At our 7th August meeting, DaveK and Robert demonstrated Accessibility Shortcut on iPhone and some other Accessibility features, Liz and Robert talked about her recent upgrade to an M4 Mac mini.
Accessibility Shortcut
DaveK and Robert demonstrated the Accessibility Shortcut feature on iPhone which allows accessibility features you select to be easily toggled on and off from a menu.
They also demonstrated the Voice Control and VoiceOver features in more detail.
Ferrers mentioned that VoiceOver was championed by Mike Sheebanek at Apple and DaveK found this podcast about it.
M4 Mac mini upgrade
Liz had recently upgraded to an M4 Mac mini and Robert helped her to set it up. They talked about the process of choosing the Mac, and how the migration from her old iMac went.
Robert highlighted the time taken to migrate the data and the big improvement in performance achieved by restoring from a Time Machine backup on an NVMe SSD (even one in a basic 10Gbps enclosure) over a traditional hard drive.
Some of the other equipment mentioned was:
- The Benq MA270S 5K monitor that the supports the Mac mini via Thunderbolt and the Power Mac G5 Liz wants to continue to use (via an DVI-HDMI cable).
- 2m Thunderbolt 4 cable for the monitor to reach the Mac mini in the desired location (the monitor comes with a 1m cable).
- USB-A to USB-C adapters to allow existing USB devices to be connected to the Mac.
Member Topics
- During the meeting we experimented with the Zoom’s options to show the presenter while screensharing. Ferrers showed us the “Show Zoom windows” option which makes Zoom windows and also the Mac menu bar visible in the share.
- Ferrers mentioned Jettison a utility to assist with ejecting external disks on Mac.
- Ferrers cleaned the wheel on his Logitech MX Master mouse using this tip from an YouTube short.
- Ferrers recommended the screenshot tool Shottr which includes text and QR code recognition features. He also mentioned TextSniper as another option for extracting text from anywhere on-screen.
- Ben mentioned that a problem he was having with Apple Watch charging notifications not displaying on the iPhone seems to be fixed in the lastet 26 OS releases.
- DaveK talked about the CoreImage filters available to developers.