10 Ancient Mac Features You Forgot Were Still On Your Mac

Hi this is Gary with MacMost.com. Here are 10 features that have been on your Mac for 20 years or more but you may have forgotten about. Sometimes I'll mention a Mac feature that's been around for a long time and I'll get comments back from people that used to use the feature but kind of forgot it was there and are amazed to find it's still on their Mac. So here are 10 examples of that. I want to start with two from the Music app. The Music app is fairly new but iTunes which preceded it has been around since 2001. Apple actually bought an app called Sound Jam and then turned it into iTunes and inherited features that even predate iTunes. For instance if you are playing music and you go to Window you'll notice Visualizer. If I use it and you see there's a handy keyboard shortcut it creates these graphics on the screen to go along with the music that's playing. You can use the escape key to exit and also notice that you can choose the new visualizer new as in 20 years ago or the classic visualizer which is even older than that which looks a little bit different. In both cases if you press the key with the question mark on your keyboard you'll get other keyboard commands displaying at the top left. So there's a lot of ways to kind of modify and customize the visualizer. It's a fun way to have your Mac screen do something when you're playing music and not using your Mac for anything else. Like imagine your Mac sitting in the corner of your room playing music while you're entertaining. Now another option that goes all the way back to the earliest version of iTunes and is still in the Music app is the ability to rip CDs. You can still take a regular music CD and insert it into an optical drive. Now Macs don't come with optical drives anymore but you can pick up a USB drive pretty cheaply and most of them will just work plug and play with your Mac. If you insert a CD into that while it's attached to your Mac and you've got the Music app running it's going to automatically recognize that and prompt you as to whether or not you want to import that CD into your collection. So you can see it's asking to do that right here. It even recognizes the tracks and all the information. In music settings you've got the same settings as before. So you've got when a CD is inserted asked to import the CD. You can go to files and change import settings to set how these files are translated into digital files. So you have all of that stuff that goes way back more than 20 years still available. You also still have the ability in the Music app to burn CDs as well. I'll also add that you can still sync music that's ripped like this to some of the last iPod models and to modern iPhones the same way you used to back in iTunes except that that is now in the Finder not in the Music app. So if you have your iPhone connected you can see it here in the left sidebar and you get a set of controls here that looks like what used to be in iTunes and you can actually select music to sync either with the standard sync or syncing manually using manually manage setting here. This is how it used to work in iTunes exactly the same way it still works now if you know where to look and you want to use the old-fashioned kind of sync instead of iTunes match or Apple Music. If you find these videos valuable consider joining the more than 2,000 others that support MacMost at Patreon. You get exclusive content course discounts and more. You can read about it at macmost.com slash patreon. Now believe it or not it was only 20 years ago that Apple introduced the iMac G5 that had a built-in webcam and when they did they added an app to those Macs called Photobooth and Photobooth is still on your Mac today. It allows you to access your Mac's camera and do things like take pictures or record videos directly from that camera. So it's kind of the camera app for your Mac. It has some pretty neat features like the ability to select effects here and then have some cool effects like this. You can drag and drop photos and videos out of Photobooth. So if you need to take a quick photo of yourself or something else and all you've got is your MacBook's webcam you can use this to do it. Now Apple first added a graphing calculator to the Mac way back in the 1990s in Mac OS 7. That app was discontinued but in 2004 Apple bought another graphing app. So if you look for grapher you'll find that on your Mac today and it allows you to create 3D graphs or even some examples that you could choose here and some of them are even animated over time and you can export videos from it. It's a very complex and interesting app. Another app that started with the original OS X is the digital color meter app. This is an interesting little utility here that will show you an enlarged portion of the screen wherever the pointer is located and you can see the RGB values from that location. If at any point you get the color you want you can use shift command C to copy that color as text or option command C to copy that pixel as an image. One of the things that I love that it does that other similar third party utilities don't do is all you just set the aperture size. So notice now that that square in there includes more than one pixel and it's giving me the average color in that area. So if you have an area that's part of a gradient and you just want to get that general color copy to the clipboard