TextExpander (Sponsor)

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Why waste your time if you don’t have to? That’s why I’m such a fan of TextExpander, this week’s MacSparky sponsor.

Less tippety-taps from me? Oh, yes. Thank you. A word, a phrase, a sentence, a line, a string, or even a paragraph can be done in fewer keystrokes with TextExpander.

Say goodbye to repetitive text entry, spelling and message errors, and trying to remember the right thing to say. Better than copy and paste. Better than scripts and templates. We can streamline and speed up what we type. We can be more efficient, and we can be more productive.

And with TextExpander usable in any app, anywhere you type, you can do your time-saving across platforms. No one likes being repetitive so try TextExpander for 20% off your first year to see what it’s like to take your time back while doing less to write more.

Do Big Things With Your Small Business With Daylite (Sponsor)

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This week, MacSparky is sponsored by Daylite. For small businesses, it can be difficult to stay on top of clients, leads, and projects that are evolving every day. Stressful situations like these are where Daylite comes in clutch.

Daylite is a CRM built for Apple fans like us, made specifically for Mac, iPhone, and iPad. This native app helps you and your team execute more projects, take on more clients, and close more deals. It is fully compatible with Big Sur and M1-powered Macs, and is designed to work in tandem with go-to Apple features. For example, you can share contacts between Apple Contacts and your Daylite database, and use features like Siri and Caller ID on your iPhone. Daylite is able to create contracts and other documents in no time, by pulling data from Daylite into apps like Pages, Numbers, and Keynote. Additionally, Daylite includes full support for features like FaceID and TouchID.

Daylite takes you through the full customer lifecycle, making it easy for you to perform seamless handoffs between teams and departments without anything slipping through the cracks. Never miss a follow-up or worry about forgetting an important step in the project — Daylite keeps track of all the details for you and your team, so you can focus on growing your business.

Whether you’re in the legal, design, consulting, or other service-based industries, thousands of businesses trust Daylite to build stronger client relationships and grow their business! Daylite offers complimentary onboarding support to help new customers get started.

Ready to start scaling your business? Start your free 30-day Daylite trial today!

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Remap Your Mac with BetterTouchTool (Sponsor)

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This week MacSparky is sponsored by BetterTouchTool, the Mac App that gives your input devices superpowers. While Apple makes some excellent trackpads and mice, the built-in gestures are just a taste of what you could do with those devices. With BetterTouchTool, you can completely re-design your Touch Bar, configure various Magic Mouse and Trackpad gestures, define keyboard shortcuts, bind standard mouse buttons, use the Siri Remote with your Mac and do tons more.

You may know BetterTouchTool for its ability to hotwire your trackpad, but there are so many other uses. For example, you can reconfigure the Mac’s green window button. Apple sets that button to take the current window to full-screen mode, but I don’t want that. I used BetterTouchTool to make it maximize the current window without full-screen mode. (I also set a right-click on the green button to make it full screen with BetterTouchTool in the odd case I actually want that behavior.)

BetterTouchTool offers many actions to automate various tasks on your Mac. These can be assigned to any input-device trigger you choose. Additionally, it contains some handy features like window snapping, a clipboard manager, a screenshot editor, and much more. This app is an absolute game-changer. Also, you can now join the BetterTouchTool Community at community.folivora.ai to learn how to get even more from BetterTouchTool. Users have shared some amazing presets there, including some very advanced custom Touch Bar setups that you should check out.

BetterTouchTool comes with a 45-day trial after which you can choose between a license that includes all updates for two years and a lifetime license.

BetterTouchTool has been around for ten years, and I've been using it the entire time. With BetterTouchTool, I can make my Mac dance. You should too. MacSparky readers can purchase BetterTouchTool for 15% off at checkout by using the coupon code MACSPARKYBTT for a limited time. So don’t delay. Go to folivora.ai to learn more and take advantage of the special limited-time, 15% discount on BetterTouchTool.

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SaneBox (Sponsor)

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Have you given your emails the power to train you to respond to each ding or notification whenever a new email appears in your inbox? Did you know that you can have power over your emails and train your emails where to go so that you can save time and increase your focus? That’s what this week’s sponsor SaneBox can do for you.

