This week MacSparky is sponsored by SaneBox, the email service that can can change your life … today. For a lot of folks, email is that thorn in your side that you can’t quite ever escape. It doesn’t have to be that way. With SaneBox at your back, you add a powerful set of email tools that can work in just about any email client. With SaneBox you can:

• Wake up everyday to find 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 like 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 by getting a SaneBox account and bringing a gun to a knife fight. I’ve been a SaneBox subscriber since 2012 and just signed up for another year. If you sign up with this link, you even get a discount off your subscription.

This week MacSparky is sponsored by Daylite. 

For small companies, staying on top of clients, leads, and projects can feel chaotic. Daylite helps you streamline your workflow so you can win more business and get more done.

Daylite is a business productivity app for the Mac, iPhone & iPad. It’s like having a CRM, Project Management, and Lead Management app all rolled into one. It integrates with Apple Mail, and you can share it with your team to keep everyone in the loop.

Whether you’re in real estate, sales, design, or the legal industry, Daylite can help you track leads, stay on top of clients, and deliver projects on time. 

Daylite also integrates with the iPhone and iPad so you can leverage features like Multitasking, Caller ID, Siri, and more.

Visit marketcircle.com/Daylite to try Daylite free for 30 days!

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This week MacSparky has a new sponsor, TableFlip. No matter what app you’re working in, creating tables is a pain in the neck. TableFlip solves that problem with you letting you create tables using Markdown and getting a live preview right in the app. 

After you create your table you can update the underlying Markdown file or the table preview and both the TableFlip and Markdown files update automatically. I like setting up the table in TableFlip to begin, and then going back to the Markdown file for quick changes.

If you don’t want to use Markdown, you can also use TableFlip independently to create a table and later use it in Markdown or CSV. (Additional formats are on their way.) 

You shouldn’t have to open Excel every time you need a table. Check out TableFlip

This week MacSparky is sponsored by the app that I use as my own personal graphics toolbox, OmniGraffle. OmniGraffle was created as a diagramming tool but it is so much more. Using OmniGraffle’s powerful, but easily understandable tools, I am able to not only make diagrams but also maps, flow charts, court exhibits, garden plans, countless school projects, and even the family Christmas card. If I’m doing something that involves moving pixels around the screen, OmniGraffle delivers.

OmniGraffle users range from artists to data mappers to (even) geeky lawyers. The tools are fast and easy to learn and there are versions of OmniGraffle for Mac, iPad, and iPhone. I frequently hear from readers that are OmniGraffle-curious. They are interested in the app but not sure whether it is something they need. My answer is always the same. If you have OmniGraffle, you will find uses for it and the diagrams you make in it will look professional and better than anything you’ve been making before. 

The OmniGroup has recently released OmniGraffle version 7 and the app has so much polish now. Everything is cleaner and easier to use and access to Stenciltown (where you can import and use other folks’ art work in your diagrams) is easier than ever. Best of all, there’s a free trial so you can download and try it risk free. Up your diagram game today with OmniGraffle.

This week MacSparky is sponsored by SaneBox, the email service that adds power features to any email system. With SaneBox at your back, you add a powerful set of email tools that can work in just about any email client. SaneBox will automatically sort your email for you, defer your email to a more convenient time, set reminders and automatically forward email. 

The list of SaneBox features just keeps growing. One feature a lot of people overlook is SaneBox’s ability to automatically save email attachments to the cloud. Attachments are hard to find and take up lots of storage space in your email. Sane Attachments scans emails in your Inbox for attachments, puts them on Dropbox, and replaces them with a link. Not only does this save space in your email, it also lets you use Hazel on your Mac to perform automation on your email attachments (which appear in a Dropbox folder) as they arrive. Super useful.

These are just a few of the features that you get with SaneBox. Go check it out and use this link to get a discount off your subscription.

A lot of Email is routine and too often involves repeating the same words over and over again. Writing identical text to different recipients is a waist of your time and a productivity drain. Put simply, it keeps you from important work. 

This week’s sponsor, MailButler, solves that problem with its new, most recent feature – reusable email templates. They’re powerful, flexible, and save you precious time. MailButler adds email templates to Apple Mail. MailButler Message Templates are customizable form emails that you can use repeatedly and they are wicked useful. If you find yourself writing an email you suspect you may write again in the future, save it as a template and don’t worry about it any more. New details can always be added before the template message is sent.

MailButler adds so much more than just templates to Apple Mail. It’s really a set of power tools for Apple Mail users. Also with MailButler you can easily schedule your emails to be sent later, get detailed information about when, where, and with which device your outgoing email has been viewed, and pause your inbox any time you want. Besides, MailButler has a lot of great signature templates, and can be integrated with the leading cloud and management services.

Supercharge Apple Mail today with MailButler.

Project planning is the stuff of legend. Go to any big company and you will find somebody in a room somwhere 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.

Most recently, OmniPlan got touch bar support so if you’ve got one of those fancy new MacBook Pros, OmniPlan is that much easier to use. If you’re curious, I recommend downloading the free trial. You’ll be surprised at how powerful and easy to use OmniPlan is. note

Something you may not realize if you are wearing an Apple Watch is that it is checking your heart rate every 4 minutes during the day. (It’s much more frequent when you are working out.) Your heart rate data is really useful to understanding your overall health. Heart rate data helps assess periods of fat burning and high intensity during workouts and even helps you understand your sleep quality.

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The problem is finding a way to access and comprehend that data. That’s where CardioBot comes in. CardioBot takes your heart rate data and displays it for you in easy to understand charts and graphs. It tracks your minimum, maximum, and average heart rate during the day. Here’s my data for January 14.

Moreover, when you workout there are additional charts showing the highest intensity, fat burning periods. In this workout I started with weights and later got on the treadmill, which really got my ticker going.

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CardioBot doesn’t add to your battery drain. It simply takes your heart data and puts it in simple (and attractive!) charts that you can easily understand. 

CardioBot can also help you improve your sleep using detailed sleep analysis. I really like the design of this app and for just $3 it sure is nice to have easy access to my heart rate data. I’m looking forward to dropping this on my doctor at my next checkup. If you’ve got an Apple Watch, this one is absolutely worth it. You can find it today on the App Store.

This week MacSparky is sponsored by Agenda Minder. We all spend time complaining about meetings but not enough of us do anything to make them better. Agenda Minder is a Mac app that lets you pull meetings in from your calendar and organize them. You can quickly find the right meeting by sorting meeting name or date. You can also filter your meetings based on when they occur. Once you add or import meetings, Agenda Minder lets you easily add agenda items along with data about objectives, notes, task owners, and time. Agenda Minder helps you plan and execute your meetings regardless of whether your other team members adopt it.

Agenda Minder’s developer keeps adding polish and features. Indeed there are so many new features and polish that the price is going to go up soon so if you’re interested, now’s the time to check out Agenda Minder.

I’m pleased to welcome a new sponsor to MacSparky, PowerPhotos. There has been a lot of action in photo management on the Mac in the past few years and PowerPhotos is that powerful utility we’ve all been waiting for. 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.

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