This week MacSparky is sponsored by SaneBox, the email service that adds power features to any email system. With SaneBox at your back, you add a powerful set of email tools that can work in just about any email client. SaneBox will automatically sort your email for you, defer your email to a more convenient time, set reminders and automatically forward email. 

The list of SaneBox features just keeps growing. One feature a lot of people overlook is SaneBox’s ability to automatically save email attachments to the cloud. Attachments are hard to find and take up lots of storage space in your email. Sane Attachments scans emails in your Inbox for attachments, puts them on Dropbox, and replaces them with a link. Not only does this save space in your email, it also lets you use Hazel on your Mac to perform automation on your email attachments (which appear in a Dropbox folder) as they arrive. Super useful.

These are just a few of the features that you get with SaneBox. Go check it out and use this link to get a discount off your subscription.

A lot of Email is routine and too often involves repeating the same words over and over again. Writing identical text to different recipients is a waist of your time and a productivity drain. Put simply, it keeps you from important work. 

This week’s sponsor, MailButler, solves that problem with its new, most recent feature – reusable email templates. They’re powerful, flexible, and save you precious time. MailButler adds email templates to Apple Mail. MailButler Message Templates are customizable form emails that you can use repeatedly and they are wicked useful. If you find yourself writing an email you suspect you may write again in the future, save it as a template and don’t worry about it any more. New details can always be added before the template message is sent.

MailButler adds so much more than just templates to Apple Mail. It’s really a set of power tools for Apple Mail users. Also with MailButler you can easily schedule your emails to be sent later, get detailed information about when, where, and with which device your outgoing email has been viewed, and pause your inbox any time you want. Besides, MailButler has a lot of great signature templates, and can be integrated with the leading cloud and management services.

Supercharge Apple Mail today with MailButler.

Project planning is the stuff of legend. Go to any big company and you will find somebody in a room somwhere responsible for project planning that spends weeks at a time in seminars trying to learn to use their Byzantine project planning software.

It doesn’t have to be that way. This week’s sponsor, OmniPlan is the exception. The fact that it’s easy to pick up OmniPlan shouldn’t surprise you. The Omni Group group has been making Difficult software easy since they first started. OmniPlan has a clean, simple interface giving you everything you need with just a few clicks.

At the same time, OmniPlan also delivers power. OmniPlan includes powerful project planning tools like filtering, violation resolution, leveling, earned value analysis, and Monte Carlo simulations allowing it to match even its most difficult-to-use competitors.

I use OmniPlan for project planning on the legal side. Clients love the nice, clean reports generated by OmniPlan showing my plans for their legal problems. Your clients will love it too.

Most recently, OmniPlan got touch bar support so if you’ve got one of those fancy new MacBook Pros, OmniPlan is that much easier to use. If you’re curious, I recommend downloading the free trial. You’ll be surprised at how powerful and easy to use OmniPlan is. note

Something you may not realize if you are wearing an Apple Watch is that it is checking your heart rate every 4 minutes during the day. (It’s much more frequent when you are working out.) Your heart rate data is really useful to understanding your overall health. Heart rate data helps assess periods of fat burning and high intensity during workouts and even helps you understand your sleep quality.

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The problem is finding a way to access and comprehend that data. That’s where CardioBot comes in. CardioBot takes your heart rate data and displays it for you in easy to understand charts and graphs. It tracks your minimum, maximum, and average heart rate during the day. Here’s my data for January 14.

Moreover, when you workout there are additional charts showing the highest intensity, fat burning periods. In this workout I started with weights and later got on the treadmill, which really got my ticker going.

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CardioBot doesn’t add to your battery drain. It simply takes your heart data and puts it in simple (and attractive!) charts that you can easily understand. 

CardioBot can also help you improve your sleep using detailed sleep analysis. I really like the design of this app and for just $3 it sure is nice to have easy access to my heart rate data. I’m looking forward to dropping this on my doctor at my next checkup. If you’ve got an Apple Watch, this one is absolutely worth it. You can find it today on the App Store.

This week MacSparky is sponsored by Agenda Minder. We all spend time complaining about meetings but not enough of us do anything to make them better. Agenda Minder is a Mac app that lets you pull meetings in from your calendar and organize them. You can quickly find the right meeting by sorting meeting name or date. You can also filter your meetings based on when they occur. Once you add or import meetings, Agenda Minder lets you easily add agenda items along with data about objectives, notes, task owners, and time. Agenda Minder helps you plan and execute your meetings regardless of whether your other team members adopt it.

