Mac Power Users 663: HomeKit Check-In

With Matter on the horizon, there has never been a better time to get into home automation. On this episode of Mac Power Users, Stephen and I talk about how our HomeKit setups have evolved over time and what we hope Apple and others can add to the smart home in the future.

This episode of Mac Power Users is sponsored by:

  • 1Password: Have you ever forgotten a password? You don’t have to worry about that anymore. 
  • Electric: Unbury yourself from IT tasks. Get a free pair of Beats Solo3 Wireless Headphones when you schedule a meeting.
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Experimenting with DiffusionBee

There’s a lot of talk lately about AI-generated art. If you want to explore it, I’d recommend checking out DiffusionBee, which has a free Mac App. That said, I took a few shots at getting it to draw a picture of a bonsai tree on top of a Macintosh computer. It did great with the tree but never did seem to remember the Mac.

Automators 113: FocusCuts and Asynchronous Automation Awesomeness

In this episode of Automators, Rosemary and I look into noncontinous automations and how breaking up a process can improve your automation abilities.

This episode of Automators is sponsored by:

  • MasterClass: Get unlimited access to EVERY Class and get 15% off an annual membership.
  • Electric: Unbury yourself from IT tasks. Get a free pair of Beats Solo3 Wireless Headphones when you schedule a meeting.
  • LinkedIn Jobs: Post a job for free by visiting this link.
  • ExpressVPN: High-Speed, Secure & Anonymous VPN Service. Get an extra three months free.

So Much Email? Try SaneBox (Sponsor)

My thanks to MacSparky’s sponsor this week, SaneBox, for maintaining inbox sanity. Have you ever counted how many emails you receive in a day? Let’s just go with a lot. SaneBox does a nifty job of taking your emails and putting them into useful buckets so you won’t even see them in your inbox, saving you time and energy. Spend your attention and keep your focus on your more important tasks. SaneBox will handle the non-essential emails until you’re ready to deal with them. Train SaneBox to have your unimportant emails sent to a folder, like SaneLater, and SaneBox will summarize them in a digest, where you can quickly bulk-process them.

Your time is valuable. Keep your email sanity and let SaneBox help you be more productive and use your time efficiently. Want to try it out for yourself? You can sign up for your free trial, and you’ll get a $10 credit you can use towards a SaneBox subscription.

Sal Soghoian and OmniFocus Voice Commands Video Interview

A few months ago, I did an extended Friends of Dave interview with Sal Soghoian about the new voice commands for OmniFocus. This has been in the MacSparky Labs for a few months, and several members have been using this cool feature. This is one of those things I wanted to make sure everyone can see, so here it is.

I put a lot of content like this in the MacSparky Labs. I’d love to have you join.

Links from Video

Omni Automation Plug-Ins for OmniFocus

Installing Plug-Ins

Script Security

Omni Automation

Omni Automation in OmniFocus

Omni Automation Controls in OmniFocus

OmniFocus 4 Beta for Mac

The OmniFocus team has been hard at work on OmniFocus 4 for some time now. Recently they announced the public release of the Beta for OmniFocus 4 for Mac. There are several significant improvements coming with OmniFocus 4:

Feature Parity

With OmniFocus now built around SwiftUI, Mac, iPhone, and iPad features are essentially in sync. Generally, you get all features everywhere. For example, you can now get location-based tags on the Mac for the first time.

New Design

The new design is lighter than previous iterations of OmniFocus. There’s more white space, and the UI is much cleaner. Nevertheless, it still feels like a flavor of OmniFocus. 

You can read more details and sign up for the beta here.

Obsidian 1.0

Obsidian, the personal management and idea connector that we have all been losing our collective minds over, is now officially out of beta with their release of version 1.0. Congratulations to the small Obsidian development team that made a very big app.

While I don’t use Obsidian for everything, I’m in it daily and use it for many things. Here are some of my favorite things about this application:

  • The file format is nothing but a folder full of markdown files. While you add some extra syntax to get those additional features from Obsidian, it is all universal and future-proof. If Obsidian were to go away, you’d still have all your data in a usable format.
  • Despite the universal nature of the files, you can do nearly anything with this application that involves words. At this point, there are 25 core plug-ins in the 668 additional community plug-ins. You can use this app to take a few notes or build an entire system around it.
  • The Obsidian community is fantastic. The people using the app are generally enthusiastic about it and friendly to people coming into it. The folks who decided to build on the Obsidian API to develop their plug-ins are intelligent and generous.
  • The Obsidian developers get it. They are entirely transparent and constantly working on improving the application. I particularly love how they publish for their Trello board so you can see what they are working on next. 

I love this app. I’m actively producing a new Field Guide about it right now. If you’ve been waiting for Obsidian to leave beta, you’ve got no further excuses.