My Free Apple Mail Seminar

I’m going to start doing free monthly webinars here at MacSparky and the next one is all about how I’m using Apple mail with a combination of AppleScript and other automation tools to make the application dance. I’ve got a lot of good ideas to help you make Apple Mail dance, so why don’t you join me?

Make Mail Dance, September 2, 2021, 9:00 AM

If the date/time are inconvenient to you, go ahead and sign up anyway. Afterward, I’ll be sending out time-limited access to a recording.

Mac Power Users 602: Was That a Rabbit Hole?



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In this feedback episode of Mac Power Users, Stephen and I discuss website redesigns, quote applications, encryption, virtualizing Windows, and a whole lot more.

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.

  • Squarespace: Make your next move. Enter offer code MPU at checkout to get 10% off your first purchase.

  • Setapp: More than 200 powerful apps for your Mac. Try it free for a week.

Acorn 7



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Acorn is a quality image editor for MacOS that won’t break your patience or your bank. They’ve got you covered on the basics like touching up your images, removing backgrounds, color correcting, resizing, and cropping, but they can help you do so much more.

Acorn gives you choices. They’ve got a ton of photo effects to choose from, and they’re easy to use. You can really play around with filters. Not only can you combine filters together for endless combinations, but you don’t have to commit and can change your mind if you don’t like the filter you chose.

Gus Mueller, the gent behind Flying Meat Software, just keeps improving Acorn. Their last update gave us a new export workflow, a super accurate color picker, a tool to help fix perspective distortions, and altering or even creating your own animated GIF. Acorn on sale at only $19.99, which is 50% off the regular price but that is ending next week.



Ikigai — Book Notes



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I read a lot of books and spend some time after the fact digesting them. I’ve decided to start sharing some of my book notes here. I hope you enjoy this first one.

Ikigai: The Japanese Secret to a Long and Happy Life is a worthy read. Written by Héctor García and Frances Miralles, the book looks closely at the people of Okinawa, who live longer than anyone else, and the Japanese concept of ikigai. Ikigai, or at least my understanding of it, is the Japanese notion of one’s purpose in life. It’s a mixture of vocation, passion, and abilities, which I came to think of as the reason to jump out of bed in the morning.

Moreover, you don’t just necessarily have one ikigai or keep the same ikigai throughout your life. It can evolve as you do. The book explains that having a purpose in life is so important in Japanese culture that the western concept of retirement doesn’t exist there.

The authors spent a lot of time talking to very old Okinawans, looking for commonalities and the thing that stood out most was the concept of ikigai. They all had it and embraced it.

The book goes into depth associating the ikigai concept with Japanese culture, exercise, meditation, and mental health. But the book is definitely written for westerners, attempting to translate these concepts and ideas for the western mindset, and it largely succeeds.

The authors explain ten rules of ikigai:

  1. Stay active; don’t retire.

  2. Take it slow.

  3. Don’t fill your stomach.

  4. Surround yourself with good friends.

  5. Get in shape for your next birthday.

  6. Smile.

  7. Reconnect with nature.

  8. Give thanks.

  9. Live in the moment.

  10. Follow your ikigai.

Read as this summarized list, it can feel pretty shallow, but the book adds more depth. At 208 pages, it is a fairly quick read, and I got a lot from it. I particularly enjoyed reading the advice from Japanese centenarians. This book got me thinking about many of my own habits and how well I’m tending to my own ikigai. It also led to some changes in the ways I handle stress. If you’d like to dig deeper on this topic, check out Ikigai.

SaneBox: To Unsubscribe without Unsubscribing (Sponsor)



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Have you ever want to banish someone into a black hole? You can with SaneBox, this week’s MacSparky sponsor. If you don’t want to hear from a sender again, or want to unsubscribe from a list without having to unsubscribe from a list, SaneBox will do the dirty work for you. 

The SaneBlackHole is the folder for training emails to your trash. You’ll move messages into this folder, and SaneBox will learn that all future emails from these senders go to the trash. 

Sometimes, unsubscribing from an email list can do more harm than good. Depending on the list you’re trying to remove yourself from, because you’ve identified yourself as a real person by unsubscribing, you may have opened yourself up to even more junk mail coming your way. Anything that comes from these senders in the future will be put directly into the SaneBlackHole, so you don’t even have to bother with unsubscribing.

Banish your email to the SaneBlackHole. And if you do make a mistake, you can just move the email out of your SaneBlackHole folder to the correct Sane folder. If you’re thinking about giving SaneBox a try, now’s a great time. You can sign up for your free trial, and you’ll get a $10 credit you can use towards a SaneBox subscription.

Tinderbox 9

Tinderbox 9 is now available. It’s one of the largest leaps Tinderbox has ever taken, with all sorts of improvements — big and tiny.

Here’s just one of the new features, the Commands & Info Bar on the Help menu. Open it any time and begin typing. You can ask it about videos to watch (View video…). You can ask it to open any Tinderbox Inspector. You can ask it to find topics in Mark Anderson’s wonderful Tinderbox Reference Manual. You can Select any note by name, or Open any Tinderbox document that Tinderbox 9 has seen. This gets you to your data much faster and that’s just one of some 150 improvements.



Tinderbox 9 is a free update if you’ve purchased or upgraded Tinderbox in the past year.

Satechi’s Clamp Hub Pro


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Satechi, who makes some of the sleekest accessories, is coming out with a USB-C Clamp Hub specifically for the 2021 iMac (24-inch)—sorry iMacs made in 2020 or earlier. To match the 2021 iMac, USB-C Clamp Hub has a modern, aluminum design. It’s got a USB-C data port, three USB-A 3.0 data ports, micro/SD card readers, and an adjustable knob to clamp onto your iMac. It’s not shipping until mid-September, but if you pre-order it now, you can get receive 15% off with the code IMAC15.

I had a similar Satechi Clamp Hub for my iMac Pro and it worked great. The question is whether the convenience of easy access to those ports is enough to justify making the front of your fancy new iMac look kind of ugly.

MindNode’s Outlining Feature Now on iPhone and iPad



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Awhile ago, I wrote about MindNode’s Editable Outline feature available on the Mac. This feature has been a real game changer for me and I routinely now work on my mind maps in both map and outline modes in Mind Node. The good news is that the outline feature is now also on iPhone and iPad versions of MindNode. With this update, you can:

  • Interact with the Outline using touch, an external keyboard, or a trackpad

  • Outline and mind map side-by-side, or use the new full-screen Outline

  • Use iOS features like External Screen Support and Scribble with Apple Pencil

Outlining, like Visual Tags, Focus Mode, Notes, Connections, Stickers, Quick Entry, all styling and layout options, is a MindNode Plus feature, which is MindNode’s cross-platform (macOS and iOS) subscription. Plans are available for $2.49 monthly or $19.99 yearly. A small price, I think, for the convenience of being able to gather my thoughts, organize my ideas, and try to make some sort of sense of them. Learn more at their website.