This Week's Sponsor:

Winterfest 2024

The Festival of Artisanal Software


Posts in Sponsored Posts

Meet Daylite: The CRM with Apple Fans in Mind [Sponsor]

For small businesses trying to stay on top of clients, leads, and projects that are evolving every day, it can be tough, if not impossible, to manage everything. That’s where Daylite comes in clutch. Daylite is an award-winning, native CRM and business productivity app for your Mac, iPhone, and iPad that’s designed to help you and your team manage more clients, close more deals, and finish more projects.

Daylite is fully compatible with M1-powered Macs and works seamlessly with the Apple features you already use and love:

  • Integration with Apple Mail on Mac
  • Share your Apple Contacts and iCal
  • Leverage Siri and Caller ID on your iPhone
  • FaceID and TouchID support
  • Create contracts and other documents by pulling Daylite data into Pages, Numbers, and Keynote

What’s more, all of your information is accessible online and off, and it can be segmented, so it’s perfectly tailored to your specific client story. Combined with a sophisticated, elegant design that makes it easy to access and use your data on the go, Daylite is the complete package for your growing business.

Unlike most Web-based CRMs that focus on customer relationships and sales, Daylite’s productivity-focused design helps you and your team get more done throughout the full customer lifecycle. From meeting prospects and winning business to managing the moving pieces on projects, all the way through to following up for referrals and repeat business, it’s all done in Daylite.

Whether you’re in a legal, design, consulting, or other professional services firm, Daylite can help you build stronger client relationships and scale your business. Daylite also offers complimentary onboarding support to help new customers get started.

See what Daylite can do for your business today. Start your free 30-day Daylite trial today!

Our thanks to Daylite for sponsoring MacStories this week.


DetailsPro: A Design Tool Made for SwiftUI [Sponsor]

DetailsPro is the accessible, graphical tool for the iPhone, iPad, and Mac that brings your app designs to life with SwiftUI. The future of modern app design on Apple’s platforms is SwiftUI, and with DetailsPro, you can be up and running immediately, designing UIs without typing a line of code.

DetailsPro uses a drag and drop interface to make designing app interfaces, widgets, and screens a completely graphical, natural experience. There are no multi-gigabyte downloads or any of the complexity you find in a tool like Xcode. Instead, DetailsPro focuses on your design first. The app is a fantastic way to learn core SwiftUI concepts in an environment that provides immediate feedback. There’s also a terrific DetailsPro community that offers in-app downloadable templates to learn, remix, or use as starting points for your own projects.

When you’re happy with your design, simply export it to SwiftUI code to Swift Playgrounds or Xcode. That’s the sort of design pipeline that makes handing your work off to your developers simple while ensuring that the fidelity of your designs is preserved in the process.

Built in SwiftUI itself by a former Apple Design Prototyper, DetailsPro is trusted industry-wide by designers at companies like Apple itself, Starbucks, Microsoft, Nike, and Porsche, and it’s easy to see why. DetailsPro brings sophisticated SwiftUIs to life quickly and easily in a way that feels like magic.

If you’ve been looking for a way to get into designing with SwiftUI, your search is over. You can download DetailsPro today for free and use it with five files, but you can unlock unlimited files and upcoming features like versioning, reusable components, MapKit maps, and more for just $9.99/year or with a one-time payment of $29.99. That’s a fantastic price for an app that will save you time and simplify your design process.

So, download DetailsPro today, and get started designing with SwiftUI.

Our thanks to DetailsPro for sponsoring MacStories this week.


Shake: Bug, Feedback, and Crash Reporting Tool for Your Mobile App [Sponsor]

Shake eliminates the headaches and hassles of processing bug reports in your mobile app. Tracking down bugs and fixing them is critical to your app’s success, but too often, identifying and resolving them is an inefficient mess. With the Shake SDK, you can streamline the process and get better data, allowing you to resolve more issues quickly and effectively.

Just add Shake to your app, and your users can submit a comprehensive bug report in seconds simply by shaking their device. Shake eliminates incomplete, vague bug reports so often submitted over email, social media, and word of mouth. With Shake, your users not only can communicate problems with screenshots but with screen recordings and markup tools, all presented inside your app.

Bug reports and crash reports are supplemented with loads of useful data that’s delivered instantly and automatically to a beautifully designed web dashboard that lets your team chat about the reported bugs, review logs, assign priorities, and tag them. Shake also integrates seamlessly with the other tools you already use, like Jira, Slack, GitHub, Azure DevOps, and Trello. Developers can customize Shake to suit their particular needs delivering any variable value they want from users’ devices too. It’s a powerful set of tools that will help you debug issues in your apps 50 times faster than before.

Shake is free to try without any time limitations on its standard features, and you can upgrade to a premium plan any time to add more attachments per bug, unlimited tags and bug reports, and full activity history for up to 30,000 MAU. Try Shake today to learn how fast, efficient bug reporting and tracking can accelerate your app development process.

