Get Productive with Daylite (Sponsor)


This week’s sponsor, Daylite, helps individuals, teams, and small businesses on the Mac, iPhone and iPad.

For those of you who don’t know about Daylite, it has been around for over 15 years. Daylite helps you manage clients, schedules, tasks, projects, emails and new business opportunities, all in one app where they’re interconnected. From a single client you can see emails to and from, who referred them, pending business deals, booked or upcoming appointments, and even future followups. Or from a single Project you can see each person and their role, the tasks and who’s responsible, meetings about the project, and notes, all in chronological order. Daylite helps you remember the little details so you don’t have to worry about anything falling through the cracks. And when you invite team members, you can share this information, assign tasks or check each others calendars before scheduling meetings.

The Daylite team is constantly coming up with new ways to make the app better. Most recently, the Daylite team announced they are adding iOS email support natively right inside the app.

If you’re looking for a mature, reliable system to manage your business, look no further. You can even read about other companies using Daylite here.

MPU 379: Workflows with Liana Lehua




This week on the Mac Power Users Liana Lehua shares her hardware and software setup, apps, and workflow for television production. We also share our hopes and dreams for iOS 11 and other Apple products at this year’s WWDC. Also, here’s a picture of me and Liana the first time we met in 1990.


Sponsors inclue:

  • Fujitsu ScanSnap ScanSnap Helps You Live a More Productive, Efficient, Paperless Life. 
  • Fracture Bring your photos to life.
  • Freshbooks: Online invoicing made easy.
  • 1Password Have you ever forgotten a password? Now you don’t have to worry about that anymore.

Apple Maps/Google Maps Comparison

Justin O’Beirne updated his Apple Maps/Google Maps comparison from last year. This is the most thorough comparison of the two products I’ve seen. One clever trick he did this year was run monthly screenshots giving you a sort-of time lapse.

Reading the article, Google seams better. I’ve been primarily using Apple Maps because of Siri integration but I’m going to run Google Maps for the next month to see if it makes any difference for me.

TripMode 2


There’s a new version of TripMode out. I’ve written about TripMode before. It’s a Mac app that will monitor your internet traffic and selectively turn off apps. This can be a lifesaver when tethering. As a quick war story, I once had a very large podcast file come in over Dropbox while I was tethering my Mac and burned through a month’s wireless data in about an hour. With TripMode, when I tether, I turn off Dropbox so that doesn’t happen.

The new version 2 adds several new features, including profiles and better app sorting. The best new feature is data limits. TripMode can now automatically block traffic when reaching a pre-defined data limit.

It’s a free upgrade if you bought version 1. If not, it’s just $8. If you ever tether your Mac to a wireless device, you’ll want TripMode.

iOS 11 Musings

As Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) approaches, a lot of folks are thinking about what Apple will do next with iOS 11. I am particularly interested to see if they can push the ball forward for iPad. It has been two years since the iPad got any significant love, and an iPad-heavy iOS update is long overdue.

I’ve been writing about this a lot here at MacSparky, and I’m not alone. Federico Viticci at MacStories wrote an interesting “wish list” for new features in iOS 11, and it is primarily focused on iPad. Viticci and Sam Beckett put together a remarkable concept video for some of their favorite ideas for the new operating system on iPad.

I like nearly all of their ideas. One in particular that makes sense is the idea of the shelf. They’ve created a drop-down shelf where you can temporarily store files and data. I do something like this already on my Mac with an app called Dropzone. This idea makes even more sense on iOS where moving data between applications is harder than usual. Something like this could alleviate a lot of the bottlenecks that come from working with multiple files on iOS.

Either way, it’s been two years, and I sure hope Apple is as ambitious as Viticci and Beckett were. I’ll be at WWDC in a few days and will report back here.

A Missed Opportunity with Text and Screen Effects in iOS

We have now had text and screen effects on iOS for eight months. Are you using them? Perhaps more importantly, does Apple remember they exist?

When iOS 10 was first released, I made the argument that to keep these relevant, Apple needed to constantly iterate and update them. If you’ve ever spent any time with Snapchat, you know what I’m talking about. Snapchat regularly releases new filters and effects that you can apply to your images. They often change seasonally and even for particular holidays. Watching my children and their friends, they all get a kick out of whatever the latest and greatest Snapchat filter is.

I think Apple had a similar opportunity with text and screen effects in iOS messaging. Why not render text with snowflakes during the winter? Why not have a screen effect with flowers blooming in the spring?

By changing things up, Apple could keep text and screen effects more relevant, and they’d get used more often. (When’s the last time you used either of these features?) If Apple brought a little regularly updated whimsy to the table, it would make the iPhone even more “sticky” for users and make them less likely to change platforms.

This seems like such a no-brainer that I’m surprised Apple hasn’t been more aggressive with text and screen effects. I’m guessing we’ll get a few updated animations with iOS 11 when they announce it next month, but I think they are missing out by not having much more frequent updates and animations.

Sort Your Mail Automatically with SaneBox (sponsor)




This week MacSparky is sponsored by SaneBox, the email service that allows you to be the boss of your email inbox.

SaneBox is an email service with a lot of features. This week I’d like to focus on SaneBox’s ability to automatically sort your email for you. Every day we all get a lot of email. Some of it may come from family or coworkers and be super important. Other email may come from some online store that you bought a shirt from 10 years ago and be a lot less important. With all of your email going into your inbox, you’ve got to spend time every day sorting the wheat from the chaff.

SaneBox can do that for you. Specifically, SaneBox will look at your inbox and sort your less important email into other folders. For instance, SaneBox sorts all of my email from people that I buy things from into a specific folder. Likewise, SaneBox has a separate folder, called “Later” that holds email from senders I usually let sit for a few days. Once SaneBox is done sorting out my inbox for me, I only see the email that is most important to me. I can deal with those and then come back to the remaining sorted folders later when I have time.

The day after I signed up for SaneBox my morning inbox went from 150 emails to seven emails and I immediately knew I had a winner. I’ve been a paying customer for years and couldn’t get by without it.

If you have been struggling with email, you should check out SaneBox. It’s a great service that will save you a lot of time. Use this link to get a discount and let them know you heard about it here at MacSparky.




MPU 378 – More iOS Hidden Features




The latest episode of Mac Power Users is up and available for download. This week we are joined by Clayton Morris to talk about some of our favorite underused iOS features. This episode is actually a continuation of an episode recorded several months ago. The outline had so much content that we couldn’t finish it in one show.

This is one of those shows full of little tips and tricks, and my goal is that everyone who listens to it can get a little bit better and a little bit faster using their iPhone and iPad. Check it out.

Sponsors include:

  • Freshbooks: Online invoicing made easy.
  • 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. 
  • Market circle: We help small business grow with great Mac, iPhone and iPad apps including Daylight and Billings Pro.