WinterFest 2024: The Festival of Artisanal Software is back with a fantastic new collection of carefully crafted software for writing, research, and thinkings.

Innovative software often comes from small teams, fired with imagination and a vision of a better way to work. There are no bundles, games, or prices that are too good to be true: just fresh software with fantastic support at great, sustainable prices.

Software artisans from around the globe have come together for this time-limited event to bring you innovative systems to assist you with everyday knowledge work. This incredible catalog of productivity software includes:

• Avalanche:Photo catalog migration
• BBEdit: power tool for text
• Bookends: The reference manager you’ve been looking for 
• DEVONagent Pro: Your smart research assistant 
• DEVONthink: Your powerful information and knowledge manager 
• Easy Data Transform: Merge, clean, and reformat data without coding 
• Hookmark: Using links beats searching
• HoudahSpot: Powerful file search 
• HyperPlan: Flexible visual planner 
• ImageFramer Pro: Add creative borders and frames to photos 
• Nisus Writer Pro: The powerful Mac word processor
• Panorama X: Collect, organize, and understand your data
• Peakto: Media management for creatives
• Photos Workbench: organize and compare your photos
• Scapple: Quickly capture and connect ideas 
• Scrivener: Your complete writing studio 
• Take Control Books: Expert advice from leading tech authors
• Tinderbox: Visualize and organize your notes, plans, and ideas 
• Tinderbox 101: Learn to unleash your knowledge and insight
• Trickster: Your recently used files at your fingertips
• Yojimbo: Your effortless, reliable information organizer

These amazing deals don’t come around often, so act today to start 2024 off with the best software available from this terrific group of developers.

Visit the WinterFest website to learn more and for links to these amazing deals, or use the coupon code Winterfest2024 at checkout.

Our thanks to Winterfest for sponsoring MacStories this week.

Have you noticed an increase in unwanted robocalls or texts? At best, spam calls are an annoyance and a total waste of time. At worst, they’re targeted attempts to scam you for money or collect data that can be used for fraudulent purposes.

Why You’re Getting Spammed on iOS

Your personal data is collected, traded and sold without your consent by companies like data brokers and people search sites. It’s eye-opening just how much information is collected with virtually no oversight: your name, email, home address, phone number, SSN, family status, and even credit score.

If you’ve suddenly received an influx of spam, chances are that your phone number (and more sensitive information) has been leaked, sold and uploaded to these unscrupulous databases. Traditional number-blocking techniques on iOS aren’t enough to stop them.

Incogni - Personal Data Removal Services

Personal data removal services can silence the harassment and get your sensitive information off the internet. Incogni’s personal information removal service will search out the data brokers most likely to be dealing in your personal data. Then, it sends out wave after wave of takedown requests on your behalf. Incogni does it all for you, letting you keep an eye on removal progress through your dashboard and regular privacy reports.

A great feature of Incogni is that it restarts removals every three months to ensure your personal info is kept out of circulation.

Take Back Control of Your Privacy, Year-Round

MacStories readers get an exclusive 58% off Incogni annual plans by using code MACSTORIES.

You can cancel at any time, and Incogni starts with a 30-day money-back guarantee, so there’s really nothing to lose – apart from those annoying robocalls and suspicious texts.

Our thanks to Incogni for sponsoring MacStories this week.

BetterTouchTool is a powerful macOS application that enables users to completely customize their various input devices such as Keyboards, the (Magic) Mouse and Magic Trackpad, the Touch Bar, the Siri Remote or even things like the Stream Deck.

Today let’s have a look at a new feature that has recently been integrated into BetterTouchTool and is getting more powerful with every update: Floating Menus / Widgets.

Imagine them as highly flexible, widget-like menus that you can place virtually anywhere on your screen. You can attach them to specific positions in specific windows, to specific screens, the current mouse position and many more. You can specify whether they float on top, stick them to your desktop or have them behave like normal windows (and more). 
They can always be visible, expand on mouse hover or be shown/hidden via any trigger in BTT.

You can find various Floating Menu examples on https://share.folivora.ai. For example have a look at the Notch menu, which is invisible by default but expands from your Macbook’s Notch on hover.  Another nice example is the “Mini Emoji Menu” preset, it places a little transparent dot on the left edge of the focused window. When hovered it shows multiple custom emoji which you can insert by clicking.

The documentation for this new feature is available here and you can always visit our community page to discuss or request features.

Try BetterTouchTool now (45 day free trial) or go and purchase a license with this 20% coupon code: MACSTORIESBTT2023 at https://folivora.ai. BetterTouchTool is also included a Setapp subscription.

Our thanks to BetterTouchTool for sponsoring MacStories this week.

Having a calm and personal space in which to make sense of the world is crucial in the age of information overload. You must be able to capture what’s important to you and have a distraction-free place to process it. Capacities is a note-taking app that wants to be just that. 

