Posts Tagged → field guides

Hazel 5 and the Next Hazel Field Guide


Hazel Icon 2020

With the release of Big Sur, Paul Kim released a brand new version of Hazel. Version 5 adds several new features. Just a few of them include:

  • Support for macOS Big Sur.

  • A standalone app form factor instead of a preference pane.

  • A pile of UI improvements making creating and organizing rules easier and better.

  • Way better match text tools

If you purchased Hazel 4 anytime during 2020, you can upgrade for free. Otherwise, the upgrade is $20. I paid immediately. I’ve received a lot of email about the Hazel Field Guide. With this new interface and toolset, I will be making a second edition Hazel Field Guide in early 2021. It will be a new purchase but have an upgrade price for prior customers. Stay tuned. 

Shortcuts Field Guide Update, Discount, and Free Shortcuts Webinar



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Are you ready for iOS 14? Because it is coming today. I have to admit when I got my popcorn for yesterday’s Apple event, I didn’t expect Tim to announce they are releasing iOS 14 the next day. Regardless, I’ve been working on an updated to the Shortcuts Field Guide and I’m pleased to announce it is already published.

I’ve added 16 videos and 48+ minutes of new content all about iOS 14 features. If you purchased last year’s Shortcuts Field Guide, this is a free update to that. Just log in to your course and the new material is already there. If you’d like to get onboard with the Shortcuts Field Guide, I’m discounting the price by $5 for a short time to celebrate the iOS 14 launch and Shortcuts Field Guide Update. Just go to the Shortcuts Field Guide Webpage and the price is discounted for a short time. Everything is downloadable and I’ve got the iOS 14 materials both integrated into the course, and collected together so no matter how you want to learn it, I’ve got you covered.

Also, on October 1, I’m putting on a free webinar where I’ll be going over all the big changes to Shortcuts with iOS 14. If you sign up but don’t make it to the webinar, you’ll still get a link to the video replay. I’ll, hopefully, see you at the Shortcuts Webinar.

Sign Up for My Free Keyboard Maestro Webinar



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For some time now I’ve been trying to increasingly work with my technology in terms of contexts, not apps. I don’t want to open the Mail App to check email. Instead, I want to open the mail app to look at my legal inbox and nothing else. I don’t want to open Safari to a home page. Instead, I want to open Safari to the specific page on my learn.macsparky platform that lets me manage customer support issues. Staying in context means avoiding getting sidetracked. It means checking the email in one account and not crashing into my email from every account. It means fixing a customer support problem without getting trapped by surfing dogs. (Yes. There are surfing dogs, and I love them.)

This idea started for me on the iPhone and quickly found its way to the iPad, using Shortcuts. Over the last few months, I’ve implemented this context-based computing on my Mac and it’s glorious. I’m pulling it all off with Keyboard Maestro. There are three areas in my life: Personal, MacSparky, and the legal practice. With just a few keyboard shortcuts I can perform all of my most common tasks in each area of my life in context using Keyboard Maestro.

Best of all, I’m going to share how I’m pulling this off in a free webinar on August 27. You can sign up now. It will be a fun event full of Keyboard Maestro scripts and tips. It will be the first Field Guide webinar and I’m putting a lot of effort into it. I hope to see you on August 27. 

If you’d like to see the webinar but can’t make it on August 27, go ahead and sign up. I’ll be sending out a link to watch a recording of the webinar afterward.

The AppleScript Email Extractor

I spent several hours putting together a super-nerdy Keyboard Maestro script that saves an Apple Mail message as a PDF and then uses some AppleScript to pull data out of the message and use it in the file name. I’ve already added the video, the Keyboard Maestro Script, and the AppleScript to the Keyboard Maestro Field Guide. Below you can watch the video and download the AppleScript here.

Fantastical 3.1 Releases and New Videos

Today Flexibits released a major update to Fantastical with version 3.1. This is the “working from home” update with a bunch of new features aimed at people surprised to find themselves working from home:

Time-Based Calendar Sets

Calendar sets have always been a cool feature. Now you can have them trigger automatically at a specific time of day.

Better Conference Calling

Fantastical’s Zoom integration is excellent. You can add a zoom call straight from the app. With this update, Fantastical can now auto-detect conference calls with several popular conferencing services, and it adds a one-click “join” button to your calendar (and your menubar) as the event approaches.

And More Improvements

They also added new Mac appearance options customized for both light and dark mode, added iMessage stickers, and made several other improvements and optimizations.

This is a free update for Fantastical subscribers. I made a few videos for Flexibits showing off the new features. Below is one, but you can find several more on Fantastical’s website. I like the way Flexibits has continued to release features of consequence since the app launch. I am using both the new time-based calendar sets and zoom integration daily. Learn more about Fantastical at their website.

If you subscribed to the Fantastical Field Guide, these new videos are also now available in the course for viewing and download.

