This week MacSparky is sponsored by OmniOutliner. OmniOutliner, in my opinion, is the best outlining solution for the Mac, iPad and iPhone. So many big projects in my life start out as a couple of entries in OmniOutliner and grow into much bigger things from there. OmniOutliner is fast, efficient, attractive, and with to OmniPresence, I can sync my outlines seamlessly between my Mac, iPad, and iPhone. Lately I’ve been using OmniOutliner a lot on my iPad Pro and the Omni Group really delivered on OmniOutliner for iPad.

Everybody inevitably has to deal with a disorganized mess of information. When that’s you, try OmniOutliner. You won’t regret it. Learn more about OmniOutliner at the Omni Group’s website.

I’d like to thank Daylite for sponsoring MacSparky this week. Daylite is a business productivity app for the Mac, iPhone & iPad. It organizes your contacts, calendars, tasks, notes, emails, projects, and new business opportunities all in one app. What’s special about Daylite is that it links all these things together. It’s used by solopreneurs and small businesses as well as teams within larger companies. 

Mortgage Broker, Gina Best, in Vancouver loves Daylite because it helps her and her team work smarter and more efficiently. She’s cut down on cc’ed emails between her and her assistant because all the email are linked to their clients and projects in Daylite. It’s helped them increase their volume of customers while still maintaining the same high level of customer service.

Yuri Vlasyuk uses Daylite to manage a local arts festival in Ukraine with his team. They use Daylite to plan meetings, prioritize tasks, and balance their workload. They also use Daylite to segment their contacts and send specific email campaigns to vendors, makers, and people attending the fair. Daylite also helps them automate routine tasks so they can build processes that make them faster.

Consultant and solopreneur, Chris Tossell, in the UK loves Daylite because of the way it integrates with Apple Mail. It helps him process his emails quickly and still be able to search and find them later. Daylite also helps him to keep track of calls and follow-ups with clients. In Chris’s words, “Daylite creates order out of what would otherwise be chaos.” 

Daylite is a native app so you don’t need an Internet connection to use it. When you do get an Internet connection, it syncs in the cloud across your devices and with your team.
To learn more about Daylite and how it helps businesses to be more productive, visit Marketcircle’s website. My thanks again to Daylite for sponsoring MacSparky.com.

This week MacSparky is sponsored by Hoban Press. In our digital age, there’s something extra special about the stationery and calling cards that roll off Hoban’s 1902 letterpress machine.

I’d particularly recommend considering getting some of Hoban’s notecards. I’ve bought notecards from Hoban for both my personal use and my law practice. I love them and my friends and colleagues love receiving them. For truly special people, I even will add a wax seal. Writing a note and sending off one of these notecards lets me channel my own inner J.D. Salinger. One of my favorite notecards is the simply designed Kennedy Notecards but if you want to go nuts, Evan will help you with your own custom design. I made a craftsman style notecard for my personal stationery and I love it.

Since Hoban Press first started advertising here, its proprietor, Evan Calkins, was able to leave his day job and is now working full time at his passion of creating beautiful letterpress paper products. There are several categories of Hoban Press products available to you. Get your own letterpress cards and stationery and use the offer code ‘MacSparky’ during checkout to receive free shipping.

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I’d like to thank SaneBox for sponsoring MacSparky.com this week. SaneBox is a kick in the pants for your email. It adds a host of additional features to any email account and works with exchange, Google mail, or IMAP accounts.

There is a lot you can do with SaneBox to tame your email. One feature that a lot of users aren’t aware of is SaneReminders. Often you will send an email to someone and have some sort of expectation about a reply. That creates a pesky problem for you. Do you try and just remember to follow up on it in a week or two? Do you tie a string around your finger? Do you create a task in your task list application to remind you to check on whether or not there’s a reply? There really isn’t a simple, efficient way to handle that problem.

With SaneReminders, when you send an email to someone, you can blind copy it to SaneBox with some designated amount of time like, “1week@sanebox.com”. SaneBox then quietly watches out for a reply to that email. If you don’t get a reply within one week, you get a note from SaneBox reminding you. If you deal with a lot of people, this is a completely friction-free way to track email replies. I use this feature every day.

Learn more about all of the features of SaneBox over at SaneBox.com. If you sign up using the links in this post, you even get a nice discount. Who doesn’t want a nice discount? Thank you SaneBox for supporting MacSparky.com.

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This week MacSparky is sponsored by Interact, an app for your iPad and iPhone to manage your contacts like no other. I am doing a lot of work on the iPad these days and one of my surprises as I dive deep is that some apps on iOS are better than those on the Mac. That is the case for this week’s sponsor, Interact. Interact helps you create, organize, and communicate with your contacts in ways that just haven’t been possible before. It’s so good that I actually prefer managing contacts on my iPad now over the Mac.

Interact empowers you and your contacts to get more done in less time, with features like group management, one-tap contact creation, and easy communication.

Interact works directly with your iOS Contacts accounts, adding features not available in the built-in iPhone and iPad Contacts app, like:

• Group management. Create and manage membership in groups.
• Capture contact information from plain text anywhere with the system with the Contact Scratchpad. The Scratchpad automatically recognizes phone numbers, emails, addresses and much more to easily turn an email signature or other block of text into a complete contact record. This feature is spooky and awesome all at once.
• Send group emails and messages with attachments from photos or files from Dropbox, iCloud Drive, Google Drive or any other iOS document provider.

