{"id":28193,"date":"2023-04-25T07:03:37","date_gmt":"2023-04-25T14:03:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/?p=28193"},"modified":"2024-11-19T14:15:26","modified_gmt":"2024-11-19T22:15:26","slug":"tiny-mac-tips-part-six","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/2023\/04\/tiny-mac-tips-part-six\/","title":{"rendered":"Tiny Mac Tips Part 6 of X"},"content":{"rendered":"<h2>Jump to Tips<\/h2>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"#haptics\">Haptics on Trackpad<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"#force-touch\">Force Touch<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"#finder-search\">Go Right to Finder Search<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"#paste-no-format\">Paste without Formatting<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"#line-feed\">Line Feed When Enter Won\u2019t Work<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I\u2019m back with another Part 6 of Tiny Mac Tips.  This is an ongoing series I started in order to teach Jill from the Northwoods how to move from an adequate Mac user to a proficient one. In case you missed the earlier installments, I\u2019ve included links to the first 5 installments:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/2022\/06\/tiny-mac-tips-part-one\/\">Link to Tiny Mac Tips Part 1<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/2022\/06\/tiny-mac-tips-part-two\/\">Link to Tiny Mac Tips Part 2<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/2022\/06\/tiny-mac-tips-part-three\/\">Link to Tiny Mac Tips Part 3<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/2022\/08\/tiny-mac-tips-part-four\/\">Link to Tiny Mac Tips Part 4<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/2022\/09\/tiny-mac-tips-part-five\/\">Link to Tiny Mac Tips Part 5<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h2><a id=\"haptics\"><\/a>Haptics on Trackpad<\/h2>\n<p>One of my favorite party tricks to show new (and even seasoned Mac users) is to demonstrate that clicking on their trackpad is a lie.<\/p>\n<p>If you push on a relatively modern Mac trackpad &#8211; either the internal one or an external Magic Trackpad, you can feel a distinct click just like on any trackpad you\u2019ve ever used. When it clicks, you can feel it move.<\/p>\n<p>Apple refer to their trackpads <a href=\"https:\/\/support.apple.com\/en-us\/HT204352\">in some support articles as Force Touch trackpads<\/a> and I\u2019ll get into more about what Force Touch does in the next tip. Force Touch happens when you push down harder than a click on an Apple trackpad, and it feels like it pushes in even farther.<\/p>\n<p>But here\u2019s how to prove it\u2019s a lie.<\/p>\n<p>Turn off your Mac or Magic Trackpad. Now try to click the trackpad. It does <em>not<\/em> move!  It\u2019s not that it\u2019s now locked, it\u2019s that it was never actually moving in the first place. Apple trick us by using haptic feedback to give the feeling of a click and it feels like it\u2019s actually moving when it isn\u2019t. Try shutting down &#8211; it\u2019s positively freaky!<\/p>\n<p>I got to wondering exactly <em>how<\/em> Apple simulate that click.  I turned to <a href=\"https:\/\/www.ifixit.com\/Teardown\/Magic+Trackpad+2+Teardown\/51032\">iFixit for a teardown of the Magic Trackpad<\/a>. If you scroll down on the link in the shownotes to the teardown, you\u2019ll see the part that performs this magic and even better they explain how it works.<\/p>\n<p>The part is called the Taptic Engine, not Haptic Engine) because Apple like to invent fun names for things. The Taptic Engine shown in the teardown is a bracket with four coils of copper wire on four posts, and then the ends of each wire coil are connected to the bracket.<\/p>\n<figure style=\"float: center; margin: 10px\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/04\/iFixit-Teardown-Explaining-Taptic-Engine.png\" alt=\"IFixit Teardown Explaining Taptic Engine\"  title=\"iFixit Teardown Explaining Taptic Engine.png\" width=\"599 \" height=\"307\"><figcaption style=\"text-align:center\">IFixit Teardown Explaining Taptic Engine<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>iFixit explain next to the image:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\n  These coils of copper wire form powerful electromagnets that push and pull against the steel bar mounted to the underside of the trackpad surface, causing the entire surface to rapidly and shortly buzz, simulating the sound and feel of a click.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>So maybe the click isn\u2019t a lie as much as a fib.  The Taptic Engine does buzz inside the trackpad so technically it\u2019s moving a little bit.  This also explains why when you cut the power to your MacBook or Magic Trackpad, you can\u2019t feel the click. Electromagnets only work when electricity is running through the coils.