Discourse is a powerful, customizable, open-source platform designed to facilitate civilized discussion for your community. We’re reimagining what a modern discussion platform could be. Discourse is designed with the tools to create and scale a healthy, vibrant, and fun place to connect with your customers, superfans, or teammates online.

Toxicity and spam are two of the biggest problems for online communities, and we’ve developed features to help make your corner of the Internet a more civilized place. Discourse’s automatic trust system encourages new users to interact with your community in helpful, thoughtful ways – all while keeping spammers at bay. Plus, our built-in community-led moderation tools assist in keeping the trolls out and topics on track.

Wondering if your site will look just like every other community out there? We have you covered. Whether you’re a gaming community or a worldwide brand, you can customize Discourse to fit your company’s image with our extensive theming system. Additionally, our developer API and plugin ecosystem give you the ability to extend Discourse in a limitless number of ways.

Oh, and did we mention that you can trust your data with Discourse? Discourse never sells your data to advertisers, and you can download a full backup of your community at any time – no questions asked and no hidden fees.

Ready to try it out? MacStories readers can get a 60-day 100% free trial by using coupon code SHORTCUT when signing up. Start building your community today with Discourse.

Our thanks to Discourse for sponsoring MacStories this week.

FirstSeed Calendar is the highly customizable calendar app that works on every Apple platform, providing a seamless experience that anyone with a busy schedule will love. Available on the iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple Watch, FirstSeed Calendar offers four different monthly calendars and seven types of weekly calendars, ensuring that you’ll be able to find one that suits your needs.

The app takes advantage of the unique features of each Apple platform, providing an unparalleled experience that anyone with a busy schedule will appreciate. For example, FirstSeed Calendar offers elegant one-handed operation of the app’s most frequently used features, like viewing, adding, editing, deleting, moving, and duplicating events, which is perfect for today’s big-screen iPhones.

FirstSeed Calendar never wastes your time either. Unlike most other calendar apps, event names are suggested after typing just a few characters, allowing you to auto-complete events quickly and efficiently. The app also features over 20 Home Screen widgets, so you can get precisely the calendar you want on your Home Screen.

FirstSeed Calendar is continuously updated with the latest technologies too. Most recently, the iPad version of the app added XL widgets. The app also supports time sensitive notifications, allowing you to set alerts that break through Focus modes.

FirstSeed Calendar has all the other advanced features you expect in a pro calendar app too:

• Calendar sets
• Shortcuts integration
• Event templates
• An excellent Apple Watch app
• Support for conferencing services like Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Webex
• Pointer support on the iPad
• Bulk event editing
• Multiple default event alarms
• Dark mode, themes, custom date colors

Managing your calendar doesn’t have to be complicated. Take control of your schedule today with FirstSeed Calendar.

Learn more here, or go straight to the App Stores and download FirstSeed Calendar for the iPhone, iPad, and Mac today.

Our thanks to FirstSeed Calendar for sponsoring MacStories this week.

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 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 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 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 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.

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.