SaneBox's AI will analyze your email history and learn what is important to you. Your email gets sorted so that important email arrive and stay in your Inbox while distractions arrive and are moved to your SaneLater folder. You can train emails using the SaneBox Digest, subject filters or domain filters, and you can train SaneBox simply by moving the email into SaneBlackHole using any email software. Get a $10 credit you can use towards a SaneBox subscription now and take your time and your power back.

Email Gets a Lot Easier with SaneBox

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I like having one less thing to deal with. SaneBox, MacSparky’s sponsor this week, helps me tremendously with this. People aren’t going to send you less emails, but with SaneBox, you can see your more important emails while the less important ones are moved out of your inbox. SaneBox’s AI and machine learning will filter into a separate folder and then summarize them in a digest so you don’t get overwhelmed but the number of emails and can focus on the things that really need your attention.

Imagine, instead of checking and managing work-related emails, and having to recover your productivity from an email interruption, or not having to ask yourself, “What was I doing?”, you could just get stuff done. With our SaneBox robot friends, you can:

  • Wake up every day to find the SaneBox robots have automatically sorted your incoming email for you so you can address the important and ignore the irrelevant. 

  • Defer email for hours, days, or weeks, so it is out of your life until a more appropriate time. They’ve even added a new feature that can optionally auto-reply to snoozed email with something like, “I’m sorry, but I'm underwater right now. I’ll get back to you in a few days.” SaneBox can even auto-reply when you defer an email.

  • Set secret reminders so if someone doesn’t reply to an important email, SaneBox gives you a nudge to follow up.

  • Automatically save attachments to the cloud (like Dropbox).

  • Use their SaneForward service to automatically send appropriate emails to services like Evernote, Expensify, and Kayak.

  • Move unwanted email to the SaneBlackHole and never see anything from that person again.

I love SaneBox and other MacSparky readers have let me know that they do too. Get your time back and try SaneBox today.

TextExpander for Teams For the Win (Sponsor)

This week MacSparky is sponsored by TextExpander from Smile. In our fast-paced world, things change constantly — and errors in messaging often have significant consequences.

TextExpander lets you make new approved messaging available to every team member instantly with just a few keystrokes, ensuring your team remains consistent, current, and accurate.

Get your message right every time: expand the content that corrects your spelling and keeps your language consistent with just a few keystrokes.

Your team members will consistently know the right message for the right person at the right time, without relying on memory or copy and paste.

I pay for a team account with TextExpander for my assistant and me. We both make changes to the critical snippets as needed, and we both benefit from that work. The more people you’ve got writing on your team, the more useful this gets.

You can get 20% off your first year. Just head over to TextExpander from Smile and sign up.

Automate Documents in DEVONthink (Sponsor)

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A lot of folks know that DEVONthink, this week’s MacSparky sponsor, excels at bringing artificial intelligence to your documents and research, but did you also know DEVONthink has a killer set of automation tools? Over the last few years, DEVONthink has added some powerful features that make automating your DEVONthink library a snap.

  • The app can install scripts in Apple Mail to save email messages to your DEVONthink library with link backs to Apple Mail.

  • You can build smart folders that automatically collect documents around parameters you (or the DEVONthink A. I.) sets.

  • There is now built-in document automation called Smart Rules that lets you move, sort, rename, tag, index, and perform just about any other action in the DEVONthink arsenal automatically. The below screenshot shows a list of available triggers to give you an idea. This is a relatively new feature that a lot of experienced DEVONthink users don’t even realize exists.

  • You can build template documents and generate them right out of DEVONthink.

  • The mobile version, DEVONthink To Go, supports Shortcuts and mobile automation.

I always appreciate it when developers spend time trying to take the tedium out of their apps, and the DEVONthink developers have delivered on this over the past few years in a big way. If you haven’t checked out DEVONthink yet (or looked at it lately), you should.

You can think of DEVONthink as your paperless office. You can automate your workflow from capture to filing, editing to publishing. It stores all your documents, helps you keep them organized, and presents you with what you need to get the job done.

