Getting Started with Your Mac: 30 Essential Tips and Tricks

One of the most frustrating things about using a Mac is when you close out an application, it remains in the dock even after you're done with it. This can be especially annoying if you're trying to declutter your dock and only want to see the applications that you use regularly. To fix this issue, simply disable "Show Recent Applications" in System Preferences > Dock.

You'll notice that when you disable this option, all the applications that were previously in the dock disappear. This is because the dock is now displaying only the applications that you've specifically added to it. Personally, I like to control what's in my dock, and disabling "Show Recent Applications" makes it super simple to get rid of those apps that are taking up space.

To remove an application from the dock, simply drag up on the application icon, hold, and then let go. You'll see a prompt asking you if you want to remove the app. Select "Remove" and the app will be gone from the dock. I like to take this opportunity to really trim the fat and get rid of any applications that are taking up space in my dock.

One thing I've found helpful is to assign Launchpad to a hot corner, which allows me to quickly access all my applications at once. To do this, go to System Preferences > Mission Control and click on "Hot Corners." Choose the corner of your screen where you want to enable the hot corner, then select "Launchpad" from the dropdown menu.

Now that we've got our Launchpad set up, let's take a look at how to customize what's in our dock. As I mentioned earlier, I like to get rid of a lot of the default applications that come pre-installed on my Mac. To do this, simply drag an application icon from your Dock to the Trash or use the "Remove" option from the Dock menu.

Another thing I've found helpful is to resize the dock based on how many apps you have in it. This can be done by dragging the vertical line that appears at the bottom of the dock up or down. You can also do this from System Preferences > Mouse > Trackpad, where you'll see an option for "Dock size."

In addition to resizing the dock, I also recommend moving the dock to a different position on your screen. To do this, go to System Preferences > Dock and select "Position on Screen." From here, you can choose whether you want the dock to be on the left side, right side, or at the bottom of the screen.

If you prefer to have the dock on the left-hand side, I find it's a good idea because you get more horizontal real estate than vertical real estate. However, this is up to personal preference, and some people may prefer to keep the dock at the bottom of the screen.

Another feature that I find super useful is the "Automatically hide and show dock" option. When enabled, the dock will disappear when you move your mouse cursor away from it, and reappear when you bring your cursor back near the dock. This is a great way to keep your desktop clean and clutter-free.

To enable this feature, go to System Preferences > Dock and select "Automatically hide and show dock" from the options menu. You can also customize this setting for the menu bar at the top of the screen by going to System Preferences > Menu Bar & Dashboard and enabling "Automatically hide and show menu bar."

Finally, I want to recommend AirBuddy 2, a must-have utility for AirPods users. With AirBuddy 2, you'll get access to features like battery widget and menu bar icon that shows all your devices intelligently grouped and smart stats that give you battery usage over time, total listening time, call time, and show you which device is draining the battery more quickly.

AirBuddy also extends beyond headphones and can show battery information for your iOS devices, accessories like the Magic Keyboard, Magic Mouse, and even other Macs running AirBuddy. Plus, with the Magic Hand-off feature, you can transfer a Magic Mouse, Trackpad, or keyboard between two Macs running AirBuddy with just a few clicks.

As one of the first 195 viewers to use the url map-to-learn more about AirBuddy 2, you'll get a 20% discount special. Thanks to AirBuddy 2 for sponsoring 9to5Mac.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enin this video i'm going to walk through over 30 of my favorite mac getting started tips so this can be handy if you purchased a brand new mac or if you've just reinstalled mac os these are my favorite tips and even if you're a seasoned mac user chances are there will probably be a few of these tips in here that are going to be helpful for you as well let me know what you guys think down below in the comment section okay so without further ado let's go ahead and get started but first a word from our sponsor 905 mac is sponsored by air buddy 2 a must have utility for airpods users the original version was great but air buddy 2 comes with tons of new incredible features it extends mac os to improve your airpods experience and it's fully compatible with bixer and apple silicon just open your charging case next to your mac to see a beautiful ui with info on batteries connection and status with airbuddy2 you can connect and change listening modes at the same time with a single trackpad gesture automate system volume audio input and listening mode so you're ready to go into a video call with just a single click and you can enjoy custom global keyboard shortcuts that allow you to quickly connect to disconnect from or change listening modes on your devices go to airbuddy.app slash 905 mac to learn more the first 195 mac viewers to use that url will get airbuddy with a 20 discount and stay tuned to the end of this video to learn about even more things that air buddy 2 can do for you thanks for watching 9.5 mac be sure to thumbs up click the subscribe button and then enable notifications with the bell icon so you won't miss any upcoming videos the very first thing i do when setting up a new mac is to change the tracking speed as you can see here it is super slow by default set to level four and it takes several swipes to swipe across the screen right so you want to go to system preferences go to trackpad and then adjust the tracking speed you can see it's on level four by default so what i do is i just drag that slider almost all the way to the right second to the last position that gives you much faster tracking speed so you can quickly get to where you need to go on mac os so that is a must do the first thing that i always do when setting up a new mac the next thing i do is enable tap to click for the trackpad so by default tap to click is disabled so when i tap on the trackpad nothing happens if i want to initiate a click i actually have to physically press on the trackpad like that but with tap to click enabled i don't have to physically press i just simply tap just like that so this sort of mimics how we we're used to tapping on things with our smartphones with our ipads you don't have to physically press on the screen you just simply tap and we can mimic that action here on the mac now when you want to drag a window or any other item around on your mac what you would normally have to do is click and drag just like this but is there a way to drag a window or other item without physically clicking on the trackpad well yes there is you just want to go to system preferences and go to accessibility and under accessibility you want to scroll down until you see pointer control click on pointer control and there you'll see where it says trackpad options click that and then click enable dragging and then click the drop down box and select three finger drag and then click ok so now when you use three fingers on your track pad look what happens you can drag without actually physically clicking on the trackpad which is super nice and it goes along well with tap to click functionality so you're not clicking nearly as much on your trackpad as you would without these options enabled now even if you're using something like a macbook pro with the built-in trackpad you may prefer to use a mouse depending on your personal preferences but you'll notice tracking is slow with the mouse when setting up your mac as well so you want to go to system preferences click on mouse and then adjust the tracking speed just like we did