Every day is full of appointments, tasks, and meetings. Managing it all is hard, but it doesn’t have to be. With NotePlan for the Mac and iOS, you can manage your calendar, to-dos, and notes in one place so you can concentrate on getting your work done instead.

NotePlan helps you effortlessly capture all the bits of data that inundate you every day: dates, times, phone calls, meetings, follow-up tasks, and more. Nobody wants to spend their day on managing those things. By focusing on getting the information out of your head and into NotePlan in plain text, NotePlan helps you recapture your time and focus on being creative.

The app integrates with Apple’s Calendar and Reminders app, which handles keeping all your devices in sync via iCloud. There are weekly and monthly calendars to give you a bird’s eye view of your workload, which will help prevent you from becoming overwhelmed. Reviewing and managing open tasks and deadlines is trivially easy with NotePlan too. On top of that, notes are perfect for brainstorming, saving links, taking meeting notes, or storing reference materials. NotePlan is highly-customizable too with handsome light and dark themes as well as tagging for organizing and wiki-style linking between notes.

Visit NotePlan’s website today to learn more and start getting serious work done. NotePlan has a special deal just for MacStories readers too. Use this link for 10% off when you purchase NotePlan for Mac directly.

Our thanks to NotePlan for sponsoring MacStories this week.

Looking for a way to keep everything in one place so you never miss a thing? It’s here! Built exclusively for Mac, iPhone, and iPad, say hello to organization and peace of mind with Daylite.

Capture every email, every meeting, and every call, all in the same place. Follow up when you say you will. Stay top of mind with your customers. Projects are so streamlined, you never worry about what’s next. Everything you need is just a click away.

Integrate with Apple Contacts, Apple Calendar, Apple Mail, and Reminders for a seamless Apple experience. Big fan of leveraging different apps to be more productive? Daylite and Zapier integration allows you to connect Daylite with 1500+ apps. Want to see a notification created in Daylite every time an action happens in another app? Automate it!

Easily organize contacts into lists for email campaigns and follow-ups. Keep a history of every interaction with a client. Track communications and next steps for client projects and always know what’s next.

New in Daylite: Always on the go? With the newly released Daylite Mail for iPhone and iPad, you can now process your email anywhere and make sure everything you need is in Daylite no matter where you are. Create tasks, follow-up reminders, and appointments without leaving your inbox – or your location!

You know how important efficiency and productivity is to your success. You know that when you’re in control, your potential is limitless. Sign up for a free 30-day Daylite trial now and become unstoppable!

Our thanks to Daylite for sponsoring MacStories this week.

Textastic is the most complete and versatile code editor available for your iPad and iPhone. To start with, the app has syntax highlighting for more than 80 programming and markup languages. There’s everything from C to Objective-C, Swift, JavaScript, Python, YAML, HTML, CSS, and dozens more languages.

Of course, Textastic is also compatible with Markdown. Not only can you write in Markdown, but you can preview Markdown with the app’s built in web server or Safari. Textastic is compatible with Sublime Text and Textmate syntax definitions too. You can even create your very own.

Textastic goes well beyond the features of a classic editor though. You can manage remote file transfers with FTP, SFTP, WebDAV, Dropbox, and Google Drive and there’s a terrific, full-featured SSH terminal built right into the app. Because Textastic supports tabs, you can even have multiple files and SSH terminals open simultaneously.

With robust search and replace that supports regular expressions, keyboard shortcuts that are customizable, and support for Git repositories using Working Copy, it’s one of the most powerful code editors you’ll find anywhere. Textastic is a great iOS citizen too, supporting the Files app, drag and drop, printing, iCloud Drive, Split View, and a whole lot more. Add to that a long history of development and support, and Textastic is an app you can use with confidence.

To learn more about Textastic and what it can do for your code editing needs on iOS, visit textasticapp.com, then download a copy today. You’re going to love it.

Our thanks to Textastic for sponsoring MacStories this week.

Grocery is the powerful iOS shopping list app that not only makes grocery shopping a breeze, but helps with meal planning and recipe management too.

