Apple announced the new, long-awaited MacPro. Major new macOS, iOS, watchOS and tvOS shipping soon. And now, Jony Ive leaving Apple. Apple announced the new, long-awaited MacPro. Major new macOS, iOS, watchOS and tvOS shipping soon. And now, Jony Ive leaving Apple. There’s a whole lot of change in the Apple world right now. For just shy of 20 years, I’ve been blogging about graphic design, Adobe products and Apple in general. It started at my personal blog (originally named “CreativeGuy,” where I gained quite a nice little following. That lead to writing for other sites like CreativeBi ..read more

I don’t see my screensaver come on very often, but when I do I prefer to see something gorgeous. I use an official Apple screensaver, which I “acquired” some time ago. I also use the Apple TV Flyover screensaver. But I came across this beauty and felt it was worth having. Brooklyn is a free screensaver of a real artsy-fartsy Apple logo. Actually, it’s over 60 different Apple logo animations in one screensaver. You can choose which ones you want to appear when your screensaver activates. It’s quite cool. Download it, double-click it. Done ..read more

If there’s one type of file worth collecting, it’s really nice 3D mockups for showing off logo designs and corporate identity. Download this photo-realistic Paper Bag PSD from MrMockup. Simply double-click the smart object in the PSD to add your logo or artwork ..read more

I’m a huge fan of Bartender, the $15 menubar manager that, among other things, allows you to hide the icons for apps that live in the macOS menubar. A cluttered menubar drives me crazy, and so does not having control over the order of their appearance in the menubar regardless of how many there are. But $15 may be a bit much for some people, particularly those who simply want to hide a few of the menubar icons and don’t need the other features found in Bartender. Enter Dozer, a free and open source utility that does only one thing—it allows you to choose which icons are hidden be ..read more

VideoDuke is a powerful video downloader which downloads YouTube, Dailymotion, and Vimeo videos to your Mac as well as videos from many other websites. Downloading videos (or the audio contained within the video) is something I suspect we all wish we could do often. VideoDuke handles this with ease, saving audio and video files in numerous formats. It also allows you to download entire YouTube Playlists and Channels. VideoDuke has browser integration in the form of a bookmarklet you save in your bookmarks/favorites bar. When you come across a video you want to save, you simply choose ..read more

While not a killer feature of macOS Mojave, Dynamic Wallpapers are a cool customization tool limited only by the fact that Apple only provides two, and offers no built-in way to create your own. Dynapaper changes that. Dynapaper allows you to create dynamic wallpapers with a simple drag-and-drop interface and save them in the required HEIC format for use in the Mac’s Desktop & Screensaver Preference Panel. Dynapaper is free to download and use, but does add a watermark to your image. A $12 in-app purchase will remove the watermark. To be honest, though, I couldn’t find a water ..read more

Use TouchSwitcher to launch and switch between apps on the new MacBook Pro with TouchBar. The most recent apps are right next to the TouchSwitcher icon. Juggling several apps is fast and easy. I’m not sure if it’s easier than using the Dock or not, but it’s worth trying for yourself. TouchSwitcher is free, however tips are happily accepted. Download TouchSwitcher Here ..read more

Learn what DPI is and when you should and shouldn’t worry about it. “DPI is used to calculate physical measurements. Printers, for example, don’t work in pixels, so we need a way of translating our content on screen—pixel dimensions—to a printable format. Thus we have the dots-per-inch measurement, which defines the print density and bridges the physical measurement of inches with our digital pixel resolutions.” Understanding DPI, by James Ritson for the Affinity Spotlight blog, is probably the best, easiest to understand explanation I’ve come across. So if you’re confused between DP ..read more

The hacking of macOS Mojave’s Light and Dark Modes continues. Today I found an app that allows you to run apps in Light Mode and Dark Mode side-by-side. Gray is a simple little app that just enters a Terminal command that tells the system to run this app or that in Light or Dark Mode. There’s no altering of system files in any way. So if you want to run Mail in Light Mode, and Notes in Dark Mode, Gray is your app. And it’s free ..read more

If you work on any sort of project that has editorial content, the writer, your client, or someone involved in providing the text content is likely to ask you for a word count. For many designers, that means copy & pasting some bogus text from the design into an app like MS Word or Apple Pages to get a character, word, or paragraph count. That’s just silly and unproductive. Simply hit F6 or open the InDesign Info Panel manually by visiting the menubar Window>Info. Now all you need to do is click in any text box with the Text Tool active and take a look at the Info Panel. A ..read more