This week MacSparky is sponsored by OmniOutliner. This app is so much more than a just a beautiful outliner. It’s got automation, distraction-free mode, filters, slide-in sidebars, gorgeous styles, and more. Whenever I have a big client project in the law practice, I outline it in Omni-Outliner. I often share these outlines with clients so we can collaborate on getting things right.

Recently I did this for a legal client on a complex transaction. Later, when I went to visit the client at her office, I found she had a blown up copy of my OmniOutline hanging on her wall that she was using a reference. I love that. To an extent, I view OmniOutliner’s gorgeous looking outlines as just one more thing that distinguishes me from others in my field.

OmniOutliner is both pretty and powerful. Best of all, with their new Pro and Essentials versions it is priced so anyone can have the best outliner available for Mac, iPad, and iPhone. Head over to the Omni Group today and try it for yourself.

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.

TextExpander brings so much power to text automation, including Team Support. I’m a TextExpander for teams subscriber myself. Using TextExpander, my team supporting the Field Guides is able to get quick responses to customer inquiries with exactly the right information. Imagine if all of your customer support team could use a common bank of snippets, written and edited by your best writers and shared with everyone on your team. Not only that you can update the snippets at any time and they automatically populate to everyone.

I’ve done so much with TextExpander over the years that I even have a page of snippets I’ve created that you can download ranging from movie to reviews to conference calls. One of my personal favorite groups is foreign thanks where you can say thank you to people in most language. Sending an email to a French friend, just type “french thanks” and TextExpander gives you “Merci”. It’s like your own, personal translator.

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.

This week, MacSparky is sponsored by Ulysses, the writing application I use every day. For a lot of people, myself included, writing words is one of the primary ways we pay for our shoes. For so many years I wanted a writing solution that just worked and I could have with me anywhere. Ulysses is that. Ulysses gives me a focused writing environment, eliminating distractions and encouraging me to do the hard work of moving the cursor across the line.

Ulysses takes the friction out of writing. That is because in addition to obsessive design, Ulysses has some real power under the hood. I love the way Ulysses organizes the various facets of my life and where I do my writing. As I go use Ulysses, I have all sorts of text that I’m currently writing, have already written, or use as a reference. And because it syncs across macOS and iOS, all of it is always available to me. There is a reason I always have this app open.

And the good news is that if you are getting a shiny new iPad Pro today, Ulysses has already been updated for it. As usual, the Ulysses team is on it with their latest update.

Best of all, the Ulysses team has agreed to give the MacSparky readers a free three month test drive. Use the links in this post to try Ulysses for three months. You’ll see immediately what I mean about why this app is good.

This week MacSparky is sponsored by SaneBox. SaneBox is the email utility that we all need. It is loaded with features, like the ability to auto-sort your email as it arrives. Every morning when I wake up, I don’t see 300 emails in my inbox but instead just a few. Importantly, those few emails are the ones that I really need to see. All of the advertisements and other nonsense are automatically sorted by SaneBox into separate folders so I can look at them later.

The past few weeks SaneBox has really been helping me out with its reminder service. It is the end of the year so on the legal side I’m sending a lot of client emails about getting their annual minutes prepared. I do this, because I am a nerd, through an automated email that I created in Siri Shortcuts. Part of that form email in Siri Shortcuts includes a blind copy field to 1week@SaneBox.com. SaneBox then automatically monitors whether or not I was a reply to that email. If I don’t in 1 week, SaneBox reminds me to follow up. I could have also done this with an OmniFocus project, but why when SaneBox does it for me automatically.

This is just one of the ways SaneBox helps me manage my email every day. I have heard from many listeners that decided to give SaneBox a trial just for a few days and then ended up subscribing within a few days because they immediately see the value in this product. If you’d like to spend less time on email, check out SaneBox and use this link to get a nice discount.

This week MacSparky is sponsored by PowerPhotos. There is a lot to like about Apple Photos on your Mac, but if you use it for any length of time, you’ll also realize the app is missing a lot of the tools you need to truly manage your large photo library.

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 also has full support for dark mode on the recently released macOS Mojave.

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. Best of all, MacSparky readers get a 20% discount. Just use the code MACSPARKY18 at check out.

This week MacSparky is sponsored by TextExpander. I feel like this is particularly appropriate because TextExpander has been helping me keep up with what can only be described as an email deluge over the last few weeks. Last month I released two field guides, which stretched all of my resources to their very limit. Every time I publish a new field guide, I get lots of email from customers and prospective customers about the new course. The last few weeks I’ve had that problem times two.

TextExpander has saved my bacon, again. I’ve created snippets to answer all of the most common questions and solve the most common problems. This lets me get through hundreds of emails in a fraction of the time it would take otherwise. Moreover, I have a team TextExpander account, so my assistant has access to the same snippets that I’m using and is just as fast at helping customers as I am. It’s productivity times two.

TextExpander allows you to simplify and automate what can be time-consuming and frustrating text entry. Not only does it substitute text at your will, but it also does things like insert dates, grab the contents of the clipboard, and even run AppleScript and JavaScript. It’s text expansion plus so much more.

I’ve written about TextExpander many times over the years because it’s so useful to me. I bet you have times where you get more email than you expect as well. Set yourself up with a TextExpander account and see just how much time you can save. It will surprise you. Use the links in this post and let them know you heard about it on MacSparky to get 20% off your subscription.

This week’s sponsor, SaneBox, might be my most used web service. SaneBox helps me manage the deluge of email. I’ve had a few releases in the past month, and that means the old inbox has been getting hammered. SaneBox has had my back the whole time, sorting email, with uncanny precision, into different folders automatically so I can find everything I need, exactly where I’d expect it.

Best of all, SaneBox works everywhere. The last few weeks we’ve had updates to both iOS and macOS and mail tools and plugins are breaking everywhere. Not SaneBox. SaneBox runs in the cloud so no matter how many times you update your operating system, change to different platforms, or just decide to switch mail apps, SaneBox keeps working for you.

There is a whole lot SaneBox can do to help you tame your email. To learn more, head over to SaneBox and use the links in this post to get a discount. Who doesn’t love a discount now and again?

For a lot of power users, project planning remains the undiscovered country. The trouble is that project planning software has this terrible (and well-earned) reputation for being difficult to use. This week’s sponsor, OmniPlan is the exception. The fact that it’s easy to pick up OmniPlan shouldn’t surprise you. The Omni Group group has been making difficult software easy since they first started. OmniPlan has a clean, simple interface giving you everything you need with just a few clicks.

At the same time, OmniPlan also delivers power. OmniPlan includes powerful project planning tools like filtering, violation resolution, leveling, earned value analysis, and Monte Carlo simulations allowing it to match even its most difficult-to-use competitors.

I use OmniPlan for project planning on the legal side. Clients love the nice, clean reports generated by OmniPlan showing my plans for their legal problems. I’ve grown to like the tool so much that now I’m also using it to plan out future Field Guides. My use is actually pretty small but some OmniPlan users manage giant projects in fields like construction, software, and mergers and acquisitions just to name a few.

If you’ve got a use for project planning, OmniPlan is the place to go. It’s powerful and easy. Download the free trial. You’ll be surprised at how powerful and easy to use OmniPlan is.