This week MacSparky has a new sponsor, Jamf Now. Managing your Apple hardware should not be something you need to spend a lot of time on and no longer demands a full, dedicated team. Jamf Now democratizes the process of Apple device management.

With Jamf Now you can manage your team’s Apple hardware, so everyone has what they need to get the job done without you being invasive and inhibiting work. Jamf uncomplicates Apple device enrollment, deployment and management so you can have everyone up and running without breaking the bank.

Apple products unlock a lot of productivity and potential if managed right. Jamf Now makes that possible. If you are using Apple hardware with a team, go check it out today.

Time is your most precious resource. You need to know how you are spending it.
But time tracking is no fun, especially when you forget to start or stop a timer.
What’s more, having to worry about starting timers all the time makes you lose focus quickly.

Enter Timing.

Timing automatically tracks which apps, documents and websites you use — without start/stop timers.

See how you spend your time, eliminate distracting activities, and improve your client billing.

It’s like Screen Time on steroids.

Timing lets you stop worrying about time and focus on doing your best work instead.

Timing also offers a web app to track time from anywhere, not to mention the ability to seamlessly sync data across all your Macs.

The Timing team even offers a set of Siri shortcuts to start and stop timers as quickly as possible.

And if you spend a lot of time in meetings, you will be delighted by Timing’s ability to record time for calendar events with a single click.

Not convinced yet? Read what David himself has to say about Timing. (Spoiler alert: He likes it, and it helps him be more productive.) Or download the free 14-day trial today and get 10% off for the first year!

PowerPhotos is sponsoring MacSparky.com this week and this is the perfect time to pick it up and start cleaning up your Apple Photos library. I use Apple Photos for all of my photo management but there are certain features that are just too close to the “power user” end of the spectrum for Apple to ever ship them with Apple Photos.

That’s where PowerPhotos comes in. If you have photos scattered across multiple libraries that you want to merge together, have a library that you want to split up because it’s gotten too large, or want to get rid of duplicate photos, PowerPhotos can help you get your photo collection back in order.

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.

PowerPhotos has all those tools you’d want for Apple Photos but Apple will never add. As we head into the new year, why not take control of your Photos library with PowerPhotos? You may recall an app from the iPhoto days called iPhoto Library Manager that gave you a similar set of tools. PowerPhotos is by the same developer, and it’s just as reliable.

So go check out PowerPhotos today.

This week MacSparky was sponsored by SaneBox, the email service that can help you get control of your inbox. For a lot of folks, email is a constant pain, and it doesn’t need to be. With SaneBox, you add a powerful set of email tools that can work in just about any email client. SaneBox allows you to:

• Wake up everyday to find that 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.

• 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 such as Evernote, Expensify, and Kayak.

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

One of the best parts about SaneBox being a web services is that it works no matter which mail application you prefer. If you want to jump between different mail apps on your iPad, no problem. SaneBox is a set of tools that will move with you between different applications on different platforms with no trouble at all.

Why not straighten out your email today? I’ve been a paying subscriber for years and can’t imagine getting by without it. If you sign up with this link, you even get a discount off your subscription.

This week MacSparky is sponsored by the Omni Group and their latest version of OmniFocus for the iPhone and iPad, OmniFocus 3. It’s so appropriate that OmniFocus is sponsoring this week because I have been running around like a crazy man between the two jobs this week. Many podcast recordings. Many legal irons in the fire. I am not going crazy, however. That is because of OmniFocus and the way it helps me hold things together. OmniFocus is the task manager that keeps on giving. Just a few of the OmniFocus Features:

• Tags! Make them for people, energy level, priority, location, or whatever floats your boat.

• The Forecast view now shows your tasks and calendar events in order, so you can better see what’s coming up in your day and adjust if needed.

• Enhanced repeating tasks are easier than ever to set up and they work with real-world examples, such as the first weekday of the month.

• Batch editing has been brought over from the Mac, and it lets you set due dates, tags, and other data for multiple tasks all at once.

• Flexible inspectors now allow you to show only the features you use and reorder them, so your favorites are where you want them.

There is a bunch more. Just try it for yourself. Also, did you know that the Omni Group has world-class support? If you need help, they even have an 800 number. To learn more, head over to the OmniFocus website and get started.

