Posts Tagged → sponsor

Drafts (Sponsor)

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. 🙂

TextSniper: The Ultimate Mac Text Capture Tool (Sponsor)

This week MacSparky is sponsored by a killer Mac utility, TextSniper. TextSniper is a Mac OCR app that can extract text anywhere on your Mac’s screen and automatically save it to your clipboard, so you can paste it anywhere you need it. It can even read the text to you. The whole thing works a lot like the built-in screen capture on the Mac, just way more powerful. You know those websites that won’t let you copy text? With TextSniper, you can. Do you know the pain of getting a phone number out of a document? It’s easy with Text Sniper.

That’s not all. With TextSniper, you can:

  • Quickly get text from PDFs, Zoom calls, Presentations, and Videos. 
  • Read QR codes and barcodes.
  • Get text out of just about any image format, including JPG, PNG, GIF, TIFF, and BMP.

I use this app often. It’s made by a developer who spends much time making it the best capture utility on the Mac. You can even use your iPhone or iPad camera to take a photo for TextSniper to perform its magic.

Moreover, in an era where so much software is more about data mining than giving you a service, TextSniper doesn’t collect your data. The text recognition is processed on your Mac and does not require an internet connection. 

TextSniper works with macOS Catalina and later and also works with Parallels Desktop

Get TextSniper now and enjoy the fastest way to copy uncopyable text, wherever you find it. Use promo code TSMS2023 to get an additional 25% off.

Tidy Your Inbox with SaneBox (Sponsor)

Let’s say you get 50–100 emails a day. Are all of them important? Of course not. So are you spending or wasting your precious time filtering through your emails to get to the important ones? SaneBox, this week’s MacSparky sponsor, will save you time. 

Those newsletters and other unimportant emails you receive that you don’t need to read right away? You can stop them from interrupting your flow. With your training, SaneBox’s A.I. will analyze your email history. After learning what’s important to you, it makes sure that only important email stays in your inbox. Those pesky emails that don’t require your immediate attention? You can get a daily digest from SaneBox at the time of your choosing and deal with them later.

Tidy up your inbox and let SaneBox deal with the clutter by sending them to your Sane folders. If you’re not quite sold, you can try it out for for yourself. For MacSparky friends, SaneBox has a special offer. You can sign up for a free trial, and you’ll get a $10 credit you can use towards a SaneBox subscription. Welcome to email sanity, it’s that simple. 

Turn Any Website into an App with Unite 4 (Sponsor)

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.

Timing: Track Your Time Without Timers; Now Even on iOS! (Sponsor)

Time is the most valuable resource you have. It’s the only resource you can’t get more of.

Yet, many of us don’t track our time. And the reason is usually simple: it’s cumbersome, and it’s way too easy to forget.

Not anymore! Timing is an app for your Mac that automatically tracks your time, no timers needed. It’s smart, it’s beautiful, and it’s easy to use.

Just download and install Timing and it’ll start recording how much time you spend on each app, document and website you use.

And with the latest update, Timing will now import your iPhone and iPad usage from Screen Time as well! This means you’ll get the full picture of how you spend your time, across all your devices.

I use Timing because of how easy it is to get good data. The app is smart. It learns how to categorize time for you (with a bit of help from you), and the reports are beautiful. I put screenshots of my Timing reports in my weekly/monthly reviews in Day One.

If you’ve tried time-tracking before and gave up on it, give Timing a try. It literally does the work for you.

Drafts Is the Tool for Text (Sponsor)

This week MacSparky is sponsored by Drafts, the one text app to rule them all. I’m a fan of Drafts. So much so that we recorded an entire MPU episode about it. But if I had to summarize why I dig this app so much, there are a few points to make:

Fast Capture

I can get into Drafts and start typing or dictating faster than any other app. Sometimes it feels like an idea is a fish I’m trying to land. The sooner I get it in the boat, the less likely it gets off the hook. Drafts helps you land bigger fish.

Text Tools

Once your precious words are in Drafts, you can do just about anything to them. You can send them to others, format them, send them to your favorite app, and add automation. As Drafts has matured, you can even keep them all right there in Drafts.

The Big Picture

Drafts is the only text app I know that constantly evolves and grows. There is polish everywhere. Not surprisingly, I wrote this post in Drafts. If you haven’t tried Drafts, you really should.

Curio: The Mac’s Most Advanced Notebook App (Sponsor)

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!

Turn Your Out-of-Control Box into a SaneBox(Sponsor)

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.

Fix Your Photos with PowerPhotos 2.0 (Sponsor)

It’s a new year gang, and I’m guessing over the holidays you took a few pictures. How’s your Photos library doing? If it’s anything like mine, it’s a mess right now. 

Did you know there is an app to help you out with that? PowerPhotos is here to the rescue.

PowerPhotos works with the built-in Photos app on your Mac, providing an array of tools to help you get your photo collection in order. Find and eliminate duplicate photos, split up your library into smaller ones, merge libraries together, open libraries in separate windows, export photos/albums, and more. 

Best of all, PowerPhotos 2.0 is now available! There are some great new features in version 2.0: 

– Convert your old iPhoto or Aperture library to an equivalent Photos library
– Advanced export of photos/albums
– Full support for iCloud Photos
– New visual duplicate detection engineLibrary groups
– Global menu bar item
– Multiple windows 

PowerPhotos adds all the features to Photos that Apple never will. You can download PowerPhotos for free to check it out, and purchasing a license will unlock all the features of the program. MacSparky readers can get a 20% discount with the coupon code MACSPARKY23, and existing iPhoto Library Manager and PowerPhotos 1.0 users can also use their old serial number to receive upgrade pricing, 50% of the normal price.

So make the Photos app work harder for you with PowerPhotos 2.0. You can get it today.