And best of all, since Interact works directly with iOS Contacts, any work done in Interact is immediately reflected throughout iOS whereever contacts are used.

Get Interact on the App Store today!

This week MacSparky.com is sponsored by SaneBox. I’ve been using SaneBox for years and at this point I can’t imagine email without it. There are so many great benefits to Sanebox. It filters my mail so I don’t wake up to an inbox bursting with irrelevant email. It allows me to defer email messages so they get out of the way while I am doing other things. It also lets me set reminders for outgoing emails.

One thing I’ve never covered, however, is SaneBox’s advanced filtering features. Once you set up your SaneBox email filtering, there are some great options. 

With SaneVIP, you can give your friends and co-workers a word or phrase to add to the subject line of their email messages to push their email to the top of your list.

You can also set the SaneBox intelligence setting between Smart, Moderate, and Manual to change how aggressively SaneBox sorts your mail for you.

SaneSubjects lets you teach SaneBox about subjects that are or are not important to you and lets SaneBox do an even better job of appropriately filing related messages.

There’s also Manual Domain Filtering. Usually SaneBlackHole takes care of any Spam that gets through your net but if you are still having an issue, you can send all messages from a certain domain to the black hole. This is not just a feature for dealing with spam. You could also, for instance, sort all email from a certain domain in your “Later” box or your inbox or any other folder you create through SaneBox.

Somewhat related, you can also specifically identify certain domains that are important to you. Once you do that, SaneBox keeps an eye out for an email from that domain and treats it appropriately.

Because all of this work is done through the SaneBox service, you can use it with any email application you want and this frees you to try and switch mail apps at will.

I love using SaneBox. I’ve talked to the team at SaneBox and they are getting ridiculously high conversion rates from MacSparky readers and Mac Power Users listeners. Because of this, they are offering the highest discount they’ve ever offered just for you. If you sign up now, you get a $25 discount. That’s only good for a few more weeks so make sure to take advantage of it. To do so, go to SaneBox.com/MPU and cash in.

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This week MacSparky is sponsored by Marketcircle, the makers of Billings Pro – a time-tracking & invoicing app for the Mac, iPad, iPhone & Apple Watch. It’s great for freelancers and small businesses such as consultants, lawyers, designers, photographers, that need an easy way to keep track of time spent on client work and a fast way to produce professional looking invoices.

Billings Pro syncs all your devices across all your team members, so you can track time for a project while out on your iPhone while a team member tracks time on their Mac at the office. It supports 3D touch, making it quick and easy for you to start a new timer or jump to a recent one, and includes a handy widget that lets you manage your Billings Pro timers within the Notification Centre. Easily add comments to your slips so you remember all the details of the work you did during that time. 

After the work is done, Billings Pro makes it really quick and simple to invoice–whether you’re creating the invoice from your Mac, iPhone, or iPad. You just select the time slips, pick an invoice template, and send. You can also add expenses or bill by flat rate. Comments jotted down on your time slips can be added to the invoice so your client has a clear understanding of the work you did – which means you get paid faster, with fewer questions. Billings Pro customers really like the invoice templates because they are clear and professional looking – and you can further customize invoices to fit your own brand. Marketcircle is full of smart developers and designers that love the Mac an iOS and if you try this app, you’ll see their attention to detail everywhere.

Read about other Mac users using Billings Pro here or experience Billings Pro for yourself with a free 30 day trial.

This week MacSparky is sponsored by SaneBox. SaneBox is the answer to your email problems. It filters your email for you, only showing you the most important in setting the less important aside for later. SaneBox also gives you the ability to defer your email, no matter which email client you use. There are many additional features like the ability to remind you when someone doesn’t reply to an email you sent.

The point is they are always making it better. The latest example of that is the SaneConnect service. It’s currently in beta but it’s pretty impressive. SaneConnect shows you the history of your relationship with different companies. Just type in the name of their domain and you see who you’ve been emailing and how often. It even rates the strength of the relationship. It gets even more powerful with team accounts where you can search for a Company and see which of your teammates have relationships there. It’s like asking for introductions on LinkedIn based on email history. It’s a great idea and it’s available to SaneBox subscribers.

Learn more at SaneBox.com.

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Marketcircle helps individuals, teams, and small businesses on the Mac, iPhone and iPad be more productive with their two apps, Daylite and Billings Pro.

For those of you who don’t know about Daylite, it has been around for almost 15 years. Daylite helps you manage clients, schedules, tasks, projects, emails and new business opportunities, all in one app where they’re interconnected. From a single client you can see emails to and from, who referred them, pending business deals, booked or upcoming appointments, and even future followups. Or from a single Project you can see each person and their role, the tasks and who’s responsible, meetings about the project, and notes, all in chronological order. Daylite helps you remember the little details so you don’t have to worry about anything falling through the cracks. And when you invite team members, you can share this information, assign tasks or check each others calendars before scheduling meetings.

With the release of Daylite 6, Marketcircle has made it even easier to get started. Create an account and login from your Mac, iPhone or iPad. Once logged in, you can even work with or without an Internet connection. Daylite will sync changes between devices and teammates when a connection is available so you always have access to your information. Marketcircle includes a 30 day trial for Daylite, with monthly and yearly plans. Daylite is made by awesome, smart people that love the Mac and iOS.

You can even read about other companies using Daylite here.

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