Our thanks to Shake for sponsoring MacStories this week.


Quill: Messaging to Make Your Team Better [Sponsor]

Quill is the messaging app and service that puts you, your time, and your focus first so you and your team can work together better.

With Quill, you’re in control of what messages you see and how much you see. That helps you stay focused and on task without constantly being interrupted. At the same time, though, Quill makes it easier than ever to get involved in the conversations and decisions that need your input.

Quill accomplishes all this by focusing conversations around threads instead of channels. You don’t need to follow a channel to be part of a thread. You can join one simply by starting a thread or being mentioned in one. It’s a simple, elegant solution that keeps conversations from getting mixed and muddled together. You can also decline to follow threads in the channels you do follow to cut down on the noise.

Push notifications are off by default for all channels and threads. Instead, events show up in the Activity Feed. Get caught up whenever works best for you instead of being interrupted and distracted. Of course, when something is truly urgent, you can send a priority mention, and the recipient is sent a push notification immediately.

When you see a thread you want to follow in the Activity Feed, you can follow it right then and there. You can also retroactively create a thread, split one thread into two, quote messages, move direct messages to public channels, and a whole lot more. Quill’s unique approach and features make it perfect for individual productivity while also facilitating remote collaboration among distributed teams.

To learn more and try Quill for free, visit quill.chat today. Messaging has never been more easy and natural.

Our thanks to Quill for sponsoring MacStories this week.


Tinderbox 9: The Tool For Notes. Visualize, Analyze, and Share Your Ideas [Sponsor]

Tinderbox is a powerful Mac app that stores and organizes your notes, plans, and ideas, bringing order and insight to the vast amounts of information collected when you’re working on a big project. Whether that’s writing a book, creating course materials, planning a wedding, or just managing your day-to-day life, Tinderbox helps impose structure on your data to keep you organized and productive.

And now with Tinderbox 9, the app offers over 150 new features including a flexible command bar, smarter artificial intelligence, a built-in gallery for saving views, improved visualizations of your data, and a whole lot more. Tinderbox has unparalleled power to analyze, visualize, and understand your notes. The app is a favorite of researchers, writers, investigators, product managers, and teachers. That’s because Tinderbox acts as a personal content assistant helping you discover connections and relationships between your notes that you might otherwise miss.

It’s easy to get started by dragging connections between notes or use Tinderbox’s wiki-like Ziplinks to link notes and ideas together. There are multiple ways to visualize your notes, too, including mind maps, outlines, word clouds, timelines, and dashboards. Each is a powerful way to gain new perspectives on your ideas.

Tinderbox also has agents and rules and employs powerful AI tools to automatically identify names and places, look up addresses, and even suggest links. Of course, the app integrates with DEVONthink, Scrivener, Bookends, Apple Notes, and more.

It has also never been easier to get started with Tinderbox. With more than 50 tutorial videos, ranging from “Creating your first notes” to “Organizing background research for architectural history” there’s a wealth of video content available. Tinderbox has a vibrant, active community, too, which includes regular meetups that offer hands-on problem-solving for new and experienced users alike. You can learn more on the Tinderbox forum or watch past meetups on Vimeo.

So, download Tinderbox 9 today to try it for free, for the best way to visualize, analyze, and share your ideas.

Our thanks to Tinderbox for sponsoring MacStories this week.


Hubstaff: The All-In-One Work Time Tracker For Managing Field or Remote Teams [Sponsor]

Hubstaff is the all-in-one time tracking solution for managing field and remote teams that you’ve always wanted. Focusing on the right priorities is critical to managing your employees, and with Hubstaff, you’ve got the tools you need to track productivity and power through projects.

Hubstaff lets you do things like automate clocking in and out with geofenced time tracking for teams on the go. With Hubstaff, preparing and tracking timesheets is simplified, and invoicing is automated too. Hubstaff Time provides simple time tracking and reporting. HubStaff Desk allows you to manage your team, proof their work, keep on top of time tracking and boost productivity. And if you’re on the go, Hubstaff Field for GPS helps you manage your field team too.

All plans are free for solo teams and start at $7 per user/month for each new team member added. Enterprise plans are just $20 per user/month. All plans also include a free, full-featured 14-day trial, so sign up today to give Hubstaff a try.

While you’re it, be sure to try Hubstaff Tasks, too, for all your agile project management needs. It’s a great complement to Hubstaff and is based on the Agile Methodology, which has been proven to enhance team collaboration and communication. Keep up to date with a smarter Stand-up tool and take your daily Scrum meetings online with automated software. The online Roadmap tool helps you visualize your strategy and unite your team too.

Hubstaff Tasks allows you to break huge projects into manageable work cycles, so your team gets more done. It also lets you see how much time is spent on each task and track time as you work.

All plans are free for solo teams and start at $5 per user/month for each new team member added. There’s also a free, full-featured 14-day trial, so sign up today to give Hubstaff Tasks a try.

