Often people ask me how to get started with some simple automation to make their lives easier. The answer to that question is this week’s sponsor, TextExpander. Copy and paste is an inefficient way to keep track of the things you type again and again. TextExpander makes you more productive by taking care of all those words and phrases for you. TextExpander works in all your apps so you can use it everywhere, like Microsoft Word and Excel, Adobe Illustrator and InDesign, and Apple’s Pages.

TextExpander does way more than that. With TextExpander you’ll see your snippets everywhere. It syncs between your Mac, iPhone, iPad, and Windows PC instantly.

They’ve got free snippet groups for all sorts of folks including job recruiters, freelancers, airport codes, brand names, and more at the TextExpander website (or you can download some of mine).

TextExpander even lets you run AppleScripts. For example, I use TextExpander to auto address emails with Apple Mail.

Best of all, with TextExpander you don’t have to work alone: TextExpander for Teams lets you manage and share snippets with your coworkers or the entire company. Use this link to get 20% off. 

This week MacSparky is sponsored by inShort for macOS.

inShort is an advanced diagramming and planning tool that lets you specify processes, resources, and how they all fit together. All of this is built around a unique interface that enables you to drill down into the details of a project or move back up to the overview and see the project in its entirety. The interface is brilliant.

inShort is an opinionated application that makes planning and workflow easier. It gets regular development and recently they’ve added layers (for pro subscribers), which add a new dimension to your diagrams, successfully combining related schemes in a common space.

If your project works in cycles, there’s new logic available in the application that lets you take into account several schedules for one object. It even addresses failed tasks, letting you map out what happens if the task fails in your project planning. This lets you log and analyze how what happens if things break, and it even updates the Gantt chart to display the failure.

If you haven’t checked out inShort, you should. Check out inShort.

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This week, MacSparky is sponsored by OmniOutliner. The latest version of OmniOutliner for Mac, iPad, and iPhone is a great example of just how much the gang at the Omni Group cares about making the best productivity software. This app is so much more than a just a beautiful outliner. It’s got automation, distraction-free mode, filters, slide-in sidebars, gorgeous styles, and more.

Often, people throw seemingly random bits of information at me. In those cases, it is my job to organize it, make sense or it, and then make that information work for my client. This is where, for me, OmniOutliner is essential; it makes order from chaos. I often share these outlines with clients so that we can collaborate on getting things right. Clients love them. They love the way it organizes complex information. They also love they way it looks. To an extent, I view OmniOutliner’s gorgeous-looking outlines as just one more thing that distinguishes me from others in my field.

OmniOutliner is both pretty and powerful. Best of all, with their new Pro and Essentials versions, it is priced so that anyone can have the best outliner available for Mac, iPad, and iPhone. Head over to the Omni Group today and try it for yourself.

This week’s MacSparky sponsor is SaneBox, the email tool that everybody could use. You may have heard about some of the innovative new email features like inbox auto-sorting, deferred email, and reply tracking. The trouble is that early implementations of those features were all app-specific. You had to switch to a different email client that you didn’t necessarily like to get those features.

SaneBox fixes that. SaneBox has all of those cool new email tools (plus many more), and it works with just about any email client. Over the last few years, I have been jumping between iOS email clients trying to find the right app for me. Throughout this process, my one constant has been SaneBox because no matter which email client I’m using, I can still get auto inbox sorting, deferred email, reply tracking, and a pile of additional email tools via SaneBox. The service gives me the freedom to try and use any email client that tickles my fancy. SaneBox makes Apple Mail feel like a bad-ass email client and that is saying something.

There is a lot more to SaneBox, but in addition to all of that, SaneBox gives you email client freedom. To learn more head over to SaneBox and sign up today. Using the links in this post, you’ll even get a sweet discount.

This week MacSparky is sponsored by TextExpander, the application that saves me time every day. TextExpander works everywhere you type, improving your productivity and accuracy no matter what apps you use.

You may think of TextExpander as a way to quickly type your address or phone number but it is so much more. I use it to run AppleScripts, draft legal contracts, and everything in between. With TextExpander, you can easily insert text snippets in any application from a library of content created by you and your team.

I’ve talked on my podcasts about my Date and Time stamp TextExpander snippet I use all the time to date/time stamp notes on my Mac. Here it is if you’d like to create it in your copy of TextExpander. I use the the snippet “xdts” to trigger it.

Whether you use it on your own or with your team, TextExpander makes you more productive. TextExpander is available for macOS, Windows, iPhone and iPad, and Chrome. Head to this link to get 20% off your first year. 

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This week, MacSparky.com is sponsored by NotePlan. With NotePlan, you get serious work done. It helps you spend less time planning and more time doing. It lets you track your work and get things quickly out of your head, so you have the headspace to be creative—that’s what brains are made for. Find out how!

NotePlan is a daily planning tool in bullet-journal style for pros, combining a calendar with plain-text markdown notes and embedded to-dos, all in one place.

Your notes are saved in simple human readable text files, so the data is always safe and accessible in your iCloud Drive—not hidden away in some online database.

With NotePlan, you can:

• Write markdown to-dos embedded into your daily notes and organize them using simple formatting like headings, bold, italic, links, etc.

• Capture important things in projects notes, which are not attached to a date, and schedule them from there into your calendar.

• Integrate with iCloud calendars and reminders.

• Focus on your tasks thanks to a distraction-free, minimal design.

• Customize NotePlan by choosing from a set of light and dark themes.

If you have a turbulent schedule and tons of things to keep track of but never enough time, NotePlan is perfect for you. Save time planning and never let anything fall through the cracks:

• Write meeting notes on a given day without worrying about where to save it or how to structure and format it.