Interested? MacSparky readers can get a 20% discount on DEVONthink. Use the code MACSPARKY2021 at checkout. This offer has been extended and now ends on December 31, 2021.

Track Your Time with Timing (Sponsor)

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This week MacSparky is sponsored by Timing. Timing is an automatic time- tracking app. It lets you see where your time spent without having to lift a finger.

So why should you track your time? One reason may be for your job. Maybe you charge clients by your time or need to report to your boss where you spend your time. But there are a lot more reasons to track your time. Tracking your time gives you a realistic picture of where you are spending (and wasting) your time. With good time-tracking data, you can make better decisions about where to make commitments, where to delegate, and realistically see how you’re doing.

Timing scratches all of these itches. With Timing, you instantly see how you are spending your time. It helps you work more productively and make smarter decisions about how to spend your time in the future.

We all know that tracking your time is key to being productive, but it’s hard to track your time if you’re doing a bunch of different things at once or don’t have the right tools.

The Timing app makes recording and reviewing your time easy with automatic tracking and a simple interface for adding details about what you did each day, so you can see how much time was spent on each task. Timing also now has a useful teams feature, letting you share project and time entries in a privacy-friendly fashion. This gives you valuable team data without being creepy.

I run Timing on my Mac every day, and you should too. I even made some screencasts on how I use Timing. Download the free 14-day trial today and get 10% off for the first year!

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Make Yoink Your Shelf (Sponsor)

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This week MacSparky is sponsored by Yoink (Website) (for Mac) (for iOS). Dragging and dropping files from one place to another is a common task, but it's not that easy.

You have to click on the file you want to move, drag it over the destination of your choice and drop it there. This can be done if you're lucky enough to land in just the right spot and you have just the right windows open next to each other. You also have to do this while looking at your monitor, which means that every time you are dragging something around, you are distracted from what else might be happening in front of your eyes. Moving files shouldn't feel like defusing a bomb.

Yoink allows users to easily drag & drop items, getting files exactly where they belong, and without you having to have everything set "just right" in advance. They have a version for Mac, iPhone, and iPad and I use it daily. Everybody needs a shelf. Make your technology shelf Yoink.

There are several reasons I chose Yoink over its competitors. First, I like the design. It looks nice but also gets out of the way when I’m not using it. Second, Yoink has been around a while and it has both stability and a rich set of features. If you need a shelf app that won’t let you down, get Yoink.

Yoink’s developer also has two other useful apps, ScreenFloat (a screenshot utility) and Transloader (a download utility). You can get a bundle with all three apps in the App Store.

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TextExpander for Text Automation (Sponsor)

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This week MacSparky.com is sponsored by TextExpander, the easiest way to start automating your work on Mac, iPad, and iPhone. TextExpander is a text replacement tool. With it, you can type a phrase like “ccell” and it will automatically fill in your cell phone number. But TextExpander is so much more than that.

Using TextExpander, you can have it automatically create the date and time. For example, when I talk with someone on the phone related to the day job and want to keep notes about the conversation, I just type “xdts” which, in my head, means date and time string. Then TextExpander automatically creates something like this, "2021-03-06 09:14". If I need to put the full date in a letter, I just type “fdate” and TextExpander puts in the current date, like this, "March 6, 2021".

But TextExpander can still go deeper. It can use the contents of your clipboard to auto-fill in snippets. It can press keyboard keys, like the tab key, to automate filling in forms on the web or creating an email. You can get it for yourself and your team members so you can share snippets with your team members. I pay for a team account and we use it from MacSparky headquarters to handle Field Guide customer support email. We can make changes to shared snippets and everyone gets updated.

To learn more, head over to TextExpander.com and let them know you heard about it at MacSparky in the “Where did you hear about us” field.

SaneReminders For the Win (Sponsor)

This week MacSparky is sponsored by SaneBox, the power tools you can add to any email application. SaneBox brings a pile of tools to your email, making it easier to manage and conquer your email. One of my favorite features is SaneReminders.

Have you ever sent an email to someone asking “Where is that thing?” and then struggled to figure out how to follow up on that? Do you add a task to your task system? (Too time-consuming and tedious.) Do you just hope you’ll remember to follow up? (Too unreliable.) There really wasn’t a good solution to this problem, until SaneReminders.

With SaneReminders, any time you want to do one of those follow-up emails, you just copy (or blind copy) the email to some increment of time at SaneBox.com. For example 2days@SaneBox.com or Monday@SaneBox.com. The SaneBox robot then tracks that email you sent. If your recipient replies before the designated day, SaneBox assumes you got an answer to “Where is that thing” and leaves you alone. If, however, there is no reply to that email, SaneBox sends you a reminder telling you that you never got a reply. In the amount of time it took you to fill in a BCC field, you solved the email reminder problem, with SaneBox. I use this feature multiple times a day.

If you’d like to get SaneBox at your back, go check it out today. You won’t regret it.

SaneBox - A.I. For Your Email (Sponsor)

The term Artificial Intelligence is thrown around so much these days that it should be a drinking game. Lots of folks talk about it, but there are few places where you can see it working for you. One of those, however, is this week’s sponsor, SaneBox. SaneBox is like having a robot to manage your email. Imagine for a moment that instead of waking up to 200 items in your inbox, you wake up to five, and those five are the most critical emails that you need to read. You can have that experience with SaneBox.

SaneBox is the solution to so many of my email problems. What if you had an assistant who worked for you 24/7 that did nothing but sort and manage your email? Wouldn’t that be nice? That is what SaneBox does. SaneBox is the email service that adds a pile of productivity features to your email, regardless of what email client you use. For a lot of folks, email is a constant pain point, and it doesn’t need to be. With SaneBox at your back, you can:

  • Wake up every day to find the SaneBox robots have automatically sorted your incoming email for you so you can address the important and ignore the irrelevant.

  • Defer email for hours, days, or weeks, so it is out of your life until a more appropriate time. They have even added a new feature that can optionally auto-reply to snoozed email with something like, “I’m sorry, but I'm underwater right now. I’ll get back to you in a few days.”

  • Set secret reminders so if someone doesn’t reply to an important email, SaneBox gives you a nudge to follow up.

  • Automatically save attachments to the cloud (like Dropbox).

  • Use their SaneFwd service to automatically send appropriate emails to services such as Evernote, Expensify, or Kayak.

  • Move unwanted email to the SaneBlackHole and never see anything from that person again.

The list goes on, and MacSparky readers love this service. I have heard from so many readers over the years who finally figured out email when they signed up for SaneBox. Why not straighten out your email by getting a SaneBox account? If you sign up with this link, you even get a discount on your subscription. Want to learn more? Check out this video.

PowerPhotos for Apple Photos Power Tools (Sponsor)

My thanks to PowerPhotos for sponsoring MacSparky. It’s a new year and a fresh opportunity to wrangle you Photos Library. PowerPhotos is the app that will help you do just that.With PowerPhotos, you can manage images across multiple libraries. Need to merge libraries? It does that. Need to split images into a separate library? It does that too. I use PowerPhotos to remove duplicates. Whatever your Photos challenge, PowerPhotos can help you get your photo collection back in order.

With the recent release of version 1.9, PowerPhotos supports macOS Big Sur and runs natively on Apple Silicon. It also added a new feature, making it possible to copy RAW+JPG pairs as a single item, making everything all that much easier.

PowerPhotos gives Apple Photos the tools it needs, but Apple didn’t provide. With PowerPhotos, you can work with multiple Photos libraries and store them wherever you want, including on an external drive or a network drive. You can also split up your giant library into smaller ones by copying photos and albums with a simple drag and drop, preserving metadata such as descriptions and keywords along the way. Or, if you already have multiple libraries, use PowerPhotos to merge them while weeding out duplicates along the way. PowerPhotos also features a powerful duplicate photo finder, a browser to let you see your photos without even opening up Photos itself, a multi-library search feature, and more.

MacSparky readers can use the coupon code MACSPARKY20 to save 20% off a purchase of PowerPhotos. Go check out PowerPhotos today.

PowerPhotos Duplicate Tool

PowerPhotos Duplicate Tool