Stand Out with Hoban Cards (Sponsor)



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Your business card says a lot about you. To me, it tells me how much you care about the little things, and that, in turn, tells me how you care about the big things. I recently had a lawyer give me his card. It was a cut piece of laser printer paper, and I thought to myself . “huh?”. It wasn’t a good “huh”. Don’t be that guy. Why not carry a business card that genuinely makes you stand out? This week, MacSparky is sponsored by Hoban Cards, where they use a 1902 letterpress machine to make cards that your colleagues, clients, and customers will never forget. I sure love mine. Forget laser printers. Watch the Hoban letterpress process in action.

Evan and the gang at Hoban Cards are entirely dedicated to making the best possible calling cards. They have some beautiful templates to choose from, or you can roll your own.

There is no doubt I am a geek, but I have to admit that I love handing out letterpress cards. It is always a conversation starter. Put simply, Hoban Cards is where you go for the unique and classy alternative to conventional, mass-produced, soulless business cards. Best of all, use ‘MacSparky’ to get $10 off any order. I’ve been carrying Hoban cards for years and I intend to keep carrying them for the duration. You should too.

Grammarly Gets Better on iPad


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Yesterday Grammarly, my online grammar checker of choice, released a new version of their iPad app. Historically, the Grammarly app was just this side of garbage. There was no app, per se, but a keyboard that would grammar check your document. In theory, this is good. It saves you the trouble of round-tripping your text to the Grammarly app. In practice, it was rough. While the grammar-checking engine has always been good, the previous version required you to remove your iPad from an attached keyboard to check grammar. It drove me nuts every time.

With this new version, the keyboard is much more useful. Indeed I’m using it right now. Also, there is now a stand-alone version of the Grammarly editor, so opening the app gets you … well … an app, where in the past it was just a fancy wrapper for the Grammarly keyboard.

I’ve subscribed to Grammarly for a few years, and I’ll renew again. I don’t know what exactly is going on over at Grammarly, but they’ve released several new, useful features in the grammar checking engine over the last six months and now the iPad app has gone from dreadful to useful.

The ElevationHub



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ElevationLab is one of my favorite makers of tech gizmos, and I own many of their products. Today I pre-ordered their latest addition, the ElevationHub. It is a small gizmo that plugs into the Apple USB-C laptop chargers and includes a pass-through USB-C, an additional USB-A port, an SD Card Reader, and a bit of velcro that lets you wrap and hold a cable around the charger. It’s all very clever and I’m in.

Fantastical 3.1 Releases and New Videos

Today Flexibits released a major update to Fantastical with version 3.1. This is the “working from home” update with a bunch of new features aimed at people surprised to find themselves working from home:

Time-Based Calendar Sets

Calendar sets have always been a cool feature. Now you can have them trigger automatically at a specific time of day.

Better Conference Calling

Fantastical’s Zoom integration is excellent. You can add a zoom call straight from the app. With this update, Fantastical can now auto-detect conference calls with several popular conferencing services, and it adds a one-click “join” button to your calendar (and your menubar) as the event approaches.

And More Improvements

They also added new Mac appearance options customized for both light and dark mode, added iMessage stickers, and made several other improvements and optimizations.

This is a free update for Fantastical subscribers. I made a few videos for Flexibits showing off the new features. Below is one, but you can find several more on Fantastical’s website. I like the way Flexibits has continued to release features of consequence since the app launch. I am using both the new time-based calendar sets and zoom integration daily. Learn more about Fantastical at their website.

If you subscribed to the Fantastical Field Guide, these new videos are also now available in the course for viewing and download.

Last Call for Introductory Pricing on the Photos Field Guide



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I have been thrilled with the warm reception for the Photos Field Guide. I didn’t know what to expect, releasing it during a pandemic, but the feedback has been excellent, and customers are writing to tell me how much better they are at taking, organizing, and finding their photos.

Now that all of the transcripts and the ePub are in place, it’s time for the last call on introductory pricing for the Photos Field Guide. The price will go up to $29 later this week. If you want in on the discount price, now is the time.

Mac Power Users 540: Subroutine in the Brain



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On this Mac Power Users’ feedback episode, Stephen and I talk more about email and working from home, but also get into what it takes to make a MacSparky Field Guide and some weird problems we’ve recently encountered with our tech.

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. 

  • Setapp: More than 180 powerful apps for your Mac. Try it free for a week.

  • The Intrazone by Microsoft SharePoint: Your bi-weekly conversation and interview podcast hosted by the SharePoint team

  • DEVONthink: Get Organized — Unleash Your Creativity. Use this link for 10% off.

