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.

Dipping Your Toes in Conversational Artificial Intelligence

There’s a Mac and mobile application, Poe, giving you an easy way to kick the tires on artificial intelligence. I’ve been playing with it for the last day, and I recommend it, particularly if you’ve never tried this kind of thing before.

The application is as simple as download, open, and start talking to it. It’ll give you a good idea about the state of conversational artificial intelligence. It is easy to make fun of this stuff; AI gets a lot wrong. But it’s constantly learning. Like it or not, this stuff is coming, and it’s time to wrap our heads around that.

While we are not at the point of robot overlords just yet, we are getting to the point of helpful robots.

Main window for Poe, an AI chat application on iPad, showing a question and answer.
Poe for AI Chat (main window)

The Six Colors Report Card

Jason Snell just published his annual Six Colors Apple Report card, where he asks folks writing about Apple to score the company in different categories. Jason has been doing this long enough now that you can see some interesting trends and get a feel for how Apple is doing with its various products and services. I like how the report card is focused on the products, and not the finances. It’s always a privilege for me to participate in this, and fascinating to see how Apple appears to be doing from the outside.

Mac Power Users 678: Sales and Studies, with Kerry Provenzano

Relay FM’s VP of Sales Kerry Provenzano drops by Mac Power Users to talk about her Apple gear, keeping multiple projects going at once, and why she has built much of her workflow around Airtable.

This episode of Mac Power Users is sponsored by:

  • 1Password: Never forget a password again.
  • Squarespace: Make your next move. Enter offer code MPU at checkout to get 10% off your first purchase.
  • Indeed: Join more than three million businesses worldwide using Indeed to hire great talent fast.