Become the Boss of Your Email with SaneBox – Sponsor



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This week MacSparky is sponsored by SaneBox, the email service that can change your life … today. For a lot of folks, email is that thorn in your side that you can’t quite ever escape. The problem is that email never sleeps. It just keeps coming at you. So why don’t you get on email tool on your side that also never sleeps. That’s SaneBox. With SaneBox at your back, you add a powerful set of email tools that can work in just about any email client. With SaneBox you can:

  • Wake up every day to find the SaneBox robots have automatically sorted your incoming email for you so you can address the important and ignore the irrelevant. 
  • Defer email for hours, days, or weeks so it is out of your life until a more appropriate time.
  • Set secret reminders so if someone doesn’t reply to an important email SaneBox gives you a nudge to follow up. (This is huge in my daily workflows.)
  • Automatically save attachments to the cloud (like Dropbox).
  • Use their SaneForward service to automatically send appropriate emails to services like Evernote, Expensify, and Kayak.
  • Move unwanted email to the SaneBlackHole and never see anything from that person again.

The list goes on. Why not straighten out your email by getting a SaneBox account and bringing a gun to a knife fight. I’ve been a SaneBox subscriber since 2012. If you sign up with this link, you get a free trial and $10 off when you subscribe. Do you know how many MacSparky readers have tried and loved SaneBox? A lot. You should try it too.

Timing Adds Multi-Mac Synchronization

A lot of people are getting religion about time tracking lately, myself included. Working in a law firm for all those years I got used to tracking time I spend on client matters. However, what I missed was the idea of productivity-based time tracking. Sync

Timing (a sometimes sponsor of my podcast) brings that to your Mac. It’s a great app that sits in the background and keeps track of your what you’re doing on your Mac and gives you a nice report, even grades your productivity.

For me, it’s been a great way to find (and plug) those rabbit holes in my productivity.

Today Timing released a new version that gives you all of those features and also now syncs that data between multiple Macs. So if you’re working on desktop and laptop machines, your data just got a lot better. This also gives you an off-site backup for your data so you don’t lose Timing data regardless of how many Macs you use. The new sync is an an important addition, done elegantly. The update is free for existing customers. You can get the app directly from the developer or as part of your SetApp subscription


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Mac Power Users 437: The iPhone as a Communicator


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Speakding of podcasats, of all the things an iPhone can do, we sometimes forget it is a great device for communication. In this episode, we dig deep on how to use the iPhone as a communicationd tool.

This episode of Mac Power Users is sponsored by:

  • PDFpen from Smile: With powerful PDF editing tools, available for Mac, iPad, and iPhone, PDFpen from Smile makes you a Mac Power User.
  • 1Password: Have you ever forgotten a password? Now you don’t have to worry about that anymore. Save up to 20% using this link.
  • Casper: The Internet’s favorite mattress. Take advantage of Casper’s limited time Fourth of July offer.
  • Pixelmator: The world’s most innovative image-editing app.

New Podcast: Automators



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I’m pleased to announce today the launch of a new podcast I’ll be making with my pal Rosemary Orchard. The show is called Automators, and it’s all about, as the name implies, Automation.

Specifically, this show will pick one particular Automation subject and drill deep on it. The goal is to give ordinary users automation super-powers, and I’m so happy to finally share it with you. 

Like Mac Power Users, this show is meant to provide listeners with a lot of signal and very little noise. We’ve got a website, Automators.FM, where you’ll be able to download the automation scripts we cover in each episode, a Forum where you can discuss and share your own Automation workflows, and a YouTube Channel where we’ll post related video screencasts when we have them. We’ll also be releasing scripts and tutorials with each episode. We want to make this easy for you.

The Automators aims at being a 30-45 minute show, and it will release every two weeks. We’re releasing the show on Fridays with the idea it will give you a fun weekend project with every episode. If you like Mac Power Users, I think you’ll like Automators. The two shows are incredibly complimentary of one another. You can subscribe right now to episode 0 and episode 1 drops this Friday. It is all about automating calendar events and it’s both geeky and wicked useful. I hope you’ll give the Automators a try.

