I’ve made no secret that iThoughtsHD is my “go to” mind mapping application. The developer also has a version for the iPhone that shares many of the shortcuts and cloud syncing features that makes its iPad big brother so great. iThoughts for the iPhone has one feature the iPad doesn’t (yet). You can create sibling entries by dictating on the iPhone 4s using commas. The above screenshot was created by me dictating into one node, “Baseball (comma) soccer (comma) football (comma) golf”. This is great for brainstorming. (Note I should have said “cap” to capitalize the sibling entries.) Check out the developer’s video showing off this feature below.

MPU listener Marvin wrote in about how he created playlist folders for each family member to help avoid trashing each other’s playlists using iCloud and iTunes Match. I promptly copied this trick and now we have playlist bliss. Nifty.

MacSparky.com is sponsored by Bee Docs Timeline 3D. Make a timeline presentation with your Mac.

Do you have a collection of external hard drives sitting around and an overwhelming sense of confusion about what is stored where? Mike Yenco’s Archive 7 indexes your hard drives and lets you search all of them, even when offline. Moreover, the latest version is in the Mac App Store. I’ve just started using it and wondering why I didn’t do this sooner.

BeeDocs has a holiday sale on for Easy Timeline. For just five bucks you can drastically improve your timeline game. I’ve written of this app before. If you ever find yourself in the position of trying to convey time related data to anyone, you should get this app. I’ve heard from lawyers, construction managers, students, soccer coaches, and countless others about how much they love BeeDocs timeline apps and now is your chance to get in for the price of a Starbucks coffee.

As an aside, I want to thank BeeDocs for sponsoring MacSparky.com through 2011. Thanks to BeeDocs, I was able to transform MacSparky.com from the AdSense monstrosity it once was into what you see today. Please show your support and do yourself a favor: Go get this normally $20 app for 75% off.

Here is a pretty amazing video Christmas card created by some of my friends. Not only is this creative and hilarious, every viewing gets a nickel donated to charity.

My friend George Starcher recently turned me on to youhavedownloaded.com, a privately ran site (read: not subject to government restrictions) that tracks torrent download sites and every IPN number that plugs in. If you think someone on your network has been downloading illegal torrents and want to know, check this out. If you’ve downloaded torrents in the past, now is the time to repent. Industry and law enforcement are getting more aggressive than ever about these things. Don’t kid yourself: If you torrent, they are tracking it.

In tomorrow’s MPU, Katie and I dive deep on iTunes Match. I spent several minutes in the show talking about the various ways to deal with duplicate songs in iTunes, including third party solutions. What I didn’t know at the time was that if you hold down the Option key while in the iTunes File menu, iTunes will display exact duplicates. Well, sort of exact. In my case I had tracks that appeared identical but had different lengths and they displayed, which was exactly what I needed.

MacSparky.com is sponsored by Bee Docs Timeline 3D. Make a timeline presentation with your Mac.

Here is a nice bit of AppleScript from Hunter Hillegas to automate importing OmniFocus tasks from e-mail using flag status. Kind of ingenious.

Several years ago, my young daughter asked me what exactly a lawyer does. After some thinking, I explained that I help people with really big problems. Ever since then, that has become my “go to” job description. Every time I get around any serious networking types and tell them that’s what I do, they look at me like I’m a weirdo. Then they patiently tell me how I’m not using enough terms like “results oriented”, “paradigm shifting”, and “excellence”. Nevertheless, at the end of the day, what I really do is help people solve big problems. After years of taking abuse for this rebellious elevator pitch, this week’s Back to Work gave me some much-needed validation.