Grocery is built on top of Apple’s Reminders app, so it integrates with your other task lists and features rock-solid Siri support. It happens all the time: you’re making a meal and discover you need to add something to your grocery list, but unlocking your iPhone would be a hassle. Instead, with a quick “Hey Siri” to a nearby iOS device or HomePod, or by raising your Apple Watch, you can add items to your shopping list before you forget them.

When your hands aren’t full, Grocery is just as easy to use. There’s a big ‘Add Item’ button at the bottom of the screen. Grocery also sorts your items automatically based on the order you check them off. The app can even suggest items to add to your list based on past shopping trips. Then, when you arrive at the store, Grocery’s Apple Watch app makes it easy to check off items without digging out your iPhone.

Earlier this year, Grocery added a meal planning and recipe solution that makes it simple to plan your week and add items to your list as needed. The latest update adds iCloud syncing of store, meal plan, and settings data across all devices. Also, the iPad version of the app now includes a split view layout for recipes on the iPad. There’s a new CleanUp feature that can automatically format recipes by separating their title and notes using CoreML too. On top of that, Grocery supports Siri Shortcuts for creating recipes and interacting with grocery lists, and the app has a wide variety of handsome themes and app icons to customize the app to your tastes.

Grocery is free to download and try so head to the App Store now and download it now. Themes, alternative app icons, ad removal, and iCloud syncing are all available for an annual $7.99 subscription, which is a bargain for an app this smart.

Our thanks to Grocery for sponsoring MacStories this week.

Updating apps is a hassle. It would be great if all of your apps came from the Mac App Store and were automatically updated, but they probably don’t and, therefore, aren’t. That’s where MacUpdater comes in. Open MacUpdater, and in a matter of seconds, it will report back with all the apps you need to update on your Mac and walk you through the process.

With just one click, you can update most apps, and if an app requires its own updater app like Adobe Creative Suite, MacUpdater can start it up with a single click too. MacUpdater also has a built in notification system, so that as soon as an app requires updating it can let you know. It’s a fantastic, seamless way to be sure you’re enjoying the latest features of your favorite apps and staying on top of the latest security patches.

MacUpdater’s pricing is as straightforward as the app itself at just $9.99, after a free trial that allows you to update ten apps, and for a limited time, MacStories readers can purchase MacUpdater for 10% off using the coupon code MACUPDATER-MACSTORIES. To learn more, check out MacRumors’ video on MacUpdater on YouTube and download the free trial today to give it a try yourself. Use MacUpdater and stop wondering whether or not your apps are up to date.

Our thanks to MacUpdater for sponsoring MacStories this week.

GoodTask is a powerful task manager for iOS and the Mac that’s built on top of Apple’s Reminders app. By leveraging Reminders, GoodTask syncs to all your iOS devices and Macs, supports Exchange, and works seamlessly with Siri shortcuts. But that’s just the start.

Tasks can be filtered using GoodTask’s Smart List feature. Smart Lists act like saved searches allowing you to view subsets of your tasks. For example, maybe you want to find all of your un-dated tasks with a certain tag. With Smart Lists, that’s incredibly simple to set up.

Another powerful feature of GoodTask is Quick Actions. You define a grid of information to add to tasks with a single tap from the Quick Actions view. Maybe you have a project, tag, day of the week, time, or other bits of data you add to tasks over an over. With Quick Actions, the repetition of typing that information over and over is eliminated. The app also includes a Smart Button on iOS to quickly move between frequently-used lists.

Interactive notifications with Quick Actions allow users to do things like auto-snooze tasks right from a notification without opening the app. There’s also a feature-rich Apple Watch app from which you can manage existing tasks and add new ones. Add to that a handy Today widget and GoodTask excels at being available no matter the device or context. The app’s iOS icons are customizable and you can switch between a variety of themes or make them yourself to set GoodTask up exactly the way you want too.

Take charge of task management today by visiting GoodTask’s website to learn more about its Mac, iOS, and Watch apps and discover the power of the premier task manager based on Apple’s Reminders app.

Our thanks to GoodTask for sponsoring MacStories this week.