for the trackpad and that makes moving your mouse around much more efficient on your mac and if you use a mouse you definitely want to enable the secondary click functionality aka right click on your mouse because otherwise if you wanted to input a right click you actually have to hold the control key on your keyboard and then click on your mouse but if you enable the secondary click within system preferences mouse right here just click that then you can simply click on the right side of your mouse to use the secondary click that is a must change when setting up your mac if you use a magic mouse open up system preferences mouse and then click more gestures there you'll see swipe between pages now i'm going to show you why this is useful normally when browsing something like safari if you wanted to go back or for it you would have to use the back or four buttons or use a keyboard shortcut but your magic mouse is actually capable of using swipe gestures to navigate safari to go back and forth so let's go back to our system preferences let's enable swipe between pages and now you can see i'm just simply swiping with a finger on my magic mouse to go back and to go forward just like that in my opinion this is a must if you're a magic mouse user if you're an apple watch user then apple watch unlock is a must configure when setting up your mac so open up system preferences click on security and privacy and then click where it says use your apple watch to unlock apps and your mac so i'm going to put in my system password there click modify settings so there we go so it's turning on and once configured i can click this little lock to unlock and approve that unlock using my apple watch just two clicks of the side button it unlocks this section of system preferences and of course you can also use the apple watch to unlock your mac at the lock screen which is super handy and for that reason it's a must configure feature when setting up your new mac another must-have for new mac users is enabling hot corners hot corners allows you to launch certain actions just by placing your cursor in one of the four corners of the display so let me show you how to set it up go to system preferences click on mission control and then click hot corners in the bottom left hand corner now you're going to see four different active screen corners that you can configure and we're going to configure all four of them so the first one i like to set up is in the bottom left-hand corner and i like to set that to show desktop so you can just select desktop there the next one i like to set up is launch pad and i like to put that in the upper left hand corner and the third one i like to set up is mission control so i like to put that in the upper right hand corner and then lastly i like to put in the bottom right hand corner put display to sleep so that it just makes the screen go black so that's how i like to set up my hot corners of course you can set yours up however you want to but these are the ways i like to do mine so click ok and now i'm going to showcase these hot corners for you so bottom left-hand corner that's going to show the desktop just like that so anytime i want to just get right back to the desktop maybe i have a whole lot of app icons on the screen i want to see something on the desktop that's super handy allows me to drag stuff from the desktop to another app with ease now the next hot corner that i configured is launch pad in the upper left hand corner and i like this because it just quickly shows me all the applications on my mac yes it's probably not as efficient as just launching an app with spotlight but i like that now in the upper right hand corner i set mission control so that allows me to view all my app windows i don't have a lot of apps running right now but that also allows me to create additional desktops to move desktops around to move apps between desktops etc and i just use a handy two-finger swipe on my trusty magic mouse to move between those two desktops so just a really nice way to enable mission control directly from the hot corner so the last corner that i use here is in the bottom right hand corner and that allows me to put my mac display to sleep and that's super handy whenever i just want to turn the screen off make it black but still keep my mac running in the background so it's not actually putting the mac to sleep it's just putting the display to sleep that's super handy so that's the way i like to configure my four hot corners but again you can set them up just like you wish now out of the box mac os's keyboard navigation is a bit limited but we can fix this by going to system preferences keyboard clicking on shortcuts and then clicking the little box that says use keyboard navigation to move focus between controls so before we do that let me just show you what it's like when i try to tap through all the various controls right here in system preferences keyboard so i'm going to use my tab key on my keyboard and just cycle through the various controls so press tab press tab again press tab again and you're really not seeing the ability to cycle through that many controls it's fairly limited as you can see there so you're missing like the restore defaults button the setup bluetooth keyboard button at the bottom the little check box lots of things you're missing let's go ahead and enable the use keyboard navigation to move focus between controls and now let's press our tab key on our keyboard and you're gonna see that you get way more control options when you're tabbing through so notice i'm getting on restore defaults getting on the button below get see everything i'm able to tab through to navigate on mac os using my keyboard so this is super handy and honestly it's more efficient to navigate through certain screens with just your keyboard instead of using your mouse and when setting up my mac i like to update my computer name to something more recognizable so right now i mean yeah it says jeff's mac mini that's pretty recognizable right but i like to be a little bit more descriptive because sometimes i have multiple macs on the same network and it just makes it easier to like to you know quickly identify mentally so if i press return after renaming the computer now whenever that shows up on the network it will be called m1 mac mini so if i'm air dropping something i'm no longer air dropping to jeff's mac mini i'm air dropping to the newly renamed m1 mac mini the new control center in mac os big sur is cool and all but i still like to be able to quickly access my volume controls right from the menu bar with minimal clicks so right now you have to open up control center and then you have to click on sound and then you can access your sound details there of course you can adjust the sound right from control center but if you want to change outputs either input or output you have to click again like this so here's how we can fix that issue you want to click and open up control center and simply drag the sound module up to the menu bar like that and now we have a quickly accessible sound button right in the menu bar and if i hold option while clicking i can access input settings along with my output settings now spotlight has been a staple in the menu bar for years on the mac but it's just not really necessary because we have keyboard shortcuts you hold command press space and then you access spotlight that way plus i don't even use spotlight i use alfred i'll talk about that a little bit later hold the command key on your keyboard while clicking and dragging out the spotlight icon from the menu bar and release just like that alright so let's talk about finder specifically what happens when you open up a new finder window and what is displayed by default so if we go to finder preferences under the general tab here you'll see at near the bottom of the general tab new finder windows show by default it shows recents when opening up a new finder window i don't particularly like that i just want a desktop window so i change that to new finder windows show desktop so i'm going to open up a new window command in and it shows a new desktop window just like that that's what i like to do you can configure that however you want to now let's talk about configuring