Posts Tagged → sponsor

Get Mac Help with Willems Tech (Sponsor)



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This week MacSparky is sponsored by Willems Tech. Rogier Willems is a wicked smart IT professional that specializes in Macs and security. Rogier and his team do remote IT for customers all over the world, and they are a great asset if you need any help managing your Apple network. 

As long as your Mac connects to the Internet and powers on, Rogier and team can assist with all Mac problems and even to a complete Tune-Up to make your Mac run like new again. They untangle email, contact, and calendar problems.

Finally, Willems Tech does a lot of consulting in data privacy and security with the knowledge that most IT professionals lack, like email encryption for instance. If you need some IT help, reach out to Willems Tech.

Timing Makes Time-Tracking Easy (Sponsor)

This week MacSparky is sponsored by Timing, my tool for tracking time on my Mac. Knowing how you spend your time is one of the most useful bits of knowledge you can have when deciding on new (and old) commitments. I’ve gone deep down the rabbit hole of time tracking as I try to figure things out for my own sanity and this week’s sponsor, Timing, has been an essential tool for me.


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Time tracking is hard. Having to throw a switch somewhere every time you change tasks or projects never works and is super-distracting. As a result, you end up with bad data. 

Timing fixes that. 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.
  • Timing lets you stop worrying about time and focus on doing your best work instead!
  • Timing also understands that your time tracking data is super sensitive, so Timing keeps it safe on your Mac.

In short, with Timing you get detailed information about how you spend your time on your Mac with zero work on your behalf. Try it yourself with the free 14-day trial and get 10% off if you buy in the next two weeks.

Unrelated but cool – The developers of Timing have also recently released Faviconographer, a free utility that adds Favicons to your Safari tabs. If you ever found yourself wanting those icons on your tabs for easier navigation, check it out!

inShort for Project Management (Sponsor)



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This week MacSparky is sponsored by inShort. inShort is a project planning application for the Mac, iPhone, and iPad that lets you plan projects and processes graphically across all of your Apple devices. This brings a new paradigm to process and project planning and is absolutely worth checking out. 

One of the more innovative features is the way it allows you to embed processes and drill down to the level of detail you need at the moment. I like to think of this as “nested” flowcharts, and I believe that it’s pretty useful. Most recently inShort’s received updates making its Gantt charts and work breakdown structure tools even more powerful. 

The inShort development team has also added a satellite service, workflow.link that gives you a way to work with, edit, and manage your projects from any device with a web browser. 

Want to learn more? Check out the website and read the developer’s PDF. 


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Tinderbox 7.2 gets Faster plus Third Party App Support (Sponsor)


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This week MacSparky is sponsored by Tinderbox. Tinderbox stores and organizes your notes, plans, and ideas. Imagine a piece of software that can collect your thoughts and then let you visually organize and re-arrange them and you’re getting the idea about the power of Tinderbox. Tinderbox helps you out with this problem with its powerful, but personal, content assistant that helps you share your notes through the cloud and on the Web.

Best of all, there’s a new version. The brand-new Tinderbox 7.2 is even faster at keeping your notes organized the way you like. Plus, new support for working with MarkDown, DEVONthink Pro, BibDesk, Bookends, OmniFocus, and more.

There are so many uses for Tinderbox. You might use it to assemble your business plan, write a book, plan a concert season or coach a robotics team. Tinderbox challenges traditional software paradigms, displaying your data as notes, maps, timelines, outlines, charts, and more. Head over to Tinderbox today and give it a try.

Agenda Minder for Better Meetings (Sponsor)


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This week MacSparky is sponsored by Agenda Minder, the application that makes it easy to capture information so that you can run killer meetings. Agenda Minder is a personal productivity tool that is designed to help people prepare for meetings and develop productive agendas. 

Agenda Minder is now up to version 1.51, including search features, filters, and tags. They’ve added a calendar import feature to make it easier than ever to get your meetings into Agenda Minder.

You can now get Agenda Minder in the Mac App Store or directly from the developer. You can even give the free trial a spin. For a short time, you’ll get a 20% discount with the code MacSparky. Thanks, Agenda Minder, for sponsoring MacSparky.



