We all have things that are important to us … things where we sweat the details. For this week’s sponsor, Hoban Cards and Stationery, that is letterpress printing. Hoban products are classy, tastefully designed letterpress cards and stationery that you can be proud of.

Your calling card represents you. Why not bring some intentionality to your game? This week, MacSparky is sponsored by Hoban Cards, where they use a 1902 letterpress machine to make cards that your colleagues, clients, and customers will never forget. I sure love mine.

Evan and the gang at Hoban Cards are masters at the craft of designing and making letterpress calling cards. They have some beautiful templates to choose from, or you can roll your own.

I love handing out letterpress cards. It is always a conversation starter. Hoban Cards is where I go to buy them, and it is where you should too. Throw out those ugly, conventional, mass-produced, soulless business cards and reach out to Hoban Cards. Best of all, use ‘MacSparky’ to get $10 off any order. Get yours today.

This week, MacSparky is sponsored by Drafts, where text always starts for me. Sometimes, apps need time to grow on me. With Drafts, it was love at first sight. First and foremost, Drafts is a text capture app. You open the app, and you’ve got a blinking cursor. Anytime I need to write down something on my phone. I tap the Drafts icon and get to work.

The thing is, my workflow on the Mac is the same. I keep Drafts in my menu bar. If I’m on a call and want to take notes or jot down a phone number, I click the Drafts icon and go.

But that isn’t all. Drafts is the poster child for third-party apps. You tap the complication, start speaking, and capture text that shows up on your phone and Mac.

In short, Drafts is the place to capture text. For some, that is enough. If you want more, Drafts has that too:

• Drafts also has a full suite of editing tools.
• Drafts can automate so your text gets sent to other places.
• Drafts lets you create actions right in the app.

Drafts is the Swiss army knife for text. I keep it on all my devices all the time. You should too.

That’s not all, Drafts’ developer has a special deal for MacSparky readers. You can get 50% off your first year of a new Drafts Pro subscription with this link. In order to work, this must be redeemed on an iPhone or iPad.

P.S. This post, like all others, began its life in Drafts. 🙂

This week MacSparky is sponsored by Unite 4, the best app for turning websites into apps. These days, many of us are using web services that require us to navigate a website to interact with them. This creates all sorts of issues. When you close your browser, you are closing your tools. When you want to jump straight to the tool, there is no easy way. Some of them are Electron-based and use up your Mac’s resources. Moreover, they often don’t follow conventional macOS standards.

You can fix all of that with Unite 4. Unite 4 takes a website and turns it into an app. It’s dead simple. You type in a URL, and you get a Mac app. It even creates an attractive Mac-friendly icon. 

Of course, people use Unite 4 for productivity apps like Gmail, Hey, Slack, Basecamp, and every other web-based productivity app. But you can also make entertainment apps like Netflix, YouTube, and Disney+. Unite 4 goes a step further with the ability to put these apps in your status bar (which, by the way, is an excellent place for Slack) and create floating windows. It also lets you take a “slice” of a website and put it in your Dock for quick reference.

Best of all, MacSparky readers are getting 20% off this week. Stop going to web pages to get your work done. Check out Unite 4.

This week MacSparky is sponsored by Curio, the most advanced notebook application for note-taking and research. There have been a lot of notebook-style applications for the Mac that have come (and gone) over the years. Curio is the best of these. 

That is because Curio combines simplicity with power in a way I’ve never seen in a notebook app before. Your books are easy to organize, and the canvas (Curio calls it an Idea Space) is easily customizable with drag-and-drop tools like text, images, to-do lists, mind maps, and even Kanban stacks. It also holds many file types like images, PDFs, documents, web links, and multimedia files. Make each space your own.

Professionals, creatives, and students use Curio to be more productive and focused. Whether you are finding a cure, writing a novel, or trying to survive the education system, Curio is there for you. I like the way you can jump between notebooks so quickly and context switch from one Idea Space to another.

Curio also plays nicely with others. It has built-in integrations for DEVONthink, Hookmark, Evernote, Calendar, Reminders, iThoughts, and TaskPaper.

Curio is one of those great Mac apps developed (now for 20 years!) by a dedicated indie developer. Go check it out. Make sure to use Coupon Code MACSPARKY for 20% Off!

Does your email go into your inbox, or is it more like an out-of-control box? Amirite?! With the help of this week’s sponsor at MacSparky, you can turn it into a sanebox. 

Take back control of your email with SaneBox. SaneBox’s A.I. will make sure that only important email stays in your inbox by analyzing your email history and learning what’s important to you. Important emails you need to deal with now go to your inbox. Emails you don’t have to deal with immediately are filtered into a separate folder and saved for later when you can switch your focus and headspace and deal with them at a later time. Goodbye, distractions. This allows you to work more efficiently.

A cleaner inbox. A more useful and productive inbox. A sanebox. You can try it out yourself and see how your inbox email is trained and sorted by signing up for a free trial, and you’ll get a $10 credit you can use towards a SaneBox subscription. Restore your sanity to your inbox with SaneBox.