the finder sidebar so in finder preferences click sidebar and you'll see several items unchecked like your home pictures music and movies folders so since i access those directories all the time i make sure i enable all those on my finder sidebar so you can see them all appear there right under favorites now i also like unchecking recent tags because i generally don't use tags on my mac so i just uncheck that it's one less thing to have to look at on the sidebar and of course you can go in here and configure the sidebar however else you like to configure you don't have to have it just like i have it here but you do definitely want to go in and customize it to your liking now one thing i do like doing is adding hard disk to the desktop so under finder preferences under general i just click hard disk and that will display all my disk internally on my mac and of course by default external disks are displayed as well so just keep that in mind now keeping folders on top when sorting by name is an option that you can enable from finder preferences under the advanced tab so under advance you're going to see where it says keep folders on top so you can check in windows when sorting by name and on desktop so when i have this option enabled you can see here within applications the folders are displayed first so utilities is going to be displayed first when sorting by name motion vfx is actually a folder just has a different look to it but utilities of course is a folder as well and that's display first so i like this because it prevents folders from being mixed up within other items causing those folders which may contain very important things to get lost in the fray now making searches use your current folder is another option that i like enabling when setting up my mac so under finder preferences under advanced i like setting the when performing a search option using the drop down menu to search the current folder and what that does is it basically will look for the search terms within the folder you're searching for sorry the way i'm saying folder i know people are going to have a conniption fit over it but basically what this does is it will search the current folder first when performing that search so if i just type in apollo here it's going to search the applications folder because that's the the folder that i was in but i can also quickly search this mac search the entire computer by just clicking this mac but by default it searches the current folder instead of vice versa it's yet another setting that i like enabling upon setting up a new mac now another thing i like doing is adding the user library to the sidebar in the finder so to do that you just want to go up to the go menu so that's going to show you your various destinations that you can quickly get to but if you hold the option key on your keyboard notice what happens see it reveals the library destination which is hidden by default and only revealed when holding the option key so if you hold option you click on library that's going to take you to your user library folder that contains all sorts of handy useful things like application support where you can go in and find some of the configuration files that are related to the applications you use on your mac and there's also the preferences folder that contains all the various preferences for the apps you use as well so you can tell why this would be handy to have quick access to so to gain access to this or to add that to your sidebar in the finder it's really easy all you need to do is go up to the file menu and select add to sidebar while in that folder and you can see bam the library folder moved directly to the sidebar for quick and easy access super simple super easy now i also like to enable the status bar in the finder and to do that all you need to do is go up to the view menu and select show status bar when you do that you see a status bar at the bottom of the finder that will tell you how many items is in a particular folder how many items you've selected the amount of storage available and if you're an icon view you can adjust the size of those icons using the slider in the bottom right hand corner of the status bar now taking screenshots something i do all the time as a mac os user so i'm going to use the shortcut command shift 3 to quickly take a screenshot now notice in the bottom right hand corner you get this floating thumbnail if you click on it you can quickly mark up a screenshot easily share that screenshot you can also drag that window preview directly into a desired destination for sharing but for me personally when i take a screenshot i don't want a window preview i don't want that waiting for you know three seconds before it appears on my desktop which is what normally happens i just want the screenshot to appear on the desktop as soon as i execute the command for that screenshot so to do that i'm going to go to the options for the screenshot and uncheck show floating thumbnail that's going to eliminate that floating thumbnail on the bottom right hand corner and when i take a screenshot notice what happens so i'm going to take my screenshot and bam it appears immediately on the desktop ready for me to do whatever i need to do to it now another thing that i do when setting up a new mac is to disable the screenshot shadow now this appears whenever taking a screenshot of a selected window using command shift 4 hovering over the window and then pressing the space bar and clicking with your mouse so i can hover over the dock i can hover over system preferences click my mouse it takes a screenshot of that particular window but notice when i preview or open that particular file you'll see that shadow that appears around the edge of that window and that's nice because you actually have that shadow i mean if you look at that system preferences window there is a shadow going around it but for my purposes i don't need that shadow when i'm uploading a screenshot of a window to nine to five mac for a tutorial or something like that so i would like to remove that shadow and that's what i always do with new installs of mac os whenever i get a new mac so i'm going to show you how to do that using a simple terminal command so we're going to close out of the screenshot here open up our text edit window and now you'll see the command necessary to not only remove the shadow but also to convert that screenshot to jpeg by default the screenshots are saved as png files which is okay but for my purposes uploading to the web jpegs are going to be smaller in size so we're going to open up a terminal window in our other folder in launchpad and i'm going to simply paste that command in so the first thing it's going to do is disable the shadow the second thing it does is change the screen capture type to jpeg and then just press return on the keyboard so now i'm going to take this screenshot again of this window and we're going to compare the two so here's the new screenshot without the shadow around it here's the one with the shadow without with with the help with you get it alright so another thing comparing the ping file to the jpeg size wise you're going to see a difference here so we're going to look at this in list view on our desktop and you see it stands out immediately 771 kilobytes for the screenshot with the shadow in png format and then just 216 kilobytes for the screenshot without shadow in the jpeg format now i always have problems with keeping a tidy desktop but if you right click on your desktop and select use stacks that can go a long way to keeping your desktop nice and tidy what this does is basically groups like files together in a stack and you can compress or expand the stack simply by clicking on it like that so all my screenshots grouped together in a stack makes for a much cleaner desktop you can also quick look the entire stack by selecting the stack pressing the space bar on your keyboard and cycling through all the various items you can also scrub on a stack like this with your mouse and get nice little previews of every item within the stack bottom line if you've always struggled to keep your desktop looking tidy then stacks can go a long way towards keeping it nice and clean when setting up your mac for the first