This week MacSparky is sponsored by Smile Software, makers of TextExpander and PDFpen. This month Smile is celebrating 15 years of bringing its productivity software to the world. They’ve had several products over the years and there is an excellent series of blog posts over on Smile’s website about how the company formed and their journey.

Of course, I have an affinity for companies passionate about making productivity software and Smile has been delivering the goods to me (and a lot of other users) for a long time.

Have you checked out Smile’s current software lineup? If not, you should. 

TextExpander is a text replacement application, but so much more. As a result of Smile’s hard work, TextExpander is exponentially more powerful than a normal text replacement application. Here are just a few examples of what I do with TextExpander.

PDFpen has been my only PDF app on the Mac for years. I use it every day to review and markup contracts and otherwise get work done.

Thanks Smile for an amazing 15 years. I can’t wait to see what you do next.

This week MacSparky is sponsored by Timing for Mac. Once installed, Timing watches how you use your Mac and gives you colorful, detailed reports on how you’re spending your time. 

You know that new feature Apple is adding to iOS 12 called Screen Time? Timing is like that, but for the Mac and way more detailed. 

Timing is a great tool to help you get your act together. It’s very difficult to keep track of how you’re spending your time. Throwing manual timers adds a lot of mental overhead and inevitably leads to bad data. Because Timing is automatic, you don’t have to think about it and the data is better. With Timing data, you can learn a lot about your work habits and where you can get better. Once you sort that out, Timing can help keep you honest.

Timing even scores your productivity based on what apps you spend time in. It’s a great app and using this link, you can get it at a discount. If you’re a SetApp subscriber, you can also get Timing as part of your subscription. Go download Timing today and see for yourself how much more productive you can be.

This week’s MacSparky sponsor is Gemini Photos, the new iPhone app that helps you tame your photos library. It’s easy, and smart to take extra pictures. You never know when that first one comes out of focus or your nephew will finally decide to look at the camera and smile. The trouble is, you always come home with a lot more pictures than you need. 

On a recent trip to Disneyland, where I took a bunch of random pictures and then shot the new parade, I came back with some 400 pictures. There was no way I wanted to keep them all but I also didn’t want to manually sort through them all.

Instead, I just ran Gemini Photos on my iPhone. Gemini looks at the photos for you and pulls out the best. In doing so it looks for the photos with the best focus, people with their eyes open and smiling, and even those that you’ve already edited and favorited. Gemini Photos then marks the remaining photos for deletion. You can scroll through and easily confirm or change the selection and then, with one tap, delete the extras. 

Gemini Photos can also unclutter your photos library with shots it thinks you don’t want to keep long-term, like screenshots. Again, everything is easy and you have the final say.

Gemini Photos is a brand new app and available now. Check it out.

Project planning is the stuff of legend. Go to any big company and you will find somebody in a room somewhere responsible for project planning that spends weeks at a time in seminars trying to learn to use their Byzantine project planning software.

It doesn’t have to be that way. 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. Your clients will love it too. 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.

This week MacSparky is sponsored by SaneBox, the email management service I’ve now used for years. For this post, I’d like to focus on one SaneBox feature, deferring email.

Deferring email is the process of taking something in your inbox and snoozing it for a set period of time. This gets the email out of your life and lets you focus on other things until some time in the future when you’re in a better place to process that mail.

When I first heard of the idea of deferring email, I mocked it. It seemed like a waste of time. However, I was wrong. I’ve now been postponing email for several years and find it useful. I get a lot of email that doesn’t merit getting sorted into my task system but also isn’t appropriate for right now. Deferring that email just takes a second and there is something to be said for getting that mail out of the way while you continue doing the hard work.

With SaneBox, you have nearly unlimited options for deferring email. You can defer it to tomorrow, or next week, or Saturday morning, or a specific time. For today, I thought it’d be fun to share my deferred email boxes on my MacSparky email account.

Afternoon

This is the nutty one that will make a lot of people angry. I do a thorough sweep through my MacSparky account every morning and afternoon. I try to stay out of that email account in between but inevitably find myself in there for one reason or another. Pushing email away until the afternoon review by deferring it is a great way to keep myself from getting sidetracked by non-critical email.

Tomorrow, 2 Days, 5 Days

I only give a certain amount of time to email every day, primarily in the morning. I always deal with the most critical email first either answering it directly or turning its response into an OmniFocus project. If there is still email left and time’s up, I defer the email out into the future.

Deferring non-critical email is a great solution, and it’s just one of the many features available to you with a SaneBox subscription. Best of all, use the links in this post to get a discount.

This week, MacSparky is sponsored by PDFpen 10 for Mac. Smile has released the most recent version of PDFpen, and it includes several new impressive features.

My favorite new feature is batch support for optical character support. Often I’m given piles of PDF documents with no OCR. The trouble is that I need OCR in my day job and rely on it in my digital documents. Before I had a cobbled together AppleScript that didn’t always work. Now I just open PDFpen 10, press the Batch OCR button, select my files and let the app do the rest. When it’s done, I’ve got a whole folder full of scanned and searchable PDFs. It’s golden.

PDFpen 10 also now adds watermarks, custom headers, custom footers, and a new precision edit tool. Moreover, with PDFpen 10, you can move images around without increasing the size of your document, you can magnify library items, and you can use an improved color palette.

Smile also offers PDFpen for iPad & iPhone for editing PDFs when you’re on the go.
To learn more, head over to the PDFpen website and use this link. Also, make sure to let them know you heard about it here. 

This week MacSparky is sponsored by OmniGraffle, by the Omni Group. OmniGraffle is the diagramming and graphics tool made for people that don’t have the time to get a degree in diagramming and graphics. It’s a powerful application that is also easy to use. In other words, it’s an application made by the Omni Group.

I initially bought OmniGraffle to make simple diagram-style graphics for use in presentations during trials, but once I realized how easy the application is to use, I found all sorts of uses for it. I often use the iPad version to diagram relationships as clients describe them to me during meetings. I’m a visual thinker so seeing things in diagram form help me understand better (and clients are always impressed).

I use OmniGraffle to make our family holiday card. I use Omni Graffle to design stickers for the rubber storage bins we put in the attic. I’m getting a new office later this year, and I’m currently designing that in OmniGraffle. I even use OmniGraffle to design the covers of my books. The iPhone Field Guide cover was made in OmniGraffle.

If you believe you don’t have a single graphic artist bone in your body, you should download the OmniGraffle free trial and check it out for yourself. What you’ll find is that the application does most of the hard work for you. They even have extensive online-based stencil libraries, making many projects as easy as drag and drop. They’ve got versions for Mac, iPad, and iPhone so no matter which Apple platform you prefer, you can make beautiful diagrams and graphics with OmniGraffle. 

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