• Use NotePlan anywhere offline, like an airplane, and let iCloud Drive sync your data once online again.

• Plan out your work for the upcoming days, and during the day, add to today’s note to extend your short-term memory and micro-manage yourself.

• See events and reminders from your calendar along with your to-dos and notes on one page, so you have the whole context.

• Keep track of things by adding quick notes to your to-dos and tagging the results so you can find them easily.

Good news! NotePlan 2 on Mac OS recently launched. Check it out.

This week MacSparky is sponsored by BetterTouchTool, the Mac App that gives your input devices superpowers. While Apple makes some excellent trackpads and mice, the built-in gestures are just a taste of what you could do with those devices. With BetterTouchTool, you can completely re-design your Touch Bar, configure various Magic Mouse and Trackpad gestures, define keyboard shortcuts, bind standard mouse buttons, use the Siri Remote with your Mac and do tons more.

BetterTouchTool offers many actions to automate various tasks on your Mac. These can be assigned to any input-device trigger you choose. Additionally, it contains some handy features like window snapping, a clipboard manager, a screenshot editor, and much more. It even includes a free iOS app to control your Mac and trigger actions remotely. If you have a MacBook or MacBook Pro, this app is an absolute game changer.

There is lots of news with BetterTouchTool. Recent updates let it run just fine on the Catalina beta. There is also a new dock widget for the Touch Bar and soon (hopefully next week) we’ll get a fancy new calendar widget on the Touch Bar. Also, you can now join the BetterTouchTool Community at community.folivora.ai to learn how to get even more from BetterTouchTool. Users have shared some amazing presets there, including some very advanced custom Touch Bar setups that you should check out.

BetterTouchTool comes with a 45-day trial after which you can choose between a license that includes all updates for two years and a lifetime license.

BetterTouchTool has been around for nine years, and I’ve been using it the entire time. With BetterTouchTool, I can make my Mac dance. You should too. MacSparky readers can purchase BetterTouchTool for 15% off at checkout by using the coupon code MACSPARKYBTT for a limited time. So don’t delay. Go to folivora.ai to learn more and take advantage of the special limited-time, 15% discount on BetterTouchTool.

This week, MacSparky is sponsored by PDFpen for Mac. Preview does a good job at very basic PDF edits but if you need more powerful tools for PDFs, look no further than PDFpen and PDFpen Pro. I use PDFpen Pro nearly daily to manage and create digital documents for my day job. I like PDFpen because it brings so much to the table. PDFpen version 11 released last month with a lot of new features:

• Split-view mode for editing

• New Font Bar for expressive font control

• Import scans from Continuity Camera

• Customize page-number locations

• Add multiple items to the Library at once

• Option to turn off guides

• Medical/Legal dictionaries for OCR (English language)

• Automatic deskew independent of OCR

• Option to specify default zoom

• Specify Facing Pages settings for individual documents

• Improved Sidebar

• Edit Form Elements Properties for multiple form fields simultaneously (PDFpenPro)

PDFpen can even take a PDF document and turn it into a workable Microsoft Word file. In that sense it is also a PDF deconstruction tool and so very handy. PDFpen does all of this, and so much more. Smile also offers PDFpen for iPad and iPhone for editing PDFs for when you are on the go.

Head over to the PDFpen website for a full list of features. Also, make sure to let them know you heard about it here at MacSparky. 

Recently, I was talking to a nerd-friend about email, and he explained how he likes email but just wished it had a few additional features, like deferred mail. What he didn’t realize is that he could have all of that immediately, in Apple Mail, with this week’s sponsor, SaneBox. SaneBox is the solution to so many email problems. SaneBox is the email service that adds a pile of productivity features to your email, regardless of what email client you use. For a lot of folks, email is a constant pain point, and it doesn’t need to be. With SaneBox at your back, you can:

• Wake up every day to find the SaneBox robots have automatically sorted your incoming email for you so you can address the important and ignore the irrelevant.

• Defer email for hours, days, or weeks, so it is out of your life until a more appropriate time. They’ve even added a new feature that can optionally auto-reply to snoozed email with something like, “I’m sorry, but I’m underwater right now. I’ll get back to you in a few days.”

• Set secret reminders so if someone doesn’t reply to an important email, SaneBox gives you a nudge to follow up.

• Automatically save attachments to the cloud (like Dropbox).

• Use their SaneForward service to automatically send appropriate emails to services like Evernote, Expensify, and Kayak.

• Move unwanted email to the SaneBlackHole and never see anything from that person again.

The list goes on. For instance, you can have SaneBox send an auto-reply when you defer an email. Why not straighten out your email by getting a SaneBox account today? If you sign up with this link, you even get a discount on your subscription.

This week MacSparky is sponsored by inShort for macOS.

inShort is an advanced diagramming and planning tool that lets you specify processes, resources, and how they all fit together. All of this is built around a unique interface that enables you to drill down into the details of a project or move back up to the overview and see the project in its entirety. The interface is brilliant.

Since the last time I featured inShort on this website, there have been several significant updates. The application now works with layers (for pro subscribers), which add a new dimension to your diagrams, successfully combining related schemes in a common space.

If your project works in cycles, there’s new logic available in the application that lets you take into account several schedules for one object. One of the most interesting new features to me is the introduction of failed tasks. You can map out what happens if the task fails in your project planning. This lets you log and analyze how what happens if things break, and it even updates the Gantt chart to display the failure.

Other improvements include the ability to customize your chart presentation style, a dark theme, and several other minor improvements.

If you’d like to bring some powerful tools to your planning, check out inShort.