time you definitely want to customize your safari start page which is a new feature in mac os bixer so when opening a new safari window with the start page displaying you can click the settings button in the bottom right hand corner and customize the start page to your liking so every time you open up a new window this is the view that you're going to see so you can eliminate everything if you just want to display your favorites you can do that and that's what i'm going to do i'm also going to use a background image so i'll just select one of these images here how about that one you can also add your own custom image if you want to do that you can even use the wallpaper from mac os use that as a background so this customize start page is what you'll see every time you open up a new window in safari on your mac now i also recommend enabling the safari status bar i'm going to open up one of my favorite websites of course electrek and what i'm going to do here is i'm going to go up to the view menu and select show status bar you see that status bar is on so now whenever i hover over a link you're going to see a preview of that link you're going to see the url in the status bar which helps you to know where you're going to go upon clicking that link so obviously goes without saying a very useful feature something i think apple should have enabled by default and i also recommend enabling the develop menu bar in safari and the reason why i recommend that is because that allows you to view page source so you can view the code behind a website which can be useful in some instances especially if you're a power user so go up to safari go to preferences go to advanced and then enable show develop menu in menu bar so like it says it will place a new develop menu in the menu bar which contains all sorts of goodies but what i particularly like is just the ability to right click and select inspect element with that option enabled which allows you to get directly to the page source option now yoink is a 7.99 app on the mac app store and it is definitely one of the first things that i add to my mac upon a new install or upon setting up a brand new mac it improves drag and drop on your mac by basically working like a temporary shelf to hold files and then that allows you to easily move those files around on your mac i'll just briefly demonstrate one example of how this can be useful so right now i'm going to configure it i like to have it on the right edge center and then i like to go into preferences launch you ain't get login uncheck the menu bar icon so what yoink will do is whenever you drag anything on your mac any sort of file you're going to see you ink up here wherever you configure it to appear in this case on the right center and that works as sort of like a temporary shelf to hold files so i can use that just drag an additional file over here so you can see those two files those two screenshots and then i can move anywhere else on my mac i can open up a folder move to a different desktop even and you see those files are waiting there waiting to be moved to another destination so i can move that screenshot i can remove that one it just makes using your mac so much more seamless and simple now earlier in our video i talked about spotlight and the fact that i don't really use spotlight at all on the mac instead i use a ridiculously handy utility called alfred and because i'm using it as a spotlight replacement what i'm going to do first is go into system preferences keyboard shortcuts in spotlight and disable the spotlight shortcut command space because i'm going to assign that to alfred and what alfred basically is it's a launcher it is a workflow utility you can see my hotkey i assigned it to command space now the downside is that to really get the most out of alfred you have to have the power pack which is a 40 upgrade i actually bought a lifetime license because i just use it that much but as you can see what alfred allows you to do among many things is to create a custom web search so i've created a couple of custom searches for nine to five mac i'll show you an example of one of those in a second you can also save your clipboard history and quickly access that there are other apps that can do that as well but this is like an all-in-one like mega utility and then you have snippets so auto expanding snippets you can have that as well alfred just does so many different things so here is alfred i'm using the number nine for my custom search and i can just quickly search nine to five mac right from this launcher spotlight replacement and there you go there is my custom search for nine to five max super simple super easy that's just one of the many things that alfred does so i i know it sounds like they're sponsoring this but no it's just something i've been using for so many years and it's one of the first apps or utilities that i install on my mac now i also love being able to access my clipboard history so i can go back and find something that i copied earlier in the day and easily access that and paste it it makes life so much easier i also love the auto expanding snippets so i can quickly auto expand for instance a right arrow just like that uh basically this app is just like tons of different utilities in one now let's talk about the dock customizing the dock one of the first things that i do is disable the recent applications section in the dock which is something that i find personally annoying so what you can do is go to system preferences go to dock in menu bar and then simply uncheck where it says show recent applications in doc so here are the recent applications they are to the right of all of your normal applications and when i close these out they remain in the dock as you can see here but if i disable show recent applications those items will disappear so let's go ahead and uncheck and you can see they're gone so i personally like that because i like to control what's in my dock just get rid of those recent applications makes it super simple and when setting up your mac for the first time you should also definitely customize what's in the dock that for me involves getting rid of a lot of the applications that are there by default so to get rid of these apps you simply drag up hold and then let go when you see remove just like that so i'm gonna go in here and really start trimming the fat and even get rid of launch pad because we have that assigned to a hot corner remember that so now i have my dock cut down and curated just to show the applications that i actually use and then from there you can go ahead and put applications that you regularly use in the docs so in this case of course final cut pro i'm going to go ahead and open that up and we're going to make sure it stays in the dock so to do that you right click on the app icon go to options and make sure you select keep in dock just like that so that will keep it in the dock now here's another way you can keep an app in the dock you simply drag it to move it and customize its place in the dock or its position in the dock and that will automatically enable keep and dock so you want to do that for all the applications that you use on a regular basis now i also recommend resizing the dock based on how many apps you have in the dock based on just your setup of course your display size so simply drag on the vertical line that appears in the dock to make it larger or make it smaller you can also do so from system preferences menu bar and dock another thing that you may wish to do when setting up your mac is to move the dock position on screen so to do so go to system preferences go to dock in menu bar and then you'll see position on screen so you can choose to put the dock on the left side or place the dock on the right side i personally would prefer it on the left i like using the dock on the left hand side because you have more horizontal real estate than vertical real estate where the dock is by default but of course that's going to be up to you i i kind of switch back and forth between placing the dock on the left-hand side or just keeping it at the bottom of the screen like it is by default now another thing i definitely recommend you consider is to enable the automatically hide and show dock