This week Kourosh Dini released the third edition of his Creating Flow with OmniFocus book. This is, by far, my favorite book on using OmniFocus.
Kourosh has been using OmniFocus for years and has some great ideas on how to the most out of the application. The book covers concepts ranging from beginning to advanced and all of them are explained with Kourosh’s gentle and insightful writing style.
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.
It’s MPU+ time. Katie shares the end of her MacBook Pro saga and AppleCare Experience, and I talk about playing with my widget screen, moving out of Evernote, and finding more uses for Keyboard Maestro. We also discuss upcoming Apple Events, packing apps, our favorite non-tech podcasts, and listener feedback.
This episode of Mac Power Users is sponsored by:
Luna Display: The only hardware solution that turns your iPad into a wireless display for your Mac. Use promo code POWER at checkout for 10% off.
1Password: Have you ever forgotten a password? Now you don’t have to worry about that anymore. Save up to 20% using this link.
The Omni Group: We’re passionate about productivity for Mac, iPhone and iPad.
Gazelle: Sell your iPhone for cash at Gazelle!
I’m doing a live seminar over at Learn OmniFocus this week on October 31 (Halloween!) at 10:00 AM PST. It’s an hour long session and I’ll be walking through some of the ways I use OmniFocus in my daily setup. There is still a little room left so get in there if you’d like to participate.
Cal Newport linked to an Adobe study that concluded average users check email 5.6 hours per weekday. If you look into the study a bit further, it looks like these numbers are inflated but even cutting them in half, 2.3 hours a day on email is too much.
Historically, I always thought of myself as that guy who answered all of his email. It wasn’t until I realized the cost of that self-image in terms of my personal productivity, my relationship with my family and my clients, and my simple ability to ship interesting products that I was able to abandon that particular hangup.
A big help for me was time blocking email. (Hooray for hyper-scheduling!) I have about 40 minutes in the morning and 20 minutes in the late afternoon blocked for email. On days that I stick to those numbers, I generally get a lot more work done.
Maybe this week you should keep track of how much time you spend with email. If you’re spending hours a day in your email client and don’t have a really good reason for that, start thinking about ways to lower that number.
I wrote awhile back how how I started using BestPhotos for doing the initial photo sort and purge on on my iPhone. The thing is, it is really easy to take a lot of pictures with your iPhone. Ask me to take a picture of a group of friends and I won’t shoot just one. I’ll shoot six with the reckless abandon of someone who grew up in a family where we only bought a few rolls of film a year.
While the small iPhone screen may not be sufficient to do fine edits, it’s a great place to trash photos that, for one reason or another, don’t make the cut.
Trying to accomplish this in the native Photos application is painful. Apple requires multiple tasks to get rid of photos and doesn’t present them in a way that makes it easy to see the keepers versus the rejects.
BestPhotos solves all of those problems and now they have released version 2.0. With BestPhotos, just tap on an image and expands from its thumbnail so you can look at it and swipe right to make it a favorite (or hide) or left to delete it. Think of it as Tinder for your pictures. One nice new feature in version 2.0 is “auto advance” that, once you swipe a photo left or right, immediately advances to the next one in your library.
If you want to compare two images side-by-side, the application can do that too. PowerPhotos is particularly useful after a family event, where I’ve taken multiple pictures of groups of people and I want to quickly get rid of the rejects before looking at the keepers closer on my Mac or iPad. BestPhotos is a free download with a $2.99 unlock of all the application features .
I recently joined my pal Chuck Joiner on his MacVoices podcast to talk about my recent field guide releases and the big switch to video. In addition to being a staple of Macintosh podcasting, Chuck is a longtime friend and I had a lot of fun checking in with him.
A surprising number of people wrote in to ask how I made UI elements appear orange in the OmniFocus Field Guide. It wasn’t a bit of clever hacking but instead a cool new feature in macOS Mojave. Watch the short video below to see how it works.
This week MacSparky is sponsored by PowerPhotos. There is a lot to like about Apple Photos on your Mac, but if you use it for any length of time, you’ll also realize the app is missing a lot of the tools you need to truly manage your large photo library.
That’s where PowerPhotos comes in. 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 want to get rid of duplicate photos, PowerPhotos can help you get your photo collection back in order.
PowerPhotos gives Apple Photos the tools it needs, but Apple didn’t provide. With PowerPhotos, you can work with multiple Photos libraries and store them wherever you want, including on an external drive or a network drive. You can also 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 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.
PowerPhotos also has full support for dark mode on the recently released macOS Mojave.
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 MACSPARKY18 at check out.
Last week Pixelmator Pro released a new version, 1.2, including full support for macOS Mojave. As a pro app, Pixelmator Pro has always had a dark mode. So with macOS Mojave, they’ve tweaked the dark appearance and released a new light appearance. That way whether you’re running your Mac in dark or light mode, Pixelmator will fit right in.
What is most interesting to me about this new version is reliance on machine learning for photo optimization. For years I’ve been fiddling with the buttons and dials in photo applications to try and make my pictures look better. But I’m just a little better than a monkey when it comes to fine-tuning images. With Pixelmator Pro, the developer has been using machine learning, having the application look at professional photos, so the application can better understand what makes a good photo and automatically tune your pictures for you. With the latest version, they have a machine learning algorithm trained on millions of professional photos. There’s a video explaining how it works below. Between the iPhone and Pixelmator, the robots are making my picture look better than ever before.