Photos Field Guide Transcripts

The Photos Field Guide now has all closed-captioning transcripts in place, along with a written transcript of each course located below each video. Hooray!

I am also trying something new with the Photos Field Guide. I have added a PDF and ePub version of the complete transcript. This is not a written Field Guide, but instead a compiled version of the transcripts that you can download and read, if that’s your thing. It’s all available now for existing customers. Log in and go crazy.

Preparing for a Sabbatical

In this week’s episode of Focused, I committed to Sean McCabe to take an entire week on sabbatical in July. For years I have been trying to figure out how to take time off. Last year I rented a cabin in the mountains for a few days with the idea of taking a short sabbatical, but just days in advance, I canceled … because I am a coward and afraid not to answer the phone for clients.

As I said in the show, I firmly believe that downtime is critical on several levels. With downtime, your brain can bring those things lurking in the background to the foreground. This is where you may identify problems or new opportunities. It is also where you may get to relax or do something different and recharge.

The problem is that I have never been able to practice what I preach. That is what led me to commit, on-air, to Sean. I figured that is the only way I would make that happen.

We recorded that episode a few weeks ago, and now July 13 is looming on my calendar. It is time to plan for my first sabbatical. I’m not talking about planning on what I will do during the sabbatical, but just how I will get to that week and feel comfortable taking a week off. It’s a lot harder to cancel at the last moment since I’ve made this a thing now.

So now I am planning my first sabbatical. I want to succeed at this, so I’m spending some time trying to set myself up for success. Here is the plan so far:

The Podcasts

I’ve already moved recording dates and traded with some co-hosts on post-production tasks, so I’ll have no podcasting duties during my sabbatical week. That was easy enough.

The Blog

Likewise, I am working on some timeless-style posts that I will have in the can. Tumbleweeds will not be rolling through MacSparky.com during my week off. I considered bringing in a guest host for the website as some bloggers do, but that felt more complicated than I needed, at least for this first go around. If I had done it, I would find myself wondering what he/she is posting and not relaxing.

Field Guide Production

Again, this is not so difficult to plan around. I am turning up the dial a bit during June and early July so I can feel I’m in a good place when I set down the microphone for a week. This may delay the next release slightly, but it’s an easy price to pay.

Customer Support

This is where things start getting harder. I do have someone that helps with common customer support email questions. My workflow has always been that the emails come to me, and I forward them to my helper along with thoughts and instructions. Ideally, I’d like to not be in that loop for the week of my sabbatical. One solution would be to turn my MacSparky email over to my assistant, but I find that extremely difficult. I’m struggling right now to figure out why I am so disinclined to do that. I trust this person, and yet I feel like my email should be my problem.

In the meantime, I am experimenting with some automations to auto-forward certain types of emails to her. If that doesn’t work, I may end up turning over the email to her, but I’m incredibly hesitant to do that.

Legal Clients

This is the most difficult challenge of a sabbatical for me. Every week, I have some legal clients that come up with problems that need immediate help. It will be tough for me to say no to that. Likewise, offloading legal email isn’t even an option since that email is subject to the attorney-client privilege. I think, ultimately, for me, a sabbatical will necessarily include keeping up with legal email and perhaps even doing some legal work. The trick will be determining what work is urgent enough to justify breaking the sabbatical and what is not. In reality, there really shouldn’t be much work that urgent, but I am inclined to make all client work urgent. At the same time, nearly all of my clients are very understanding when I tell them I’ll be doing their work a bit later for one reason or another, and I think they would have no problem with me delaying a few days if something truly is not urgent.

Between now and July 13, I plan to write out something for sabbatical-me giving strict instructions about what constitutes sabbatical-breaking legal work. I’m not sure what that is going to say yet, but I will figure it out.

The Rest

I also intend to do a deep dive on Sean’s Sabbatical.blog website for further advice. Finally, I have to prepare my family for the sabbatical week since they will all most likely be home with me. I have also started a forum thread where listeners are sharing their sabbatical success (and failure) stories.

I’m looking forward to this sabbatical experiment, but before I can pull it off, I’ve got my work cut out for me.

Mac Software on ARM Macs

Gus Mueller wrote a post about software predictions with the hypothetical ARM Macs. Gus is a long-time (and smart) developer that has gone through prior Apple processor changes, so I put a lot of stock in his opinions. The whole post is worth reading, but my big take away was that with the possible exception of requiring sandboxed apps (Gus pegs that at 50/50), the underlying frameworks (and therefore the apps) will remain the same. This isn’t Apple’s first rodeo when it comes to processor changes, and if we get an ARM Mac announcement at WWDC, I fully expect the message will be, “Same Macs, same software, longer battery life.”