Earlier this month, Pocket Lists got a massive update, which made it the first to-do list app designed specifically for family collaboration. That’s a big deal because far too many to-do apps are designed for your work life, but completely ignore the needs of you and your family.

Pocket Lists includes a brand new ‘Family’ tab that integrates real-time collaboration and to-do list sharing, so up to 6 family members can work together efficiently and productively. The new Family tab makes it super easy to share to-do lists with everyone in your family, view your family’s activity log, and assign tasks to one another.

By focusing on families instead of businesses, Pocket Lists makes the collaboration process truly friendly and easy to understand. The app is designed from the ground up to seamlessly combine all of the new family collaboration features with the ability to keep some lists and tasks private too.

Pocket Lists also looks great. There are over 400 icons to make your lists stand out, over 70 built-in and custom cover images, and color-coding. The app has all the other features you’d expect from a top-notch task manager too like natural language support for setting due dates and times in all ten languages that the app supports. Reminders can be set based on dates, times, and locations and can repeat. There is even support for hashtags, subtasks, an Apple Watch app, an iMessage app, and dark mode. On top of that, Pocket Lists integrates with Apple’s Reminders and Calendar apps.

If you’re looking to get your household tasks in order for your whole family, check out Pocket Lists today on their website and download it the App Store. It’s the friendliest to-do list app for families.

Our thanks to Pocket Lists for sponsoring MacStories this week.

Tomorrow, MacStadium is announcing something big, but we’ve got a sneak peek just for MacStories readers. MacStadium is releasing Orka, their new virtualization platform. Orka (Orchestration with Kubernetes on Apple) is a new build infrastructure based on Docker and Kubernetes technology. It’s the very first solution for orchestrating macOS in a cloud environment using Kubernetes on Mac hardware.

MacStadium developed Orka to provide Mac and iOS developers with the ability to use container technology features the same way they can on other platforms. With Orka, MacStadium’s customers will now have a more software-driven, self-service capable experience using MacStadium’s infrastructure that’s similar to what they may have used with AWS, Azure, or GCP.

At launch, Orka will ship with plugins for Jenkins. Additional Plugins for Buildkite, Bamboo, and TeamCity will be released soon. Orka has already been adopted by Homebrew, the popular package manager for macOS. Aso, if any readers plan to be at DevOps World | Jenkins World, be sure to catch MacStadium’s live Orka demo on Wednesday, August 14th or visit MacStadium.com to learn more about Orka.

Of course, MacStadium is also the premier Mac hosting company that provides dedicated Mac hardware and private cloud services, and it has a special deal just for MacStories readers. Just use the coupon code MACSTORIES at checkout and MacStadium will take 50% off the first two months of a hosted Mac mini server.

Our thanks to MacStadium for sponsoring MacStories this week.

Milanote is the perfect tool for organizing your next creative project. The Mac and web app, which also has a companion iPhone app, is an incredibly easy way to create beautiful visual boards of ideas and inspiration that you can organize any way you’d like.

Conceived initially to fulfill the needs of the cofounders’ design agency, Milanote has grown to over 250,000 users that include teams at companies like Apple, Nike, Netflix, and Uber. The strength of Milanote is its flexibility. You can combine notes, images, files, and links all in one place and then connect them using drag and drop. Because Milanote uses a freeform canvas, the app makes it simple to find connections between ideas that you’d miss in a traditional notes app. The Milanote boards you create are private by default, but they can be shared with colleagues allowing you to work collaboratively with team members too.

The latest addition to Milanote is its iPhone companion app that lets you gather photos, notes, to-dos, and links on the go. You can then organize everything when you return to your Mac. It’s a great way to ensure that you can capture ideas even when you’re away from your Mac.

Milanote has a special offer just for MacStories readers. For a lifetime 20% off on a Milanote Pro account, which adds unlimited notes, links, images, and file uploads as well as powerful board and content search to Milanote’s free plan, use the coupon code ‘macstories20’ at checkout. So don’t delay, head over to Milanote’s website to learn more and sign up for a Milanote Pro account.

Our thanks to Milanote for supporting MacStories this week.