<\/p>\n<p>Next time you\u2019re at a boring party, get out your trackpad and amaze the other partygoers by turning it off and showing them how it doesn\u2019t click. That will be sure to liven things up.<\/p>\n<h2><a id=\"force-touch\"><\/a>Force Touch<\/h2>\n<p>Now that we know about the lying trackpad, I promised to tell you about Force Touch.  On a Mac, you can do all kinds of nifty things by pushing just that little bit extra on your trackpad.  My favorite thing to do is look up words in things I\u2019m reading. The first time you Force Touch on a word, you\u2019ll get a popup explaining that you\u2019ve triggered Look Up. It explains the kinds of things you can find out with Look Up.<\/p>\n<figure style=\"float: center; margin: 10px\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/04\/Lookup-with-Force-Touch-Explanation.png\" alt=\"Lookup with Force Touch Explanation\"  title=\"Lookup with Force Touch Explanation.png\" width=\"422 \" height=\"466\"><figcaption style=\"text-align:center\">Lookup with Force Touch Explanation<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>Dismiss the popup and try again to Force Touch on a word. This time you\u2019ll be rewarded with the Dictionary definition of your word and synonyms from the Thesaurus.<\/p>\n<p>The word I chose to use in the screenshots for the article was Preferences, and in the sentence, it was in the phrase System Preferences.  In the popup with the definition and synonyms, it also explained what System Preferences is from Apple.<\/p>\n<figure style=\"float: center; margin: 10px\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/04\/Look-Up-Showing-Definition.png\" alt=\"Look Up Showing Definition\"  title=\"Look Up Showing Definition.png\" width=\"402 \" height=\"462\"><figcaption style=\"text-align:center\">Look Up Showing Definition<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>At the bottom of the popup, you\u2019ll also see Siri Knowledge and Siri Suggested Websites.  These options are contextual depending on what you\u2019ve selected with Force Touch. Siri Knowledge for my example of the word \u201cPreferences\u201d gives me a short paragraph from Wikipedia and offers to take me into Wikipedia to read more. Likewise, the Siri Suggested Websites option gave an overview paragraph from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and offered to take me there.<\/p>\n<p>While the <a href=\"https:\/\/support.apple.com\/en-us\/HT204352\">support article from Apple that explains everything you can do with Force Touch<\/a> still refers to System Preferences instead of System Settings, it has a great explanation of all of the cool things you can do with Force Touch. I really had no idea how many things it could do before researching for this article.<\/p>\n<p>I\u2019m not going to read them all to you, but Force Touch on an address brings up Maps, on dates it adds them to the Calendar, and on flights it gets details of the flight. You can see previews of web pages by force-clicking on a link. I\u2019m not even halfway through telling you everything that Force Touch can do! It\u2019s really worth exploring the support article to familiarize yourself with all of the options.<\/p>\n<p>In System Preferences or System Settings \u2192 Trackpad, you can modify how to invoke Force Touch.  Because Apple loves to use different names for the same thing, in the Trackpad settings, they call it \u201cForce Click and haptic feedback\u201d.<\/p>\n<figure style=\"float: center; margin: 10px\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/04\/Trackpad-Settings.png\" alt=\"Trackpad Settings to change Look up and data detectors triggers\"  title=\"Trackpad Settings.png\" width=\"599 \" height=\"561\"><figcaption style=\"text-align:center\">Trackpad Settings in macOS Ventura<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>You can turn Force Click off entirely if you want. You can still get Look up and data detectors (like maps and phone numbers) using Tap with Three Fingers, or you can turn it all off if you like.<\/p>\n<p>You may not remember, but I told you about another trackpad gesture back in <a href=\"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/2022\/06\/tiny-mac-tips-part-three\/\">Part Three of Mac Tiny Tips called three-finger drag<\/a>. Obviously if you have enabled three-finger drag of your windows, you won\u2019t want to use a three-finger tap to access Look Up.<\/p>\n<h2><a id=\"finder-search\"><\/a>Go Right to Finder Search<\/h2>\n<p>Those last two tiny tips weren\u2019t all that tiny, were they? Let\u2019s cleanse our palates with a truly Tiny Tip. Imagine you\u2019re working away in Safari or Photos or any third-party app, and you realize you need to search for a file in the Finder.