option so when i check that notice the dock disappears and it only reappears when you place your mouse cursor down near where the dock resides just like that it's a great feature for keeping your desktop nice and clean now another thing you may want to consider is to automatically hide and show the menu bar so if you hide and show your dock you can do the same thing for the menu bar at the top of the screen under dock and menu bar settings in system preferences just enable automatically hide and show menu bar and now you get a super clean setup because you've hidden both your menu bar and your dock and you reveal those whenever you place your mouse cursor wherever your dock resides and at the top of the screen where your menu bar resides so ladies and gents that has been my look at over 30 of my favorite mac getting started tips let me know where there any tips that you didn't know about that you plan to use in the future when setting up your new mac let me know down below in the comment section and thumbs up if you appreciated this video also be sure to subscribe for more videos like this stay tuned for more mac content this is jeff with the nine to five mac 905 mac is sponsored by air buddy 2 a must-have utility for airpods users as we discuss air buddy 2 is the perfect companion for airpods it also extends mac os with the batteries widget and menu bar icon that shows all your devices intelligently grouped and smart stats give you battery usage over time total listening time call time and shows you which airpod is draining this battery more quickly but airbuddy goes beyond headphones it can show battery information for your ios devices accessories like the magic keyboard magic mouse and even other mac's running air buddy including their accessories and with the magic hand-off you can transfer a magic mouse trackpad or keyboard between two mac's running airbuddy with just a few clicks go to air buddy dot app slash nine to five map to learn more the first 195 map viewers to use that url will get everybody with a 20 discount special thanks to air buddy 2 for sponsoring 9 to 5 mac youin this video i'm going to walk through over 30 of my favorite mac getting started tips so this can be handy if you purchased a brand new mac or if you've just reinstalled mac os these are my favorite tips and even if you're a seasoned mac user chances are there will probably be a few of these tips in here that are going to be helpful for you as well let me know what you guys think down below in the comment section okay so without further ado let's go ahead and get started but first a word from our sponsor 905 mac is sponsored by air buddy 2 a must have utility for airpods users the original version was great but air buddy 2 comes with tons of new incredible features it extends mac os to improve your airpods experience and it's fully compatible with bixer and apple silicon just open your charging case next to your mac to see a beautiful ui with info on batteries connection and status with airbuddy2 you can connect and change listening modes at the same time with a single trackpad gesture automate system volume audio input and listening mode so you're ready to go into a video call with just a single click and you can enjoy custom global keyboard shortcuts that allow you to quickly connect to disconnect from or change listening modes on your devices go to airbuddy.app slash 905 mac to learn more the first 195 mac viewers to use that url will get airbuddy with a 20 discount and stay tuned to the end of this video to learn about even more things that air buddy 2 can do for you thanks for watching 9.5 mac be sure to thumbs up click the subscribe button and then enable notifications with the bell icon so you won't miss any upcoming videos the very first thing i do when setting up a new mac is to change the tracking speed as you can see here it is super slow by default set to level four and it takes several swipes to swipe across the screen right so you want to go to system preferences go to trackpad and then adjust the tracking speed you can see it's on level four by default so what i do is i just drag that slider almost all the way to the right second to the last position that gives you much faster tracking speed so you can quickly get to where you need to go on mac os so that is a must do the first thing that i always do when setting up a new mac the next thing i do is enable tap to click for the trackpad so by default tap to click is disabled so when i tap on the trackpad nothing happens if i want to initiate a click i actually have to physically press on the trackpad like that but with tap to click enabled i don't have to physically press i just simply tap just like that so this sort of mimics how we we're used to tapping on things with our smartphones with our ipads you don't have to physically press on the screen you just simply tap and we can mimic that action here on the mac now when you want to drag a window or any other item around on your mac what you would normally have to do is click and drag just like this but is there a way to drag a window or other item without physically clicking on the trackpad well yes there is you just want to go to system preferences and go to accessibility and under accessibility you want to scroll down until you see pointer control click on pointer control and there you'll see where it says trackpad options click that and then click enable dragging and then click the drop down box and select three finger drag and then click ok so now when you use three fingers on your track pad look what happens you can drag without actually physically clicking on the trackpad which is super nice and it goes along well with tap to click functionality so you're not clicking nearly as much on your trackpad as you would without these options enabled now even if you're using something like a macbook pro with the built-in trackpad you may prefer to use a mouse depending on your personal preferences but you'll notice tracking is slow with the mouse when setting up your mac as well so you want to go to system preferences click on mouse and then adjust the tracking speed just like we did for the trackpad and that makes moving your mouse around much more efficient on your mac and if you use a mouse you definitely want to enable the secondary click functionality aka right click on your mouse because otherwise if you wanted to input a right click you actually have to hold the control key on your keyboard and then click on your mouse but if you enable the secondary click within system preferences mouse right here just click that then you can simply click on the right side of your mouse to use the secondary click that is a must change when setting up your mac if you use a magic mouse open up system preferences mouse and then click more gestures there you'll see swipe between pages now i'm going to show you why this is useful normally when browsing something like safari if you wanted to go back or for it you would have to use the back or four buttons or use a keyboard shortcut but your magic mouse is actually capable of using swipe gestures to navigate safari to go back and forth so let's go back to our system preferences let's enable swipe between pages and now you can see i'm just simply swiping with a finger on my magic mouse to go back and to go forward just like that in my opinion this is a must if you're a magic mouse user if you're an apple watch user then apple watch unlock is a must configure when setting up your mac so open up system preferences click on security and privacy and then click where it says use your apple watch to unlock apps and your mac so i'm going to put in my system password there click modify settings so there we go so it's turning on and once configured i can click this little lock to unlock and approve that unlock using my apple watch just two clicks of the side button it unlocks this section of system preferences and of course you can also use the apple watch to unlock your mac at the lock screen which is super handy and for that reason it's a must configure feature when setting up your new mac another must-have for new mac users is enabling hot corners hot corners allows you to launch certain actions just by placing your cursor in one of the