Last Call for Introductory Pricing on the Photos Field Guide



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I have been thrilled with the warm reception for the Photos Field Guide. I didn’t know what to expect, releasing it during a pandemic, but the feedback has been excellent, and customers are writing to tell me how much better they are at taking, organizing, and finding their photos.

Now that all of the transcripts and the ePub are in place, it’s time for the last call on introductory pricing for the Photos Field Guide. The price will go up to $29 later this week. If you want in on the discount price, now is the time.

Photos Field Guide Transcripts

The Photos Field Guide now has all closed-captioning transcripts in place, along with a written transcript of each course located below each video. Hooray!

I am also trying something new with the Photos Field Guide. I have added a PDF and ePub version of the complete transcript. This is not a written Field Guide, but instead a compiled version of the transcripts that you can download and read, if that’s your thing. It’s all available now for existing customers. Log in and go crazy.

Announcing the New Photos Field Guide



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I am happy to announce the release of the all new Photos Field Guide. 

THE SHORT VERSION

  • 122 videos, fully streamable, plus combined versions for easier download.

  • Nearly six hours of video tutorials.

  • Full coverage for iPhone, iPad, and the Mac.

  • Everything is broken up and paced so novice to advanced users can get on board and master their photos.

Get it now with the introductory price.

THE LONG VERSION

This second edition of the Photos Field Guide contains nearly six hours of video tutorials that will up your photo game on your iPhone, iPad, and Mac. Over the years, organizing, editing, and sharing your photos with multiple devices have come to feel like chasing a mythical white whale. Not anymore. The Photos Field Guide delivers the goods, and this video course teaches you how. This course has in-depth video explaining how to get the most from the Photos app on the iPhone, iPad, and the Mac.

Please note the introductory price of $24 will go to $29 shortly after launch.

OVERVIEW AND LIBRARY MANAGEMENT

While Photos attempts to make your initial setup simple and easy, there can be complications. What if you have more than one existing photo library? What if you’ve got folders of photographs sprinkled all over your hard drive? All of these can be imported into Photos, but you’ve got to know the ropes. This video screencast shows you all kinds of tricks to run Photos on your Mac, iPad, and iPhone.

Photos also can use iCloud Photo Library to make sharing photos between your Mac, iPad, and iPhone so much easier. The Field Guide walks you through the initial iCloud setup, including advice on which cloud storage to use and how to get the initial upload of your photo library done with as little pain and suffering as possible.

TAKING PHOTOS

While “point-and-shoot” works amazingly well, you can do so much more when taking your photos with a modern iPhone. This section includes multiple videos explaining how you can take photos from portrait mode to panoramas. This section also includes some photography basics to get you up and running.

PHOTOGRAPHY ACCESSORIES

There are some great affordable and compact accessories to improve your iPhone photos. Learn about useful tripods, lenses, and lighting sources that fit in your pocket. 

PHOTOS ON THE IPHONE AND IPAD

Multiple sections and videos cover a complete soup-to-nuts treatment of how to take, organize, find, edit, and share your photos in the Photos app for iPhone and iPad. 

ORGANIZING PHOTOS

Photos uses an intuitive organizational structure that lets you see your pictures grouped in multiple ways. You have thousands of photos. Photos will make it easier to find your favorites. You can even search your library so if someone says, “Hey! Quick, find me that photo of Aunt Trudy from 2004 wearing that Juicy tracksuit!”, you can deliver the goods. This stuff sounds complicated. It’s not. By the time you get to the end of this video, you’ll be able to embarrass Aunt Trudy in no time flat.

EDITING PHOTOS

Photos also has a surprisingly large toolset to make your photos better. You can do simple edits, like cropping and rotating, but you can also make complex adjustments to color and light. On the Mac, there are even more tools including a histogram, sharpening, definition, noise reduction, vignette and level adjustments. If all of this sounds like greek to you now, that’s okay. After watching the video, it won’t.

The video also explains Photos’ built-in filters and how they can be an excellent jumping-off point for making your photos look great. It also covers the semi-magical “enhance” button. If that’s not enough, there are workflows to get your photos out of the Photos app and into an external editor for further work on the Mac, iPad, and iPhone.

SHARING PHOTOS

With the new Photos app, there are many ways to share your images with friends and family from something as simple as an email to full-blown shared iCloud albums. This section covers all of the sharing options.

PHOTOS ON THE MAC

All those cool tricks covered in the iPhone and iPad are also fully explained and demonstrated on the Mac. Learn how to organize, find, edit, and share your photos from the Mac just as easily as you can on the iPhone and iPad. 

VIDEO

Believe it or not, Photos can manage, edit, and share your video files too. This section covers the best practices for managing video files in Photos and its limited editing capabilities.

BACKUP

No photo management system is complete without a thorough backup system. The Photos Field Guide concludes explaining backup strategies and techniques. This section also demonstrates how to export images from Photos for additional backup.

THERE’S MORE!

There are more topics covered in this Photos Field Guide including a primer on digital photo formats, popular third-party photo applications, application settings for the Photos and Camera apps, and more. 

Get it now with the introductory price.