<\/p>\n<p>You could click on the Desktop or the Finder icon in your Dock to bring forward a Finder window, and then you could click in the little search box or hit Command-F to start a search.  But it turns out you don\u2019t have to launch Finder separately, you can start the search while inside any app.<\/p>\n<p>While in any app, hit Command-Option-Space and it will instantly open a new Finder window directly to the Finder search field.  How cool is that?<\/p>\n<p>The keystroke might not stick right away in your muscle memory, but here\u2019s a way to remember it. Command-Space launches Spotlight to search and launch apps, and throwing in the Option key makes it right to the Finder search.<\/p>\n<h2><a id=\"paste-no-format\"><\/a>Paste without Formatting<\/h2>\n<p>Here\u2019s another Tiny Mac Tip that I use <em>all<\/em> the time.  You know how if you copy some text from a source and paste it into another document, the formatting comes along with it and looks terrible in your document?  There are a <em>lot<\/em> of tools out there to get past this problem, including clipboard managers.  But the Mac has built into it an automatic way to paste without bringing the formatting along for the ride.<\/p>\n<p>We all use Command-C to copy, and Command-V to paste, right? Throw in that handy dandy Option key and Command-Option-V pastes without the formatting.  Seriously, it works in pretty much every text-based app I\u2019ve ever used!<\/p>\n<h2><a id=\"line-feed\"><\/a>Line Feed When Enter Won\u2019t Work<\/h2>\n<p>I recently posted a Tiny Tip on how to add a line feed on iOS when the app you\u2019re using doesn\u2019t have a \u201cReturn\u201d key. You can use dictation and say, \u201cNew line\u201d instead, or and thanks to Joop, we also learned that tapping the 123 button in the bottom left gives you a return key to enter those line feeds.<\/p>\n<p>With some apps and services, we have the same problem on the Mac of not being able to add a line feed.  Let\u2019s take Apple Messages as an example. If you\u2019re typing away in Messages, Telegram, or Slack, and if you hit enter, your text will instead instantly send.  Most of the time that\u2019s what you want, but sometimes you want to separate two thoughts and have a line feed to make them easier to read.<\/p>\n<p>In most apps on the Mac, if you hold down the Option (\u2325) key and <em>then<\/em> Enter, you\u2019ll get your precious line feed.<\/p>\n<p>One of my favorite places to use Option-Enter is when I want to nicely format a column heading in Excel, controlling on exactly which word the text will wrap.<\/p>\n<p>The one chatting app that doesn\u2019t obey is Discord, where Enter sends, and Shift-Enter adds a line feed. There are comments going back four years to four months ago in the Discord discussion forum asking for options on this behavior but evidently, the Discord team doesn\u2019t want to change it.<\/p>\n<p>Oh well, Option-Enter is available in <em>almost<\/em> every app for macOS.<\/p>\n<h2>Bottom Line<\/h2>\n<p>I sure enjoy making these Tiny Mac Tips, and if you have some you haven\u2019t heard me mention that will help the new or even seasoned Mac users up their game, send them to me so I can share.<\/p>\n<p>If you enjoyed these tips, here&#8217;s a link to the next set of tips: <a href=\"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/2023\/06\/tiny-mac-tips-part-seven\/\">Link to Tiny Mac Tips Part 7<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Jump to Tips Haptics on Trackpad Force Touch Go Right to Finder Search Paste without Formatting Line Feed When Enter Won\u2019t Work I\u2019m back with another Part 6 of Tiny Mac Tips. This is an ongoing series I started in order to teach Jill from the Northwoods how to move from an adequate Mac user [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":28070,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[147,6818],"tags":[3487,5840,1132,4106,5789,150,5839],"class_list":["post-28193","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog-posts","category-tiny-mac-tips","tag-copy-paste","tag-finder-search","tag-force-touch-trackpad","tag-haptic-feedback","tag-line-feed","tag-mac-tutorials","tag-taptic-engine"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/04\/Tiny-Tip-landscape-no-alpha.png","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28193","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28193"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28193\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":32288,"href":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28193\/revisions\/32288"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/28070"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28193"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28193"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28193"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}