you use somewhere else you can do it. Now a long time ago Apple actually had an app for web developers called iWeb. It was one of those old-fashioned tools that allow you to design the HTML on your Mac and then it would upload the entire thing to a website and it also used to be able to use an old version of pages and export all the rich text in there as HTML. You can't do that any longer but there is one app on your Mac that still handles HTML and that is TextEdit. If you use TextEdit in rich text mode not plain text mode but rich text mode where you can change the style and color and font and all of that when you go to save or if you've already saved hold the option key down you get to choose the file format. Rich text document is the default but you could also choose to save as a web page as .html and I'll get this HTML file. If I select it and quick look it you can see it shows it as HTML. I can even drag this now to Safari and it will load up in Safari as well and TextEdit will also read HTML as well. I can control click right click or two finger click on this say open with and choose TextEdit and you can see it displays it back. It's just another format for it to handle. Now I can continue to edit that. I often hear from people that use the passwords app that say well it's a shame that keychain access isn't there anymore on your Mac. Keychain access was the way to access passwords before there was a passwords app and people assume that passwords replaced it. Well that's not true at all. Unfortunately you can't find it if you use launchpad but it does come up in spotlight so you can open up keychain access right there. You can see its location is actually in your system folder library core services applications and you can run it here. It'll prompt you to open passwords instead of keychain access but you can override that by clicking that button and get keychain access back. This is especially useful if previously you stored secure notes in keychain access like I've got a few sample ones here on my iCloud keychain. I can still access those here even though I can't create new ones and of course if you're a developer often you need to use keychain access to access things like certificates for software development. Another thing that was included with the original Mac OS 10 in 2001 was an app called system profiler. Use the apple menu go to about this Mac but hold the option key down and it changes to system information and that brings up the app. System information is the name it's currently called but it's a direct descendant of system profiler and allows you to do really interesting things like if I was on a MacBook here I could get more detailed battery information right here. On my Mac studio I can get detailed information about say the graphics and displays all sorts of things like that. You can even go down to software here and see a list of your applications like that with all the versions numbers and whether or not they're universal or for apple silicon only and this is the oldest app that I'm going to talk about today. This dates back to 1994 and when I show this to people in different lists of things you can do on your Mac they're amazed that it's still there they've forgotten about it and it's very useful and it's called stickies. Stickies is a little app that puts these little text windows on your screen and you can create new ones and place them anywhere you want. Under window you can set them to float on top or be translucent there you can use font styling and all sorts of stuff in there. They're good for little notes that you want to leave for yourself on your screen handy little things you want to refer to some reference material all sorts of stuff like that but the big downside to stickies today is it doesn't work over iCloud it's just local on your Mac so the no tap is better for most things but for little things that just appear on one Mac's screen stickies is a really interesting option and one last thing that people forget is there the DVD player. It doesn't show up in launchpad like before but you can use spotlight to find it and of course it pops up automatically if you have an external optical drive you've connected to your Mac and you insert a DVD into it and it comes up and it's got all the DVD controls here and tons of different things that you can do just to play back DVDs. I don't have a DVD inserted now so you can't see anything but it's there if you've got a DVD player it also allows you to open up DVD images if you have any of those back from days where you may have created DVDs on your Mac. So those are the 10 I want to mention but there are more there's an app called Bluetooth file exchange that allows you to use Bluetooth to send files between Macs. Image capture dates back to 2001 and it's a great way to access camera photos directly without the photos app but also access scanners that are attached to your Mac or over the network. Print center is an app that shows you all of the documents being printed right now and other information about your printers. Audio midi setup is an app that allows you to take detailed control over different audio inputs and outputs and the dictionary app is 20 years old right now and that's a great app for looking up definitions of words has a thesaurus and lots of other language information. So maybe you find one of these old apps that's still on your Mac useful. Thanks for watching.