This week, MacSparky is sponsored by Ulysses, the writing application I use every day. For a lot of people, myself included, writing words is one of the primary ways we pay for our shoes. For so many years I wanted a writing solution that just worked and I could have with me anywhere. Ulysses is that. Ulysses gives me a focused writing environment, eliminating distractions and encouraging me to do the hard work of moving the cursor across the line.

Ulysses takes the friction out of writing. That is because in addition to obsessive design, Ulysses has some real power under the hood. I love the way Ulysses organizes the various facets of my life and where I do my writing. As I go use Ulysses, I have all sorts of text that I’m currently writing, have already written, or use as a reference. And because it syncs across macOS and iOS, all of it is always available to me. There is a reason I always have this app open.

And the good news is that if you are getting a shiny new iPad Pro today, Ulysses has already been updated for it. As usual, the Ulysses team is on it with their latest update.

Best of all, the Ulysses team has agreed to give the MacSparky readers a free three month test drive. Use the links in this post to try Ulysses for three months. You’ll see immediately what I mean about why this app is good.

This week MacSparky is sponsored by SaneBox. SaneBox is the email utility that we all need. It is loaded with features, like the ability to auto-sort your email as it arrives. Every morning when I wake up, I don’t see 300 emails in my inbox but instead just a few. Importantly, those few emails are the ones that I really need to see. All of the advertisements and other nonsense are automatically sorted by SaneBox into separate folders so I can look at them later.

The past few weeks SaneBox has really been helping me out with its reminder service. It is the end of the year so on the legal side I’m sending a lot of client emails about getting their annual minutes prepared. I do this, because I am a nerd, through an automated email that I created in Siri Shortcuts. Part of that form email in Siri Shortcuts includes a blind copy field to 1week@SaneBox.com. SaneBox then automatically monitors whether or not I was a reply to that email. If I don’t in 1 week, SaneBox reminds me to follow up. I could have also done this with an OmniFocus project, but why when SaneBox does it for me automatically.

This is just one of the ways SaneBox helps me manage my email every day. I have heard from many listeners that decided to give SaneBox a trial just for a few days and then ended up subscribing within a few days because they immediately see the value in this product. If you’d like to spend less time on email, check out SaneBox and use this link to get a nice discount.