iMac Questions

iMac Questions: a reader asks…

I recently switched from Windows PC to a new iMac. Can you answer these questions? 1) Can I get the time to always be visible at the top of the display? 2) I enlarged iTunes (accidentally) to fill the whole screen, but I cannot figure out how to make it smaller. 3) How do I add to favorites?

For your first question, the time should always be visible at the top-right corner of the screen. The only time this wouldn’t be the case is if you run an app in full-screen mode. So I think it relates to your second question. For your second question, if you are in full-screen mode with iTunes (or any program), here’s how you get out of that mode:

1. Hover your mouse cursor near the very top of the Mac screen until the menu bar and window bar show up
2. Click on the newly visible green button in the upper left corner to exit out of Full Screen Mode

For your third question, in Safari, what you call “Favorites” are actually called “Bookmarks” (Microsoft calls them “Favorites” while Chrome and Firefox use the more standard moniker “bookmarks”). There are several ways to add bookmarks:

1. Click the universal “Share” icon (square with an up arrow pointing out the top), and click Add Bookmark
2. If your bookmarks sidebar is showing on the left-side, you can click, hold and drag the URL in the top-center of the window down to the sidebar area to add a bookmark

In addition to bookmarks, Safari has two other similar features:

1. “Favorites” are the sites that appear in the window when you open a new tab. Those sites (shown as small-scale icons in a grid on the page) are your most-recently or most-often viewed websites
2. “Reading List” is a list of web pages that you’ve marked for reading later, but they are not intended to be as persistent/permanent as bookmarks.
   • To add to the reading list, place your cursor in the URL box at the top-center of the window and a plus sign will appear on the left. Click that to add the site to your reading list.
   • Once you click on that entry in your reading list, you go to the site so you can read it.
   • The reading list is also made available offline so you can look at web pages even when not connected to the internet. You can clear an entry (or the entire list) from the Reading List by right-clicking (two-finger tap/click) on any reading list entry.

Controls for how your desktop display acts and looks, and a whole lot more are in the System Preferences applet (the gear icon). To help you get familiarized with how your iMac works, I find YouTube videos to be a treasure trove of information, well worth watching at least a few.  Here’s a couple of my favorites on this subject:

Thanks to YouTuber A.C. Guevara for that fast-talking video, and 9to5mac.com for the second one. Don’t be worried too much about the age of the Mac tutorials, even tutorials that are several years old can still be relevant – Apple doesn’t make drastic changes to the basics and tries to be fairly consistent with updated versions of the MacOS (formerly OS X) operating system. It’s well worth a small investment in time looking through some of the YouTube videos for tips on using your new iMac. I would open YouTube.com and search on “MacOS Beginner” to see a good selection of videos. After you’ve covered the basics, you could also check out some more advanced tips, such as this one: