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.

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Innovating when You’re Big

Yesterday Apple had a good day. They reported 2021 Q1 income and things are going gangbusters. $111 Billion (with a B) in one quarter. Moreover, Apple now reports 1 Billion active iPhone users. It’s all nuts.

Success like that makes it hard to innovate. Everything has to be at such a scale that you can’t afford to make any mistakes. That is one of the reasons I’ve been so fascinated with the recent Mac renaissance and Apple Silicon. It seems right now that the Mac is where Apple can take risks. Hopefully, they do.

Retaining Knowledge with Readwise.io

I read a lot in areas ranging from the finer points of cooking gumbo to recent developments in California trade secret law. For a long time now, I’ve done this reading digitally. I read long-form articles in Instapaper and books in the Kindle app on my iPad or directly on a Kindle device.

I have friends who lament about reading books digitally. They tell me about the experience of reading paper books and feeling the weight of it in your hand. I remember when paper books were the only option, and I remember their weight alright. I remember how heavy my bag was with three or four books in it back in the day. I also remember how frustrating it was when I carried all of those books only to find I left the book I needed at home. So I am fully invested in the idea of digital books. I don’t need the feel of them, I just need them to be with me.

The convenience of digital books took on a new level for me recently with my subscription to Readwise.io. Readwise is an online service that can sync with your Amazon Kindle account. Readwise can then look at your Kindle books and collect all of your highlights from a book. You can then export your highlights as a Markdown file to add to your research notes on the book (or use any other way that makes sense to collect highlights).

My workflow is:

Read the book, making digital highlights.
Collect and export the highlights from Readwise.io to my notes app.
Read the highlights and make a second set of highlights of the highlights.
Summarize critical points in my own words.

In addition to automatically collecting highlights from my Kindle account, it does the same thing with everything I’ve highlighted in the Instapaper app. There are several more connected services, including Pocket, Medium, Hypothesis, Goodreads, Airr, Feedly, Apple Books, and Twitter. They even have a way to save to Readwise with an extension on iOS. If you’ve read other books without digitally highlighting them, Readwise can share a list of their most common highlights from that book as well.

Another cool Readwise feature is the option to send you a daily email with a collection of highlights from all of your resources. Every morning, I spend a few minutes looking through this list at ideas I thought were important enough to highlight. It’s one more way Readwise helps you retain what you’ve learned.

The system is all digital, all searchable, and always with me. I’ve done variations of this since I was in college in the ’80s. This is, by far, the best implementation.

TextSniper — Screenshot to OCR Tool

I occasionally run into the problem where I need to get some text from an image, document, or website that does not provide for copy and paste. My old tool for pulling text out of screenshots stopped getting updates, so I went looking for new tools and settled on TextSniper (App Store)(website). TextSniper lets you take a screenshot of anything on your screen and pulls out the text, adding it to your clipboard.

It does a good job with the OCR. In the screenshot gallery below, you can see the screenshot and the resulting text pasted into Drafts. I found turning off the “Keep Line Breaks” option works better for me. Regardless, I’m happy to have a new actively developed tool for just this problem.

$20 MagSafe Charging Stand

With CES this month, many companies have announced new MagSafe accessories on the way, including several expensive charging stands. I’ve gone a little more budget to solve this problem with this MagSafe charging stand I bought off Amazon for <$20. It’s a bent piece of metal (aluminum?) with a slot cut in the middle and a rubber piece glued on with a perfectly shaped MagSafe charger hole in the middle.

All I had to do was take my existing MagSafe charger, feed the cable through the slot, and press the MagSafe puck into the MagSafe puck-sized hole. It’s no more than a stand for the existing MagSafe charger, but it works great. The magnet in the MagSafe charger is plenty strong to hold the iPhone. It isn’t as elegant as a built-together device in that the cable most definitely does hang out the back.

Regardless, it looks great. It doesn’t cost much, and it’s available now.

Mac Power Users 572: iPhone & iPad Tips

As the iPhone and iPad have become more full-featured, the software that runs them has gotten more complex and powerful. On the latest episode of Mac Power Users, Stephen and I run though a whole bunch of our favorite ways to get more out of these devices.

This episode of Mac Power Users is sponsored by:

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Guest on Decision Vision, with Mike Blake

I joined Mike Blake on the podcast Decision Vision. We discuss, among other things, the question, “Should I have a podcast?” If you’re interested in how the sausage is made, have a listen.

The Omni Group 2021 Roadmap

The Omni Group has published its annual roadmap, where it looks back on what it shipped the prior year and forward to what it intends to ship in the next year. Most interesting to me is that they are embracing the relatively new SwiftUI technologies to bring more power (and less mode switching) to their mobile apps. Seeing such a significant Apple ecosystem developer embrace SwiftIUI is encouraging.

ThoughtAsylum Icon Generator

Stephen Millard has made an ingenious shortcut that solves the problem of generating icons. The particular itch that Stephen was trying to scratch was the development of icons for his Stream Deck. However, if you do any automation, you’re constantly bumping into places that you’d like to have icons. One of the things I particularly like about Stephen’s solution is the way it works with Apple’s SF Symbols, which I like.
Either way, if you want to render 10 or 10,000 icons this weekend, check this out.

Rumored New MacBook Air

Mark Gurman is back, this time with a rumored new MacBook Air design in the works for later this year or next year. The goal is thinner and lighter with a smaller bezel. The MacBook Air is already pretty thin and light, but it really isn’t that much lighter than the 13” MacBook Pro. (2.8 vs. 3.1 pounds).

Either way, it appears the Macintosh Renaissance is in full swing. If you are thinking about getting a new Mac, but in no particular hurry, I’d recommend waiting a year. I expect the entire line of options will be different a year from now.