four corners of the display so let me show you how to set it up go to system preferences click on mission control and then click hot corners in the bottom left hand corner now you're going to see four different active screen corners that you can configure and we're going to configure all four of them so the first one i like to set up is in the bottom left-hand corner and i like to set that to show desktop so you can just select desktop there the next one i like to set up is launch pad and i like to put that in the upper left hand corner and the third one i like to set up is mission control so i like to put that in the upper right hand corner and then lastly i like to put in the bottom right hand corner put display to sleep so that it just makes the screen go black so that's how i like to set up my hot corners of course you can set yours up however you want to but these are the ways i like to do mine so click ok and now i'm going to showcase these hot corners for you so bottom left-hand corner that's going to show the desktop just like that so anytime i want to just get right back to the desktop maybe i have a whole lot of app icons on the screen i want to see something on the desktop that's super handy allows me to drag stuff from the desktop to another app with ease now the next hot corner that i configured is launch pad in the upper left hand corner and i like this because it just quickly shows me all the applications on my mac yes it's probably not as efficient as just launching an app with spotlight but i like that now in the upper right hand corner i set mission control so that allows me to view all my app windows i don't have a lot of apps running right now but that also allows me to create additional desktops to move desktops around to move apps between desktops etc and i just use a handy two-finger swipe on my trusty magic mouse to move between those two desktops so just a really nice way to enable mission control directly from the hot corner so the last corner that i use here is in the bottom right hand corner and that allows me to put my mac display to sleep and that's super handy whenever i just want to turn the screen off make it black but still keep my mac running in the background so it's not actually putting the mac to sleep it's just putting the display to sleep that's super handy so that's the way i like to configure my four hot corners but again you can set them up just like you wish now out of the box mac os's keyboard navigation is a bit limited but we can fix this by going to system preferences keyboard clicking on shortcuts and then clicking the little box that says use keyboard navigation to move focus between controls so before we do that let me just show you what it's like when i try to tap through all the various controls right here in system preferences keyboard so i'm going to use my tab key on my keyboard and just cycle through the various controls so press tab press tab again press tab again and you're really not seeing the ability to cycle through that many controls it's fairly limited as you can see there so you're missing like the restore defaults button the setup bluetooth keyboard button at the bottom the little check box lots of things you're missing let's go ahead and enable the use keyboard navigation to move focus between controls and now let's press our tab key on our keyboard and you're gonna see that you get way more control options when you're tabbing through so notice i'm getting on restore defaults getting on the button below get see everything i'm able to tab through to navigate on mac os using my keyboard so this is super handy and honestly it's more efficient to navigate through certain screens with just your keyboard instead of using your mouse and when setting up my mac i like to update my computer name to something more recognizable so right now i mean yeah it says jeff's mac mini that's pretty recognizable right but i like to be a little bit more descriptive because sometimes i have multiple macs on the same network and it just makes it easier to like to you know quickly identify mentally so if i press return after renaming the computer now whenever that shows up on the network it will be called m1 mac mini so if i'm air dropping something i'm no longer air dropping to jeff's mac mini i'm air dropping to the newly renamed m1 mac mini the new control center in mac os big sur is cool and all but i still like to be able to quickly access my volume controls right from the menu bar with minimal clicks so right now you have to open up control center and then you have to click on sound and then you can access your sound details there of course you can adjust the sound right from control center but if you want to change outputs either input or output you have to click again like this so here's how we can fix that issue you want to click and open up control center and simply drag the sound module up to the menu bar like that and now we have a quickly accessible sound button right in the menu bar and if i hold option while clicking i can access input settings along with my output settings now spotlight has been a staple in the menu bar for years on the mac but it's just not really necessary because we have keyboard shortcuts you hold command press space and then you access spotlight that way plus i don't even use spotlight i use alfred i'll talk about that a little bit later hold the command key on your keyboard while clicking and dragging out the spotlight icon from the menu bar and release just like that alright so let's talk about finder specifically what happens when you open up a new finder window and what is displayed by default so if we go to finder preferences under the general tab here you'll see at near the bottom of the general tab new finder windows show by default it shows recents when opening up a new finder window i don't particularly like that i just want a desktop window so i change that to new finder windows show desktop so i'm going to open up a new window command in and it shows a new desktop window just like that that's what i like to do you can configure that however you want to now let's talk about configuring the finder sidebar so in finder preferences click sidebar and you'll see several items unchecked like your home pictures music and movies folders so since i access those directories all the time i make sure i enable all those on my finder sidebar so you can see them all appear there right under favorites now i also like unchecking recent tags because i generally don't use tags on my mac so i just uncheck that it's one less thing to have to look at on the sidebar and of course you can go in here and configure the sidebar however else you like to configure you don't have to have it just like i have it here but you do definitely want to go in and customize it to your liking now one thing i do like doing is adding hard disk to the desktop so under finder preferences under general i just click hard disk and that will display all my disk internally on my mac and of course by default external disks are displayed as well so just keep that in mind now keeping folders on top when sorting by name is an option that you can enable from finder preferences under the advanced tab so under advance you're going to see where it says keep folders on top so you can check in windows when sorting by name and on desktop so when i have this option enabled you can see here within applications the folders are displayed first so utilities is going to be displayed first when sorting by name motion vfx is actually a folder just has a different look to it but utilities of course is a folder as well and that's display first so i like this because it prevents folders from being mixed up within other items causing those folders which may contain very important things to get lost in the fray now making searches use your current folder is another option that i like enabling when setting up my mac so under finder preferences under advanced i like setting the when performing a search option using the drop down menu to search the current folder and what that does is it basically will look for the search terms within the folder you're searching for sorry the way i'm saying folder i know people are going to have a conniption