A novel approach

Moving away from files and folders, Capacities groups notes by their type and facilitates connections with easy linking between notes. All of this is centered around a calendar, which is your anchor to lay out all your note-taking on a timeline. It acts like your inbox and starting point, giving you a simple go-to place when processing what you have captured.

Who uses Capacities?

Knowledge workers, CEOs of small and large company and professionals from various industries alike enjoy Capacities’ refreshing approach to organizing their thoughts and ideas.

Great media support

Capacities goes beyond just text: media such as your images, PDFs, audio recordings or bookmarks become part of your notes.

Cross-platform, seamless sync, powerful features

This experience is available cross platform, with great offline support and seamless sync behind the scenes on servers safely hosted in Europe. Capacities has pledged that its core will be free forever, with a simple one-click export functionality for all your content, but there is also a paid plan that unlocks extra features like an AI Assistant, powerful integrations and more.

Join a community of thousands of happy users

Thousands of happy users find in Capacities an intuitive tool where their minds feel at home. It’s a quiet place for you, amongst a very busy world.

Visit Capcities.io today to learn more and give Capacities a try.

Our thanks to Capacities for sponsoring MacStories this week.

Inoreader, a trusted platform for content discovery and organization, has introduced a comprehensive redesign of its web application to enhance how users find, manage, and share content online. With a fresh and intuitive interface, this update brings powerful tools for organizing feeds, saved items, and automation—all within one centralized hub.

The redesign features an updated tab bar and dynamic sidebar for seamless navigation across feeds, saved items, custom dashboards, and other account sections. Users can now create personalized dashboards with widgets tailored to their unique needs, while the centralized Saved section consolidates everything from articles to tags in one accessible space.

With advanced content filters, improved contextual search, and a revamped audio player, Inoreader empowers users to easily find and manage what matters most. Enhanced YouTube feed tools allow filtering by video duration (Bye-bye, Shorts!), viewing video lengths directly in the article list, and staying updated on live events—all within a single interface. Additionally, Inoreader’s Free plan now offers an ad-free experience, making it even more enjoyable for new users.

Built on extensive community feedback, this new design reflects Inoreader’s commitment to delivering a top-tier reading experience that adapts to users’ evolving needs.

Discover Inoreader’s updated design and features at Inoreader.com. Engage with the content you love on mobile by downloading the app on the Apple App Store or Google Play.

Our thanks to Inoreader for sponsoring MacStories this week.

Pixelmator Pro proves that powerful Mac image editors don’t need to be complex. The app is designed for ultimate ease of use. It’s the ‘image editor for the rest of us’ who want a native Mac app that’s instantly familiar.

The app includes a refined, single-window design that puts the focus on your work instead of your tools. Pixelmator Pro features a completely nondestructive editing workflow that allows you to experiment, unleashing your creativity with the confidence that you can always revert any changes you make.

Pixelmator Pro has full RAW image support, layers, and advanced photo editing for fine tuning. The app also includes extensive machine learning-based tools that can automatically enhance your photos.

Pixelmator Pro isn’t just for photographers though. Illustrators will love the app for its vector tools and SVG file support, digital painters will appreciate the app’s powerful painting engine and extensive set of dual-texture brushes, and anyone who works with video will enjoy its video templates designed with YouTube and social media in mind.

Best of all, Pixelmator Pro’s features are lightning fast because they’ve been built from the ground up using Apple’s latest technologies like Metal 2, which powers the app’s editing engine. Pixelmator Pro is ready for the upcoming Mac Pro too with full support for multiple GPUs.

To learn more, visit Pixelmator Pro’s website where you’ll find even more details along with terrific tutorials. Then, download the app and start editing your images like a pro.

Our thanks to Pixelmator Pro for sponsoring MacStories this week.

Photomator is the best way to edit your photos across all of your Apple devices. The app works seamlessly across the iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Vision Pro with advanced tools to make your photos look their best.

Photomator’s state-of-the-art tools are texture-aware. That lets you preserve details other apps can’t, enhancing highlights and deep shadows while getting exactly the look you want. Photomator also offers selective adjustments to the sky and background elements using AI and a long list of machine learning-powered features that help you get the most from its tools.

If you shoot in RAW, you’re covered with Photomator’s support for over 750 RAW formats, including Apple ProRAW. The app supports LUTs for applying color adjustment presets, too.

Best of all, Photomator’s sophisticated tools don’t come at the expense of simplicity. The app is beautifully designed on every platform to make accessing features easy while focusing on your images. That design makes browsing and managing your photo library a breeze, too.

Of course, all edits made in Photomator are non-destructive so that they can be done at any time. Also, so you know what’s coming next from the Pixelmator team, they maintain a public roadmap of their development plans.

To learn more about Photomator visit their website and download a free trial from the App Store. Photomator is just $7.99/month or $29.99/year. There’s a life-time purchase option, too.

Our thanks to Photomator for sponsoring MacStories this week.