse the folder that you're in in List View. So only when you're on the name of the folder.
Right. Okay, now one advantage to List View that might be more reliable is I'm on a folder now called Include. If I press V or right arrow, I'm on my date modified or my size or my kind. So it does now it will loop you down to the next file like Chris was saying too, if you press V or right arrow. And now I'm on on lib folder expanded. And VO backslash will collapse that row too, if you need to as well. And if I go to Column View and then I press VO right arrow, it's just opening these packages and then it says blank here. And then I can do VO down arrow. And that gives me information about this. But I don't know, I think maybe I should play with List View, because if you go to List View, then you can also go up to the View menu in Finder and customize what it is that is available right there as well, right?
Yeah, it's pretty cool. I thought I would sort of play with Column View, but I just. I may default to what I've been doing for the last 13 years, but definitely check out both of those as listeners and see which one you like best. And just kind of be mindful of what's collapsed or expanded.
Also spend some time in the preferences of Finder, because you can configure Finder because if you're anything like me, you'll just jump in there and just use it how it is by default. But for example, you can tell Finder to open Tab open folders in New Tabs instead of Windows, which is a change that you can make. You can also go in and customize what appears in the sidebar. You can go in and make modifications to how long things stay in the trash. So definitely worth hitting command comma on when you have Finder open to go explore the preferences there as well.
Yeah, that's great. I appreciate that because I forget to kind of go through those preferences because I get to what I have chosen and it's like, that's the way it always is, right? Also, I discovered that in Preferences you can put all folders on the top. So it used to be that my folders were mixed in with my files and it was all just kind of alphabetical. And I think this was maybe under Advanced Preferences under Finder and you could put folders on top so that it would like on my Windows computer, it's all in folders on top and then all the files in Windows.
When sorting by name, you can keep folders on top or on desktop. That is amazing. Like, oh, I didn't even know you could do that that throws me off when I'm on Windows and when I'm on Mac. I mean, I'm used to it now because I spend time in both operating systems, but still, that's pretty cool.
Yeah, I really liked it. I didn't know if you knew about that, but I just learned about that yesterday because I thought, what is going on? I got files mixed up with folders and it's all just alphabetical. And I appreciate alphabetical, but I don't want them all mixed up. And so then I went looking around and I might have done a YouTube thing. I think I found it. I'm sure I probably went to chat GPT but eventually I found the setting and I was super happy about about that.
Okay.
Yeah. So show all your folders in one place on the top. So another thing that I remembered again, another tip is changing the function key behavior of the F1, F2, F3. Use them, add the function key to them to do what is printed on the key like your volume up, volume down, down, that sort of thing. And I needed to tell a new student that because that is not on by default. And I would rather use the function keys with the voiceover keys and you know, make that super easy to do for this person. So anyways, I visited with that and what I did was I went to the Settings center, I typed F1 into the search box because I had a trouble finding it. And then it popped up. Yeah, it really is under keyboard and use function keys as. And you know, add the globe key, it says. And so that's what I did. So that was fun to sort of uncover that setting. So let's see, you had a keyboard. Aha. Really excellent moment this week with Parallels. Did you want to talk about that that Steven shared with you?
Yeah. So I'm all about this Parallels thing. I like Parallels because it gives me the best of both worlds. And what I've done is I went into Parallels Desktop and then I hit Command comma and then I went to the toolbar and I went over to Shortcuts and press V space on that. Now I'm using VOCR so I can hit Command Control Shift W and that captures a copy of the screen. And then you use Command Control to move up and down through the screen. And I was able to move over to where it says Mac System Shortcuts. And under Mac System Shortcuts it says Mac OS System Shortcuts, etc will be sent to the virtual machine by default. This is set to automatic if you change it to always Then that means when you're in a Windows machine, unless you actually specifically press a VO keystroke or move the mouse to one of the pointers, then pressing Command Tab or Option Tab if you haven't fixed your keys will never take you out of the virtual machine. And it's like running a virtual machine. I additionally went into Windows 11, I downloaded Sharp keys from Randy Rance, and I went down and changed Left Special Left Windows key to be special Left Alt key. And I changed special Left Alt key to be special Left Windows key. And so now what that means is that when I'm in Windows, if I press Command tab, it'll just Alt Tab me through all the icons in Windows that are open. And if I get out of Windows and I'm on the Mac, I can hit Command Tab to again go through all the windows that are open. So it, it makes it a really amazing experience. And then once you change those keystrokes for the function keys like Chris was just talking about, then Command F4 is the same as pressing Alt F4 in Windows and that just works as well. So one little change to Parallels can definitely improve the experience for you users.
