Charty developer Rodrigo Araujo joins Rosemary and me on this week’s episode of Automators to talk about using Charty with Shortcuts. He also shares some of his favorite personal automations.
This episode of Automators is sponsored by:
PDFpen, from Smile: The ultimate tool for editing PDFs on the Mac.
DEVONthink: Get Organized — Unleash Your Creativity. Use this link for 10% off.
I spent the last week guesting on Ken Ray’s In a Few Minutes podcast. It was a lot of fun and topics covered range from iBooks Author to my five-song jazz playlist. Enjoy.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
There is another Sparks in the podcasting racket. My daughter Sarah has been regularly putting out episodes for her Playwright Repertory Podcast for months. If you have ever been curious about playwriting, or know someone else who may be, check it out.