For fun, we recorded Episode 0 memojified below. Please subscribe to the new show and, if you like it, check out the website, forum, YouTube channel, and leave an iTunes review so listeners can find us. 

​MPU T-Shirts and Hoodies Available for Limited Time



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There’s a big promotion at Cotton Bureau that ends tomorrow. As part of the promotion, we agreed to put some of our MPU merchandise back up for sale. We really weren’t planning on selling these again but the folks at Cotton Bureau asked and it looked kind of fun so we agreed.



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So if you’d like an MPU hoodie or t-shirt, now’s the time. They are also giving away some pretty cool technology so you may end up with a lot more than a t-shirt.

Manage Cloud Storage on Your Mac with CloudMounter

Like everyone else, I have files distributed across a collection of cloud storage services. As a result, I’m always juggling how to keep track of that data on my laptop with limited SSD storage.


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Recently, I picked up a copy of CloudMounter. CloudMounter is a Mac utility for precisely the above-described problem. Specifically, it runs in the Mac’s menubar and lets you attach various cloud storage solutions. They’ve got the usual suspects, like Dropbox, Google, Microsoft OneDrive, and Amazon S3. They also have more unexpected providers like Backblaze and various flavors of FTP.

I’ve been happy with CloudMounter. It gets out of the way but still gives me access to my cloud storage without filling up my SSD. The application integrates with the Mac’s Finder, so you see the mounted cloud storage as just another volume in the Finder. Even though those files show up in the Finder, Cloudmounter doesn’t download the files to your hard drive which is the trick that saves you so much space.

There’s also an option to encrypt your cloud data through CloudMounter, that gables the cloud files if they are accessed from a different device. Because I use multiple devices and platforms, I did not enable this.

Even on my desktop Mac, I have limited SSD storage. As a result, there are pieces of Dropbox that I never automatically download. Instead, I have to fiddle with the application settings or go on to the web service if I want to get access to those files. Using CloudMounter, I’m able to get to them much faster.

If, like me, you’ve got a lot of data stored in the cloud, CloudMounter may be the solution you’re looking for on your Mac.

inDispute, an App for Arguments


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As both a lawyer and a nerd I am always interested in the technology behind negotiation. So much so that I’ve even created custom Members templates to help me out during mediations. Recently I discovered an app for the iPhone and iPad, inDispute, that’s engineered around making reasoned arguments. The idea is to help you script out arguments and counter-arguments, making it easier to get your point across (and hopefully take some of the emotion out of an argument). It’s an interesting and app and one I never quite imagined existing but isn’t that what the App Store keeps doing to us? Giving us apps we’d never imagined before. 

Either way, inDispute is worth checking out before you make your next argument.

OmniFocus 3 Now Available for iPad and iPhone – Sponsor


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This week, MacSparky.com is sponsored by OmniFocus. Check out the new OmniFocus, version 3 for iPad and iPhone. It’s everything you’ve always loved about OmniFocus, just more powerful and easier to use. 

The new version allows you to add tags to your tasks, like location, person, energy level, and priority. You can even sort by multiple tags to build perspectives that get exactly the tasks you need in front of you right now. 

Speaking of perspectives, there are some useful built-in perspectives with the new version including forecasts but if that’s not enough for you, with the pro version you can make your own custom perspectives. I use these every day to get my work done.

I’ve been hearing from readers that are worried about upgrading to the new version on iPad and iPhone while they’re still using version 2 on the Mac. This is not a problem. The Omni group spent a lot of time making sure that the files will work just fine across version 2 on your Mac and version 3 on your iPad and iPhone period. (Version 3 for the Mac should arrive later this summer.)

So stop waiting and get yourself set up with OmniFocus, version 3 for iPad and iPhone and let them know you heard about it here at MacSparky.com.

Mac Power Users 436: MPU+: These Things Are Like Tribbles


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In this episode, we launch the new MPU Discourse community and talk about Siri Shortcuts. Katie got a HomePod. I share my thoughts on the iOS Beta and my recent visit to Apple Park. We also tackle listener questions about messages in the cloud, iPad accessories, and kids in college. 

This episode of Mac Power Users is sponsored by:

  • 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! 
  • FreshBooks: Online invoicing made easy.