fit over it but basically what this does is it will search the current folder first when performing that search so if i just type in apollo here it's going to search the applications folder because that's the the folder that i was in but i can also quickly search this mac search the entire computer by just clicking this mac but by default it searches the current folder instead of vice versa it's yet another setting that i like enabling upon setting up a new mac now another thing i like doing is adding the user library to the sidebar in the finder so to do that you just want to go up to the go menu so that's going to show you your various destinations that you can quickly get to but if you hold the option key on your keyboard notice what happens see it reveals the library destination which is hidden by default and only revealed when holding the option key so if you hold option you click on library that's going to take you to your user library folder that contains all sorts of handy useful things like application support where you can go in and find some of the configuration files that are related to the applications you use on your mac and there's also the preferences folder that contains all the various preferences for the apps you use as well so you can tell why this would be handy to have quick access to so to gain access to this or to add that to your sidebar in the finder it's really easy all you need to do is go up to the file menu and select add to sidebar while in that folder and you can see bam the library folder moved directly to the sidebar for quick and easy access super simple super easy now i also like to enable the status bar in the finder and to do that all you need to do is go up to the view menu and select show status bar when you do that you see a status bar at the bottom of the finder that will tell you how many items is in a particular folder how many items you've selected the amount of storage available and if you're an icon view you can adjust the size of those icons using the slider in the bottom right hand corner of the status bar now taking screenshots something i do all the time as a mac os user so i'm going to use the shortcut command shift 3 to quickly take a screenshot now notice in the bottom right hand corner you get this floating thumbnail if you click on it you can quickly mark up a screenshot easily share that screenshot you can also drag that window preview directly into a desired destination for sharing but for me personally when i take a screenshot i don't want a window preview i don't want that waiting for you know three seconds before it appears on my desktop which is what normally happens i just want the screenshot to appear on the desktop as soon as i execute the command for that screenshot so to do that i'm going to go to the options for the screenshot and uncheck show floating thumbnail that's going to eliminate that floating thumbnail on the bottom right hand corner and when i take a screenshot notice what happens so i'm going to take my screenshot and bam it appears immediately on the desktop ready for me to do whatever i need to do to it now another thing that i do when setting up a new mac is to disable the screenshot shadow now this appears whenever taking a screenshot of a selected window using command shift 4 hovering over the window and then pressing the space bar and clicking with your mouse so i can hover over the dock i can hover over system preferences click my mouse it takes a screenshot of that particular window but notice when i preview or open that particular file you'll see that shadow that appears around the edge of that window and that's nice because you actually have that shadow i mean if you look at that system preferences window there is a shadow going around it but for my purposes i don't need that shadow when i'm uploading a screenshot of a window to nine to five mac for a tutorial or something like that so i would like to remove that shadow and that's what i always do with new installs of mac os whenever i get a new mac so i'm going to show you how to do that using a simple terminal command so we're going to close out of the screenshot here open up our text edit window and now you'll see the command necessary to not only remove the shadow but also to convert that screenshot to jpeg by default the screenshots are saved as png files which is okay but for my purposes uploading to the web jpegs are going to be smaller in size so we're going to open up a terminal window in our other folder in launchpad and i'm going to simply paste that command in so the first thing it's going to do is disable the shadow the second thing it does is change the screen capture type to jpeg and then just press return on the keyboard so now i'm going to take this screenshot again of this window and we're going to compare the two so here's the new screenshot without the shadow around it here's the one with the shadow without with with the help with you get it alright so another thing comparing the ping file to the jpeg size wise you're going to see a difference here so we're going to look at this in list view on our desktop and you see it stands out immediately 771 kilobytes for the screenshot with the shadow in png format and then just 216 kilobytes for the screenshot without shadow in the jpeg format now i always have problems with keeping a tidy desktop but if you right click on your desktop and select use stacks that can go a long way to keeping your desktop nice and tidy what this does is basically groups like files together in a stack and you can compress or expand the stack simply by clicking on it like that so all my screenshots grouped together in a stack makes for a much cleaner desktop you can also quick look the entire stack by selecting the stack pressing the space bar on your keyboard and cycling through all the various items you can also scrub on a stack like this with your mouse and get nice little previews of every item within the stack bottom line if you've always struggled to keep your desktop looking tidy then stacks can go a long way towards keeping it nice and clean when setting up your mac for the first time you definitely want to customize your safari start page which is a new feature in mac os bixer so when opening a new safari window with the start page displaying you can click the settings button in the bottom right hand corner and customize the start page to your liking so every time you open up a new window this is the view that you're going to see so you can eliminate everything if you just want to display your favorites you can do that and that's what i'm going to do i'm also going to use a background image so i'll just select one of these images here how about that one you can also add your own custom image if you want to do that you can even use the wallpaper from mac os use that as a background so this customize start page is what you'll see every time you open up a new window in safari on your mac now i also recommend enabling the safari status bar i'm going to open up one of my favorite websites of course electrek and what i'm going to do here is i'm going to go up to the view menu and select show status bar you see that status bar is on so now whenever i hover over a link you're going to see a preview of that link you're going to see the url in the status bar which helps you to know where you're going to go upon clicking that link so obviously goes without saying a very useful feature something i think apple should have enabled by default and i also recommend enabling the develop menu bar in safari and the reason why i recommend that is because that allows you to view page source so you can view the code behind a website which can be useful in some instances especially if you're a power user so go up to safari go to preferences go to advanced and then enable show develop menu in menu bar so like it says it will place a new develop menu in the menu bar which contains all sorts of goodies but what i particularly like is just the ability to right click and select inspect element with that option enabled which allows you to get directly to the page source option now yoink is a 7.99 app on the mac app store and it is definitely one of the first things that i add to my mac upon