Agenda Minder’s developer keeps adding polish and features. Indeed there are so many new features and polish that the price is going to go up soon so if you’re interested, now’s the time to check out Agenda Minder.

I’m pleased to welcome a new sponsor to MacSparky, PowerPhotos. There has been a lot of action in photo management on the Mac in the past few years and PowerPhotos is that powerful utility we’ve all been waiting for. If you have photos scattered across multiple libraries that you want to merge together, have a library that you want to split up because it’s gotten too large, or just want to get rid of duplicate photos, PowerPhotos can help you get your photo collection back in order.

PowerPhotos allows you to work with multiple Photos libraries and store them wherever you want, including on an external drive or a network drive. Split up your giant library into smaller ones by copying photos and albums with a simple drag and drop, preserving metadata such as descriptions and keywords along the way. Or, if you already have multiple libraries, use PowerPhotos to merge them together while weeding out duplicates along the way. PowerPhotos also features a powerful duplicate photo finder, a browser to let you see your photos without even opening up Photos itself, a multi-library search feature, and more.

You may recall an app from the iPhoto days called iPhoto Library Manager that gave you a similar set of tools. PowerPhotos is by the same developer and it’s just as reliable.

So go check out PowerPhotos today. Best of all, MacSparky readers get a 20% discount. Just use the code MACSPARKY at check out.

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I’m pleased to welcome back Tinderbox as this week’s MacSparky sponsor. Tinderbox stores and organizes your notes, plans, and ideas. If you’re like me, you’ve got a lot rattling around in your brain and Tinderbox helps you make sense of it. Tinderbox is a powerful but personal content assistant that helps you share your notes through the cloud and on the Web.

Best of all, Tinderbox is part of the WinterFest 2016 festival of artisanal software. This is a collection of some of the very best software available, much of which works together.

For example, Tinderbox and DEVONthink are an excellent combination. You can store your research materials in DEVONthink and make sense of them with Tinderbox. Another great combination is Tinderbox with Scrivener. Organize your novel with Tinderbox and then write it with Scrivener. All of these apps work brilliantly together and are on sale with rare discounts as part of WinterFest 2016. 

Heading into the new year, get yourself some powerful tools to accomplish some big goals in 2017. Check out Tinderbox and WinterFest 2016 now before the sale ends.

This week MacSparky is sponsored by SaneBox, the email service that can start saving your bacon today. As the end of the year approaches, it’s a good time to look at your workflows that work … and those that don’t. For a lot of folks, email is a constant pain point and it doesn’t need to be. With SaneBox at your back, you add a powerful set of email tools that can work in just about any email client. With SaneBox you can:

• Wake up everyday 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.
• 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. Why not straighten out your email in 2017 by getting a SaneBox account and bringing a gun to a knife fight. If you sign up with this link, you even get a discount off your subscription.

This week MacSparky is sponsored by OmniGraffle. Did you know that the Omni Group recently released version 7 of OmniGraffle for the Mac? The new version adds several useful new features including Touch Bar support and the ability to convert lines and text into shapes. They’ve also dramatically improved the import and export features. But of all of the new features, my favorite new one is the infinite campus. As I build OmniGraffle documents, they often grow with my ideas. The infinite canvas makes it possible for me to easily do that.

I originally purchased OmniGraffle for the law practice. I use it to create diagrams for presentations and legal briefs. The application is perfect for that job but since then I find I use it for a lot of other things than the day job. In this last week, I used OmniGraffle to create our family Christmas card and also some sweet new Star Wars based Apple watch faces.

OmniGraffle manages to combine powerful tools with an easy to learn interface. This lets anybody use the application while at the same time giving you plenty of room to grow. If you ever find the need to create diagrams and images using your computer, you should really check out OmniGraffle. They’ve got versions of the application for the Mac, iPad, and iPhone. Head over to the OmniGraffle website and download your free trial. While you’re at it, let them know you heard about it from MacSparky.com.

This week MacSparky is sponsored by my favorite mind mapping application, MindNode. MindNode walks that line of providing powerful tools while still keeping a simple (and delightful) interface.

Mind mapping is something you really should try if you haven’t recently. I was originally unimpressed with mind mapping but when I bought my first iPad I tried it again and it just clicked for me on the tablet form factor. Now I use MindNode every day with copies on my iPhone, iPad, and Mac all syncing data together. One of my favorite uses for MindNode is brain storming. Watch the below video to learn how to brain storm with MindNode and get yourself a copy of MindNode to get more productive.