The 2019 Artisanal Software Festival is a fantastic collection of carefully-crafted apps for writing, research, thinking, and more at terrific prices. As in past years, software artisans from around the globe come together to offer fair discounts direct to you from the workshop door.

The 17 apps span a wide spectrum that will assist you with everyday knowledge work. There are apps to plan your next big project, conduct research, organize your research, edit images, manage email, write, and more:

• Tinderbox – Visualize and organize ideas and plans.
• Panorama X – Collect, organize, and understand your data.
• Nisus Writer Pro – The powerful word processor for the Mac.
• DEVONthink 3 - Your paperless Mac office.
• Aeon Timeline 2 – The timeline tool for creative thinking.
• TextExpander – Recall your best words. Instantly, repeatedly.
• Spam Sieve – powerful email spam filtering
• Storyspace – Serious hypertext narrative.
• Bookends – The reference manager you’ve been looking for.
• Trickster – Your recently used files, at your fingertips.
• PDFpen – Powerful PDF editing.
• HoudahSpot – Powerful file search for Mac.
• HoudahGeo – Photo geotagging.
• DEVONagent Pro – Your smart (re)search assistant.
• BBEdit – Power tool for text.
• ImageFramer Pro – Your art. Showcased.
• Hook – Work smarter.

Tools with attitude: no gimmicks, no bundles, no gotchas – just saving of hundreds of dollars on these fine tools for a limited time. Visit the WinterFest website now for links to amazing deals each of these fantastic apps and to learn more.

Our thanks to the 2019 Artisanal Software Festival for sponsoring MacStories this week.

Prizmo 5 is the premier solution for fast, streamlined scanning and powerful, accurate OCR on the iPhone and iPad. The app’s hallmark is the efficiency of its capture workflow, which is driven by an elegant and intuitive UI coupled with the latest iOS and iPadOS features.

Creaceed, the maker of Prizmo 5, has been refining the capture process for years, and with the latest update, they introduced auto-shoot, which detects pages as they are come into view of your iPhone or iPad’s camera and captures them automatically. Once scanned, the images, which use highly-efficient compression formats, can be quickly cleaned up with Prizmo’s suite of built-in tools to rotate, crop, and flatten a scan and adjust its brightness, color, and edges.

Prizmo offers both cloud-based and on-device OCR, turning the text of scanned documents into editable text that can be exported as a text-searchable PDF or even an editable Microsoft Word file. The app also supports business card scanning and processing, so you’ll never lose track of those new contacts you meet again.

Of course, Prizmo supports all the latest iOS and iPadOS technologies, too, including Shortcuts, iCloud, and iPad multitasking, plus exhaustive VoiceOver support with spoken guidance while scanning. There’s even a text reader that can read your scan aloud and batch editing support.

Prizmo 5 is free to download and try and is available through Apple’s Volume Purchasing Program for schools and enterprises. Best of all, for this week only, Prizmo 5’s Premium Pack is 20% off, making now a great time to get started with building a paper-free workflow.

Our thanks to Prizmo 5 for sponsoring MacStories this week.

UpHabit makes building and maintaining strong relationships with the people who matter to you the most part of your daily routine.

We all lead busy, active lives. Pulled in several directions at once and with an ever-growing list of personal and business contacts, it’s easy to fall out of touch with people. UpHabit solves the problem with a powerful set of tools that help you maintain strong, healthy relationships.

With UpHabit, you can take control of creating stronger personal or business relationships with features like:

• The ability to set reminders to keep in touch with people
• A place to take notes so you can pick up where you left off the next time you talk to someone
• Reminder snoozing, so getting in touch with contacts doesn’t fall through the cracks when you’re busy 
• Tagging to help organize your contacts

It’s incredibly easy to get started and begin enjoying the benefits of stronger relationships immediately with UpHabit.

UpHabit is continually updated with new functionality drawn from feedback from its growing community of users with features like message templates, two-way contact syncing, and more coming soon.

Of course, privacy is of paramount importance to UpHabit too. The app doesn’t have ads, and your contact data isn’t shared with third parties.

Make connecting with your most important contacts part of your daily routine. Download UpHabit now to try it for free, and for a limited time, you can get 25% off when you sign up for UpHabit.

Our thanks to UpHabit for sponsoring MacStories this week.

One of the biggest hurdles to consistently tracking your time is starting and stopping timers. It’s too easy to forget to do, leaving you with gaps in your tracking or timers left running overnight. What if you could free yourself from the burden of timers by automating the process? You can do precisely that with Timemator 2.