This week MacSparky is sponsored by Ulysses, the powerful, yet simple-to-use, writing app for all of the Apple platforms. With the release of iOS 13 and the new iPadOS, Ulysses was there on day one. The latest version 18 includes all the great new features, including support for Dark Mode and the system Split View on iPad. The Ulysses team has also made the application less dependent on iCloud. If you want, now you can sync your Ulysses library in Dropbox without functional compromises.

I am a fan of this application. I use it for all of my significant writing projects. Indeed, this is very post was written in Ulysses. The reason I like it so much is the combination of power and simplicity. The developers are opinionated and have built a beautiful application that’s fun to write in. At the same time, they have not overloaded it with bells and whistles to such an extent that it gets in the way of your writing. It’s just the perfect balance for me. If you haven’t checked out Ulysses, you should. If you sign up with the links in this blog post, you’ll even get three months of Ulysses for free.

This week MacSparky is sponsored by TextExpander. Copy and paste is an inefficient way to keep track of the things you type again and again. TextExpander makes you more productive by taking care of all those words and phrases for you. TextExpander works in all your apps so you can use it everywhere, like Microsoft Word and Excel, Adobe Illustrator and InDesign, and Apple’s Pages.

TextExpander does way more than that. With TextExpander you’ll see your snippets everywhere. It syncs between your Mac, iPhone, iPad, and Windows PC instantly.

They’ve got free snippet groups for all sorts of folks including job recruiters, freelancers, airport codes, brand names, and more at the TextExpander website (or you can download some of mine).

TextExpander even lets you run AppleScripts. For example, I use TextExpander to auto address emails with Apple Mail.

Best of all, with TextExpander you don’t have to work alone: TextExpander for Teams lets you manage and share snippets with your coworkers or the entire company. Use this link to get 20% off. 

My thanks to BetterTouchTool for sponsoring MacSparky this week. BetterTouchTool takes your mouse, trackpad, and just about every other input device and makes them way better. Apple’s 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.

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. It even includes a free iOS app to control your Mac and trigger actions remotely. If you have a MacBook or MacBook Pro, this app is an absolute game-changer.

For example, when I click the bottom right corner of my trackpad, the currently active window gets resized to the right side of the screen. (I also do the same on the left side.) This little gesture is just one step in BetterTouchTool, but for me, it’s second nature, and I use it countless times a day.

Recently, the BetterTouchTool added a community website at community.folivora.ai. 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 nine years, and I’ve used it since the beginning. 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.

This week MacSparky is sponsored by SaneBox, the email service that can add a boatload of features to any email application. Using SaneBox you can get your email auto-sorted for you, defer it, and even get reminders when people don’t reply to important email. The feature I’d like to cover today, however, is the SaneBlackHole.

Have you ever received emails from a pest that just doesn’t know when to quit? I’m not talking about SPAM here, but instead a real person that just keeps bugging you. Just this morning I received the third email in three days from a blogger that wants to do “friendly cross-posts”. I declined in a reply to his first email but that didn’t stop him. They just keep coming. Today’s email started out, “Just in case you missed my earlier email about this important opportunity for you …” So today I unceremoniously dumped his email in the SaneBlackHole. Now, when I get any future email from that person, they go straight into the black hole and I’ll never see them again.

Maybe you’ve got someone in your life that needs to be dropped in the black hole. SaneBox can help you with that.

Why not straighten out your email by getting a SaneBox account today. If you sign up with this link, you even get a discount on your subscription.

This week, MacSparky is sponsored by OmniFocus, one of my favorite applications. Professional task management is the key to staying on top of your projects. These days, we have more commitments than ever. If we don’t have powerful tools to manage those projects, things are going to break. That is why I use OmniFocus. More than just a task manager with built-in tools to manage project review and tags, it gives you so many ways to capture and manage your tasks.

The Omni Group now has a web-based version that lets you access and modify your data from any computer with a web browser. If you work in an office that doesn’t support your Mac or iPad, OmniFocus for the Web solves your problem. You really need to check this out if you are down with web apps. The Omni Group did it right.

I use OmniFocus every day. It is how I’m able to keep my act together. Do you need a little help? Try OmniFocus. I don’t know how I’d get by without it.