Yeah, that's great. That's awesome. I still need to play with that. I think I defaulted to AIRA to help me change that setting and so I'm going to experiment with that some more. That's really awesome. But yeah, kudos to Stephen from Double Tap for sharing that with you.
Exactly. Doubletaponair.com not sponsored by them, although Steven.
Oh, Stephen's awesome. So let's see here. I have a couple more here. So when I have an annoying pop up ad on Safari, I was hoping to get to the close button by doing VO right or left arrow and I cannot do that for some reason. So just a little tip, if you tap tab to it, you should be able to get to the close button to close that little pop up. So tabbing was the only thing that worked for me with an annoying pop up. So sometimes you would think that, you know, it's maybe, you know, sometimes interchangeable, I don't know, vo, radar and tab and things. Not. Not really. And so, you know, just using the tab would. Is going to get you that button.
Yeah. Okay. I was not aware of using the tab in those instances. I leverage VOI a lot of times and just type in the word close and hit enter, but that doesn't work all the time.
Okay. Okay, good to know. Well, it seemed to be pretty close proximity to where I was, so that worked for Me.
Good.
Yeah. And then here's another reason to use Chrome. Besides, I'm not really down on Safari. I use it most of the time. But, um, so when I open a tab in Safari, I mean, I do the option L, right. And I type what I'm searching for, what website I'm going to. And it usually doesn't echo the letters, even though I don't have key, you know, typing echo turned on. So. But when I open a separate address bar thing, it. It will say from the beginning each time when I'm typing, it'll just repeat from the beginning, from the beginning, from the beginning what I'm typing. And it's absolute annoying. And so what I tried was I thought, well, I wonder if I use Chrome. It will do that and does not. And so apparently I don't get the same type of echo when I'm typing in to the search bar what I'm looking for a website or search terms and things. So Safari has a couple things to be fixed here, but it's a good reason to just try a different browser if you have a frustrating experience. You know, some websites behave differently. Differently on different browsers. So.
Yep. And. And that's the case on Windows too. So it's always good to have multiple. Multiple solutions to solve your problems.
It is definitely. Yeah. Excellent. Well, I feel like this has been a wealth of information. I have a lot to think about. So many tips and programs and suggestions. Yeah. What are you thinking about all that? That's pretty cool.
Yeah. I just, while we were talking, went to My Mastodon at PayOnetDragonscave Space P A Y O W N and shared that link to Damasi's launch bar tutorial where he walked through preferences so you can grab it from there. It is not available on Unmute show, so I had to go hunt it down. Apparently it was a technically working episode, and I thought it was something we did on Unmute, which kind of makes a little more sense because it was more in depth. And so I shared that. But we'll put it in the show notes for this episode episode. For people who are interested in giving that a listen.
That is really great. And I'm personally looking forward to an AI summary of all these keyboard commands and keystrokes and steps of things. That would be awesome.
I'll forward you what Zoom gives us. It's probably not going to be the best, but I'll forward it to you.
That's okay. No problem at all.
No pressure at all. Zoom AI.
Hope you're listening right. Exactly. We all. I'll just put ChatGPT to work on some of this stuff sometime, I hope.
There you go.
That's great. Yeah.
Well, thanks for having me. Really appreciate it.
Yeah, absolutely. Thanks so much for joining me. And then if folks want to get in touch about this show or anything else, what's the best way for them to do that?
Michael Feedback Show. And if you want to shoot comments to Chris directly, Feedback at Unmute show, we'll forward those along to her. Unless, of course, she wants to share her phone number and Social Security number and so much email address and all that stuff. But Feedback at Unmute show, get over to us and we can share that along. You can go search for other Mac Chat episodes at Unmute Show.
Thanks.