By letting Timemator track the apps you use, the files you open, and the web sites you visit on your Mac, you’ll never lose a billable minute because you forgot to start a timer. Nor will you fret about stopping a timer when you’re finished because Timemator shows you exactly when you stopped using an app, allowing you to focus on what’s most important: your work.

Time never slips through the cracks with Timemator because it approaches the problem of tracking three ways. First, Timemator automatically creates an activity timeline as you work on your Mac. Just go over your activities at the end of the day and assign them to projects and tasks. Second, you can set up Timemator rules to automatically record time to a project or task when you open a particular app or file. Third, there’s a manual timer available for those one-off tasks and times that it’s just easier to click start. It’s a three-pronged approach that’s proven useful to a wide variety of professionals, including contractors, freelancers, and small teams.

Timemator is a native Mac app that’s been thoughtfully designed to look as beautiful as it is functional. The app is also continually updated with the latest macOS technologies. Next up on Timemator’s roadmap is iCloud sync, an iOS app, integration with third-party tools like Jira and Asana, and team features.

Timemator is free to try for 30 days, and for a limited time, readers of MacStories can buy the app for 30% off by using the coupon code TM-MACSTORIES at checkout. Don’t wait until the new year to get serious about time tracking. Start today by downloading Timemator 2, so you can stop thinking about timers and focus on your tasks.

Our thanks to Timemator 2 for sponsoring MacStories this week.

Kolide is a new Slack app that messages employees when their Mac, Windows, or Linux device is not compliant with security best-practices or policy.

With this app, Kolide will notify users or groups when a device is out of compliance along with clear instructions about what is wrong, and step by step instructions to remediate the issue themselves. They can even confirm in real-time that they resolved the problem with an interactive button inside the Slack message!

Unlike most endpoint security solutions, Kolide was designed with user privacy in mind. Your users will know what data is collected about their device, who can see that data, and can even view the full source code of the agent that is run on the device.

Kolide is already used by hundreds of fast growing companies who want to level-up their device security without locking down their devices. Try Kolide’s new product for free for 30 days for your entire fleet by visiting kolide.com.

Our thanks to Kolide for sponsoring MacStories this week.

SignEasy tears down one of the most stubborn barriers to conducting business, especially for those with distributed workforces and remote and field-based teams. For too long, workflows that required signatures have involved printing, scanning, and sending documents by snail mail. With SignEasy, that runaround is a thing of the past: now, you can work seamlessly no matter where you are, maximizing your productivity.

The flexibility SignEasy provides for users is transformative. Whether you’re at a meeting or working from home, you can sign documents and send them off for signature either on desktop or using their handy mobile app. In fact, the app has become so valuable for businesses big and small that SignEasy recently became part of Apple’s mobility partner program. This partnership gives SignEasy access to the latest iOS and iPadOS features and design trends, ensuring that users always have the most cutting-edge features at their fingertips. It also allows SignEasy to collaborate with other Apple mobility partners, creating groundbreaking partnerships and integrations with the best tools on the market.

Most recently, SignEasy took a page out of Apple’s book to inspire its feature updates for the iOS and iPadOS 13 launch, including dark mode, multi-window viewing on the iPad, and Dynamic Type. There’s even an in-app scanner so you can pull documents from the physical world into your digital workflows. SignEasy is also compatible with all of the major cloud service providers, including Google’s G-Suite, Office 365, Dropbox, Box, and email apps.

SignEasy is the easiest way to sign and send documents for signature, and for a limited time, it has a special deal for MacStories readers.

Sign up today and receive a 50% discount on a SignEasy subscription. It’s never been more cost-effective to simplify your work.

Our thanks to SignEasy for sponsoring MacStories this week.

Pixelmator Pro proves that powerful Mac image editors don’t need to be complex. The app, which is the successor to the original Pixelmator, 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 introduced 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 and advanced photo editing tools for careful fine tuning. The app also includes extensive machine learning-based tools that can automatically enhance your photos. There’s even a Photos app extension that lets you use Pixelmator Pro inside the Photos app and save your edits nondestructively.

The app isn’t just for photographers though. Illustrators will love Pixelmator Pro for its vector tools and SVG file support, and digital painters will appreciate the app’s powerful painting engine and extensive set of dual-texture brushes.

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’s free trial to start editing your images like a pro.

Our thanks to Pixelmator Pro for sponsoring MacStories this week.