Our thanks to Hubstaff for sponsoring MacStories this week.


UpNote: The Best Cross-Platform Note-Taking App [Sponsor]

UpNote is an elegant and powerful note-taking app that works across every major platform, making it the perfect solution for your note-taking needs. Designed to make it easy to take notes anywhere and stay focused, UpNote combines a beautiful interface with a fluid workflow for a refined note-taking experience.

The app works on iOS, Android, the Mac, and Windows, making it an excellent solution for anyone who needs access to their notes across multiple platforms thanks to the app’s fast, reliable sync. UpNote works online and off, too, so you’re always able to capture your thoughts. With colorful themes and a long list of font choices, you can make UpNote your very own, organizing notes into notebooks and pinning and bookmarking notes for quick access.

UpNote has all of your note-taking needs covered. The app offers a web clipper extension so you can quickly save links and content as you browse and research on the web. There’s a focus mode that eliminates distractions, so you can capture your thoughts quickly and efficiently, too. There’s even a great solution for longer notes: a table of contents feature that makes navigating long notes a breeze. The app can also be locked, which makes it perfect for journaling.

Switching to UpNote is easy, with powerful import functionality that can handle Evernote, Markdown, and other formats. UpNote’s text editor is fully featured, too, with support for rich-text, bi-directional linking, to-do lists, images, attachments, tables, and code blocks. Of course, the app supports Markdown syntax as well. And, when you need to use your notes elsewhere, you can export them as Markdown text, HTML, or PDFs.

Now is the perfect time to try UpNote. The app includes subscription and lifetime upgrade options, and for a limited time, MacStories readers can purchase UpNote’s lifetime premium upgrade for 30% off. This is an amazing deal, so don’t delay. Go check out UpNote now and take advantage of this offer.

Our thanks to UpNote for sponsoring MacStories this week.


FitnessView: All-in-One Health & Fitness Dashboard [Sponsor]

FitnessView is a brand new health and fitness dashboard for tracking Health data and gaining valuable insights using the iPhone and Apple Watch. The Apple Watch has become a robust health and fitness device that, coupled with the iPhone, lets you track more data than ever about your workouts and overall health. FitnessView takes that overwhelming mountain of data and makes sense of it with a beautifully designed app that helps you spot trends and measure your progress.

FitnessView tracks the progress of your Activity Rings and a whole lot more. By picking the goals that matter to you most from the app’s comprehensive list, you can create a dashboard designed just for you.

FitnessView also tracks workouts, providing the most important stats at a glance with in-depth data just a tap away. Those stats power the app’s Home Screen widgets, allowing you to keep track of your most essential data without opening the app. FitnessView’s data is available on the Apple Watch, too, along with multiple watch complications that bring FitnessView’s power to the face of your Apple Watch.

The app has detailed Stats and Workout sections. From Stats, you can analyze your health and fitness data over time to get a sense of your progress and dive into the details whenever you want. The Workouts section provides a similar experience, allowing you to browse through your training sessions chronologically. You can even filter workouts by type and access high-level monthly stats.

FitnessView also supports Quick Add for tracking goals like hydration, making it easy to keep up with all your objectives. You can even share your progress with friends and family or on social media with an animated version of your Activity Rings.

Download FitnessView today to stay on top of your health and fitness goals all year long with its beautiful all-in-one dashboard.

Our thanks to FitnessView for sponsoring MacStories this week.


Honeybadger: Your Secret Weapon for Exception, Uptime, and Cron Monitoring [Sponsor]

Honeybadger is your one-stop solution for error tracking that combines error monitoring, uptime monitoring, and cron monitoring into a single, simple-to-use platform. It’s the only service that combines all those elements into one elegant solution that has your back when you need it most.

If your production site goes down, the last thing you want is to hear about it first on Twitter or by email from unhappy customers. With Honeybadger, you know the instant a problem arises. The included uptime and cron monitoring also let you know when your external services are having issues or your background jobs go missing or silently fail.

What’s more, Honeybadger is easy to set up, taking just minutes, not hours. The service hooks into popular web frameworks, job systems, authentication libraries, and front-end JavaScript. Most installations are just a few lines of code. Honeybadger also includes a comprehensive online dashboard and context-rich reporting system that helps you diagnose and resolve issues quickly.

Honeybadger is a bootstrapped company built from the ground up to serve developers. They answer to you, not VCs, and their mission is straightforward: tame production and make you a better, more productive developer.

Honeybadger is used by tens of thousands of customers of all sizes, including eBay, DigitalOcean, heroku, thoughtbot, and even MacStories. Sign up for Honeybadger’s 15-day free trial today and join the growing list of companies whose developers swear by Honeybadger. There’s no credit card required to sign up, so you’ve got nothing to lose. Give Honeybadger a try and see how it feels to stop wasting time tailing logs and spend more time doing the development work you love.

Our thanks to Honeybadger for sponsoring MacStories this week.