SaneBox with Reminders (Sponsor)


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This week MacSparky is sponsored by SaneBox, the email service that acts like your personal email assistant. There’s a lot that SaneBox can do for you, but this week I’d like to focus on SaneReminders. They’re awesome.

So what are SaneReminders? Let me answer that question by describing a problem. Often I will send an email to someone that requires a response. That creates an issue for me. How do I track whether or not I ever receive a response? I could create a separate OmniFocus task for every such email, but that’s way more fiddling than I want to do in OmniFocus. Wouldn’t it be great if the computer could keep track for me? That is exactly what SaneReminders does.

When I send an email that requires a response, I blind copy the email to SaneBox. The format is a period of time followed by @sanebox.com. For example, if I’m sending an email that I want to follow up on if I don’t receive a reply in one week, I would blind copy it to “1week@sanebox.com”. That’s all I have to do. SaneBox then keeps track of whether or not I receive a reply to that specific email. If I don’t, in a week, SaneBox sends me a reminder.

I use this all the time.

Because of this feature, I seem to have wizard-like powers to the people I correspond with. I don’t let things fall through the cracks. I love this feature, and it’s just one of the many things you get if you add SaneBox to your email management routine.

To learn more, go to SaneBox.com and make sure you use the link in this post so you’ll get a nice discount. Thank you, SaneBox, for sponsoring MacSparky.

Project Management with Workflow.link (Sponsor)



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I’m happy to welcome a new sponsor this week with workflow.link. Created by the same developer as inShort, workflow.link is a project management web service. With workflow.link, you can keep an eye on your big projects from the 20,000-foot view while still having the ability to drill down into the details. 

This ability to combine the micro and the macro has always been one of inShort’s best features and it comes over to workflow.link nicely. As your diagram grows bigger, it can be split up, creating new diagrams until all the steps to achieve the goal are clear and feasible. 

From the resulting map of tasks, you can compose a detailed plan and start cranking widgets, marking the progress in the service. For convenient control of plans, tasks can also be displayed as ordinary Gantt charts. 

Like inShort, workflow.link’s design embraces the Theory of Constraints to automatically determines the critical path, configures time buffers and sets late starts. If you’ve used inShort in the past, you’ll get it immediately. You can even upload inShort diagrams to workflow.link or the reverse when moving from web service to app.

If you’re curious, give workflow.link a try. You can register for a free 30 day trial and really kick the tires starting today.



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Get Started Outlining with OmniOutliner Essentials (Sponsor)

This week MacSparky is sponsored by OmniOutliner, my favorite outlining application for the Mac, iPad, and iPhone. Recently the Omni Group has released OmniOutliner version 5. One of the best things about this new version is the addition of OmniOutliner Essentials. It includes several of OmniOutliner’s key features, like keyword filtering, document stats, distraction-free mode, resource search, touch bar support, dark mode, opml mode, and pro file compatibility. 

I use OmniOutliner often. It’s a fantastic tool for collecting ideas and organizing them. Whether you’re taking notes, making lists, brainstorming, or starting your book, OmniOutliner can help you out.

With OmniOutliner Essentials, you get all these features for just $10. OmniOutliner Essentials is a great deal and if you have any interest in adding a world-class outliner to your tool belt, go get OmniOutliner Essentials today.


Get Control of Your Email with SaneBox (Sponsor)


This week MacSparky is sponsored by SaneBox, the email service that can make you the boss of your email. How are you doing with your inbox these days? Are you the boss of it, or is it the boss of you? 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.

The list goes on. 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.

PowerPhotos – The Ultimate Toolbox for Photos on the Mac (Sponsor)

This week MacSparky is sponsored by PowerPhotos. Apple has done a great job the last few years getting photo management under control with their new Photos app and cloud storage solutions. Photos, however, like any Apple mainstream software, is missing a lot of geeky power tools serious users need.



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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 just want to get rid of duplicate photos, PowerPhotos can help you get your photo collection back in order.

PowerPhotos allows you to work with multiple Photos libraries and store them wherever you want, including on an external drive or a network drive. 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 together 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.

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 MACSPARKY at check out.