Email the Author

About the Book

You can head off into the wilds of Sierra with confidence when you’re equipped with Mac expert Scholle McFarland’s detailed “What's New in Sierra” list. In this Sierra Crash Course, she also teaches you about big new Sierra features like Siri, app tabs, Desktop and Documents folder syncing, Universal Clipboard, and Apple Pay in Safari, and. Particularly important is the book’s discussion of Optimized Storage, which can save a lot of space on a Mac with a small drive, but should be enabled only when you understand its implications.

Nonetheless, our favorite chapter is “Discover the Little Things in Sierra,” which explains keeping folders on top of file listings, new text shortcut features, link and video previews in Messages, Picture in Picture, and the somewhat involved steps for setting up Auto Unlock with an Apple Watch. Don't miss Scholle's troubleshooting advice, which covers a wide range of misbehavior, from a frozen app to a frozen Mac.

If you’re upgrading to Sierra from an older version of OS X or just haven’t taken advantage of what has come down the pike in the last few revisions, you’ll benefit from the book’s coverage of core Mac topics. Thanks to a magazine-like layout with lots of steps, lists, and screenshots, you can find just the info you need, whether it involves customizing the Dock, configuring Notification Center to be useful, pinning tabs in Safari, understanding iCloud Drive, or any one of a myriad other helpful subjects.

Whether you want to browse for a few tips or go deep, you'll learn about...

• The hidden trick to getting your Mac to respond to “Hey, Siri!”
• All the things Siri can do for you on the Mac
• Improving your writing with Sierra’s new text shortcuts
• How to watch a video—even from YouTube!—while you pretend to get work done
• The steps necessary to set your Apple Watch up to unlock your Mac automatically
• Using Apple Pay with an iPhone—while shopping online in Safari on your Mac
• How to sort folders on top of files in Finder windows… Or not.
• The best ways to work with Sierra’s new tabs in apps beyond Safari and the Finder
• Using Handoff to move a task from your Mac to your iPhone, or vice-versa
• How to choose the best position for your Dock
• Moving data between your Apple devices with Universal Clipboard
• Understanding where your Desktop and Documents folders go when synced
• How you access synced Desktop and Documents folders from other devices and older Macs
• What to do if your Mac won't turn on, if you get the spinning beachball of death, or if you need to repair your disk—and how to easily find out if your Mac still has AppleCare
• And much more!

Crash course? As part of our Crash Course series, this book splits the first-rate content you expect from us into short chunks so you can dip in and read quickly. Take Control Crash Courses have a modern, magazine-like layout in PDF while retaining a reflowable design in the EPUB and Mobi versions.

About the Author

Scholle Sawyer McFarland

@schollem

Scholle (“Sholly”) has been covering the Mac since 1996 as an editor at MacUser magazine and then Macworld. During that time, she witnessed Apple transform from everyone’s favorite “doomed” company to everyone’s actually favorite company and is still amazed by the whole thing. When she’s not working as a freelance writer and editor, Scholle likes to hang out with her family, friends, and many animals in beautiful Portland, Oregon.