inShort, the project planning system for Mac, iPhone, and iPad has a labor day sale. The Mac version is 50% off and the iOS version is 70% off. If you’ve been thinking about this app, today’s your lucky day. 

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While I first met Shawn Blanc while wearing his nerd hat, I’ve been really pleased to see Shawn writing about more productivity focussed subjects. Recently, Shawn released The Focus Course. This is a course of videos and PDFs to help you figure out where you want to go and how to get there. I’ve only started going through the materials and they are good. If you’re feeling adrift or just want to help get yourself more focussed, check this out.

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You may have noticed things have been a little quiet around here as of late. I’ve hinted around about me getting sick but not really explained in full detail. In February, just a few days after quitting my job, I woke up in severe pain and unable to get out of bed. It turns out I had a kidney stone. It wasn’t dreadful but was causing me problems about once a week. After four months, The thing was still rattling around inside of me and I went through a small surgical procedure to take care of the problem. That was late July. Unfortunately, the procedure didn’t work and the kidney stone just got pissed off. For much of August, I was experiencing between five and eight kidney stone attacks a day, which if you’ve never had a kidney stone, I can assure you is pretty miserable. So in summary, my productivity for the last month was all shot to hell.

I am all better now and kidney stone-free. This past week I canceled this site’s sponsorship knowing that I needed to dig out on the legal side. Now I’m back to filling my fitness rings on my Apple watch while I’m still behind on email (sorry!), things are getting manageable again and next week MacSparky will be back to its regular programming.

While they are quite uncomfortable, kidney stones are not the end of the world. Once you get rid of them, you’re done. It’s not like cancer or some other chronic illness. Nevertheless, the past several months gave me new appreciation for how difficult it is for people with chronic illnesses to get by. I think about guys like Federico Viticci, who built a flourishing website while at the same time fighting off cancer, and I have more respect than ever. Thank you everyone for the well wishes as I’ve been dealing with this.

I recently joined Erik Fisher on his Beyond the Todo List podcast to talk about transition, travel, and the Apple watch. Erik has a great show and you should check it out.

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DxO, known primarily for its image processing software has got into the hardware business. For years we’ve been seeing a variety of bolt-on/clip-on/glue-on lenses for the iPhone. The DxO One instead plugs into the iPhone and iPad through the lightening port. The lens housing is in the unit and is s significant upgrade to the current iPhone 6 camera (or anything we’ll see in the iPhone 6s). There is a 20 Megapixel, one inch sensor, and an F Stop down to 1.8. All of this adds up to better low light performance, better depth of field, and just generally better pictures at a cost of $600 and an additional thing to carry around.

The Wall Street Journal likes it, as does DPReview, Yahoo, and The Verge. I’m interested but also going to wait to see how it works with the new phone hardware later this month before committing.

Over the past several years, we’ve received lots of emails requesting assistance optimizing iPhones and iPads. In this episode we unloaded, explaining all the ways you can optimize your iOS experience, from wrangling notifications to extending battery life we run through a number of tips and tricks for creating a better experience when using your iPhone or iPad.

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As we are moving toward the release of iOS 9, OS X 10.11, and Dragon Dictate is about to get an upgrade, I’ve been looking lately a lot at how far along we’ve come with the ability to dictate to our devices.

I’ve long been a fan of dictation but also long felt an outsider in this regard. That isn’t so true anymore. This morning I was sitting in a coffee shop and saw a few people dictating into their phones. I think it was the addition of dictation anywhere on our phones that has brought a lot of people in. This afternoon I made an informal poll of other geek friends, I’m hearing that many are using the built-in iOS dictation on at least a semi-regular basis. You should. It’s faster and easier than typing.

That same informal poll, however, discloses that almost nobody dictates to their Macs. While Dragon Dictate remains in the lead over the built-in Mac OS dictation, I can report that the built-in Mac dictation continues to improve. It still exhibits strange behaviors on occasion but, If nothing else, it’s a free way to find out if you want to dictate more and invest in Dragon Dictate.

While we are in much better shape than a few years ago, I still don’t think dictation is for everyone. We haven’t got to the point where you can just speak and have full confidence your words are being properly transcribed. On iOS, you still need an Internet connection for it to work. (Wouldn’t it be nice if the next iPhone put dictation on the chip so you could dictate without an Internet connection?) Correcting blundered dictation is also still more difficult than it should be.

However, if you are the type that once in awhile just needs to get that first draft of something into your computer, dictation is now definitely up to the task.