a new install or upon setting up a brand new mac it improves drag and drop on your mac by basically working like a temporary shelf to hold files and then that allows you to easily move those files around on your mac i'll just briefly demonstrate one example of how this can be useful so right now i'm going to configure it i like to have it on the right edge center and then i like to go into preferences launch you ain't get login uncheck the menu bar icon so what yoink will do is whenever you drag anything on your mac any sort of file you're going to see you ink up here wherever you configure it to appear in this case on the right center and that works as sort of like a temporary shelf to hold files so i can use that just drag an additional file over here so you can see those two files those two screenshots and then i can move anywhere else on my mac i can open up a folder move to a different desktop even and you see those files are waiting there waiting to be moved to another destination so i can move that screenshot i can remove that one it just makes using your mac so much more seamless and simple now earlier in our video i talked about spotlight and the fact that i don't really use spotlight at all on the mac instead i use a ridiculously handy utility called alfred and because i'm using it as a spotlight replacement what i'm going to do first is go into system preferences keyboard shortcuts in spotlight and disable the spotlight shortcut command space because i'm going to assign that to alfred and what alfred basically is it's a launcher it is a workflow utility you can see my hotkey i assigned it to command space now the downside is that to really get the most out of alfred you have to have the power pack which is a 40 upgrade i actually bought a lifetime license because i just use it that much but as you can see what alfred allows you to do among many things is to create a custom web search so i've created a couple of custom searches for nine to five mac i'll show you an example of one of those in a second you can also save your clipboard history and quickly access that there are other apps that can do that as well but this is like an all-in-one like mega utility and then you have snippets so auto expanding snippets you can have that as well alfred just does so many different things so here is alfred i'm using the number nine for my custom search and i can just quickly search nine to five mac right from this launcher spotlight replacement and there you go there is my custom search for nine to five max super simple super easy that's just one of the many things that alfred does so i i know it sounds like they're sponsoring this but no it's just something i've been using for so many years and it's one of the first apps or utilities that i install on my mac now i also love being able to access my clipboard history so i can go back and find something that i copied earlier in the day and easily access that and paste it it makes life so much easier i also love the auto expanding snippets so i can quickly auto expand for instance a right arrow just like that uh basically this app is just like tons of different utilities in one now let's talk about the dock customizing the dock one of the first things that i do is disable the recent applications section in the dock which is something that i find personally annoying so what you can do is go to system preferences go to dock in menu bar and then simply uncheck where it says show recent applications in doc so here are the recent applications they are to the right of all of your normal applications and when i close these out they remain in the dock as you can see here but if i disable show recent applications those items will disappear so let's go ahead and uncheck and you can see they're gone so i personally like that because i like to control what's in my dock just get rid of those recent applications makes it super simple and when setting up your mac for the first time you should also definitely customize what's in the dock that for me involves getting rid of a lot of the applications that are there by default so to get rid of these apps you simply drag up hold and then let go when you see remove just like that so i'm gonna go in here and really start trimming the fat and even get rid of launch pad because we have that assigned to a hot corner remember that so now i have my dock cut down and curated just to show the applications that i actually use and then from there you can go ahead and put applications that you regularly use in the docs so in this case of course final cut pro i'm going to go ahead and open that up and we're going to make sure it stays in the dock so to do that you right click on the app icon go to options and make sure you select keep in dock just like that so that will keep it in the dock now here's another way you can keep an app in the dock you simply drag it to move it and customize its place in the dock or its position in the dock and that will automatically enable keep and dock so you want to do that for all the applications that you use on a regular basis now i also recommend resizing the dock based on how many apps you have in the dock based on just your setup of course your display size so simply drag on the vertical line that appears in the dock to make it larger or make it smaller you can also do so from system preferences menu bar and dock another thing that you may wish to do when setting up your mac is to move the dock position on screen so to do so go to system preferences go to dock in menu bar and then you'll see position on screen so you can choose to put the dock on the left side or place the dock on the right side i personally would prefer it on the left i like using the dock on the left hand side because you have more horizontal real estate than vertical real estate where the dock is by default but of course that's going to be up to you i i kind of switch back and forth between placing the dock on the left-hand side or just keeping it at the bottom of the screen like it is by default now another thing i definitely recommend you consider is to enable the automatically hide and show dock option so when i check that notice the dock disappears and it only reappears when you place your mouse cursor down near where the dock resides just like that it's a great feature for keeping your desktop nice and clean now another thing you may want to consider is to automatically hide and show the menu bar so if you hide and show your dock you can do the same thing for the menu bar at the top of the screen under dock and menu bar settings in system preferences just enable automatically hide and show menu bar and now you get a super clean setup because you've hidden both your menu bar and your dock and you reveal those whenever you place your mouse cursor wherever your dock resides and at the top of the screen where your menu bar resides so ladies and gents that has been my look at over 30 of my favorite mac getting started tips let me know where there any tips that you didn't know about that you plan to use in the future when setting up your new mac let me know down below in the comment section and thumbs up if you appreciated this video also be sure to subscribe for more videos like this stay tuned for more mac content this is jeff with the nine to five mac 905 mac is sponsored by air buddy 2 a must-have utility for airpods users as we discuss air buddy 2 is the perfect companion for airpods it also extends mac os with the batteries widget and menu bar icon that shows all your devices intelligently grouped and smart stats give you battery usage over time total listening time call time and shows you which airpod is draining this battery more quickly but airbuddy goes beyond headphones it can show battery information for your ios devices accessories like the magic keyboard magic mouse and even other mac's running air buddy including their accessories and with the magic hand-off you can transfer a magic mouse trackpad or keyboard between two mac's running airbuddy with just a few clicks go to air buddy dot app slash nine to five map to learn more the first 195 map viewers to use that url will get everybody with a 20 discount special thanks to air buddy 2 for sponsoring 9 to 5 mac you\n"