This Week's Sponsor:

Winterfest 2024

The Festival of Artisanal Software


Posts in Sponsored Posts

SugarBot: Health Insights Through Sugar and Nutrition Tracking [Sponsor]

SugarBot is an easy-to-use way to maintain a healthy diet by tracking sugar intake and other nutritional data from the maker of CardioBot. With SugarBot for the iPhone and Apple Watch, you can track your data and gain insights into trends from its in-depth graphs and recommendations to form healthier habits.

Getting started with SugarBot’s elegantly designed interface couldn’t be easier. The app comes with an extensive database of foods. Log your meals, and SugarBot does the rest, recording sugar and other information, including protein, carbohydrates, fiber, and fat for each meal. Everything tracked is measured against your goals, which can be set up in the app’s Settings. You can set up SugarBot according to a Keto diet or to lose, maintain, or gain weight. Individual nutrient goals can be set as well.

Each data point logged is immediately accessible from the app’s main screen giving you a quick view of today’s nutritional intake and the option to navigate back to prior days. There’s also an ‘All nutrients’ view for daily tracking your nutritional intake by category.

For longer-term trend analysis, SugarBot has a dedicated Insights tab that displays graphs of your intake of nutrients over time. It’s a fantastic way to ensure you’re on track with your goals and understand how your food consumption affects other areas of your health.

Download SugarBot today to start your journey to better health through tracking what you eat.

Our thanks to SugarBot for sponsoring MacStories this week.


Ulysses: The Ultimate Writing App for Mac, iPad and iPhone [Sponsor]

Ulysses is an exceptional text editor for the Mac, iPad, and iPhone with an unrivaled set of advanced features and a beautiful design that is always being refined and improved. The winner of an Apple Design Award, Ulysses features a distinctive balance of power-user features that writers appreciate in a simple, elegant, distraction-free UI that makes the app a pleasure to use.

A terrific example of the power available in Ulysses is its publishing tools. Users can publish to the most popular blogging platforms from right inside Ulysses. The app includes deep integration with WordPress, Ghost, Medium, and Micro.blog, allowing you to publish directly to them, complete with images, tags, and excerpts. Most recently, Ulysses added the ability to copy and paste tables from Excel and Numbers with row sorting and sketching on the iPhone and iPad versions of the app. The Mac gained PDF and image annotation too.

Ulysses has built-in grammar and style checking for over 20 languages and a special dashboard in the sidebar that includes statistics, keywords, and footnotes. An outline of the headings in your writing provides a handy bird’s-eye view of your work and a way to navigate your document.

The app’s Library sidebar helps order your writing into groups that can be nested. Along with features like sync, powerful search and filtering options, keyword support, in-line images that can be stored locally or remotely on a server, and new customization options, Ulysses is as flexible as it is powerful. Ulysses includes support for Projects now too, allowing you to show only what’s most relevant to your current task and hiding everything else.

You can also set character, word, and other types of writing goals that can be attached to a single document or entire group, which, combined with deadlines, is a fantastic way to form good writing habits. Then, when you’re finished writing, Ulysses has abundant export options, including plain text, Markdown, TextBundle, rich text, DOCX, ePub, HTML, and PDF. To learn more about Ulysses, visit ulysses.app.

Ulysses is free to try before deciding whether to subscribe for $5.99/month or $39.99/year. MacStories readers can take advantage of a special extended one-month free trial for a limited time. It’s a terrific way to discover the app’s full capabilities, so be sure to check out Ulysses’ new features right away.

Our thanks to Ulysses for sponsoring MacStories this week.


Unite 4: Turn Websites into Apps on Your Mac [Sponsor]

Are you tired of juggling multiple browser tabs while working on your Mac? Unite 4 for macOS revolutionizes your browsing experience by allowing you to transform any website into a tailor-made app for your Mac. Leveraging a lightweight, WebKit-powered browser as a backend, Unite 4 enables you to effortlessly create isolated, customizable apps from any site.

Unite 4 offers a multitude of features and customization options, making it a fantastic alternative to resource-intensive Electron apps or lackluster Mac Catalyst implementations. The apps you create are simple to set up, fast, isolated from your other browsing activity, and only limited by your imagination.

  • Creating dedicated apps for your favorite streaming services like Netflix and Disney+
  • Conserving your laptop’s battery by using Unite for Slack, Discord, and WhatsApp with full notification support
  • Utilizing AI tools such as ChatGPT and MidJourney alongside your other macOS apps
  • Streaming music through services like Apple Music or Spotify
  • Tuning into podcasts with Overcast
  • Organizing your notes in a dedicated Roam Research app
  • Never losing your Figma design work amidst a sea of Safari tabs
  • Restricting apps like Facebook from tracking you across sites
  • Browsing your Instagram feed
  • Monitoring your finances with Robinhood

This week only, MacStories readers can enjoy a 20% discount on Unite 4 by visiting bzgapps.com/macstories or using the promo code ‘MacStories’ at checkout.

Unite offers a 14-day free trial and is also available as part of a Setapp subscription.

Download Unite 4 today and transform your favorite websites into your favorite apps.

Our thanks to Unite 4 for sponsoring MacStories this week.


Streaks: The to-Do List That Helps You Form Good Habits [Sponsor]

Streaks is one of the best-known habit-tracking apps on the App Store. In addition to linking to the Health app to help improve your health and wellbeing, you can use it for anything! Work, hobbies, exercise, timers, and more - it’s extremely customizable.

We’ve just released Streaks 9 with some great new features:

  • Screen Time tasks that automatically monitor your device usage
  • An all-new Apple Watch app, now written in SwiftUI
  • You can now record daily notes with your tasks
  • New great-looking neon themes

Streaks has now been in the App Store for 8 years - if you haven’t tried it before, or it’s been a while since you used it, we hope you can check it out!

Our thanks to Streaks for sponsoring MacStories this week.


MenuBar Stats: Advanced System Monitoring [Sponsor]

MenuBar Stats is a suite of 9 menu bar modules for monitoring your Mac developed over the course of 10 years of listening carefully to customer feedback. The app tracks your Mac’s:

  • Battery
  • Bluetooth
  • CPU
  • Disk
  • GPU
  • Memory
  • Network
  • And, with a helper app, your Mac’s temperature and fan speed

The app, which is highly customizable, provides essential details, with even more extensive information just a click away. Modules can be combined into a single window, displayed as individual windows, and anchored to always be visible. The stats monitored are available as a collection of more than 10 widgets and accessible through MenuBar Stats’ Shortcuts actions. The app has been extensively tested on and tuned for Apple’s latest M1 and M2-based Macs and includes a tool to clean your Mac’s memory too.

MenuBar Stats goes beyond monitoring and reporting with the ability to set up notifications to alert you of the details that matter most to you and even run shortcuts from them. Whether that’s when your battery reaches a certain level or when there’s a process that is monopolizing your CPU, MenBar Stats can alert you, so you’ll know the moment your Mac needs your attention.

Acting on those notifications couldn’t be simpler. MenuBar Stats can take you to a long list of Mac system utilities from your menu bar or using global keyboard shortcuts that you define. There’s also backup and restore functionality, so you can recreate your carefully-crafted setup anywhere.

It’s easy to see why MenuBar Stats has an average rating of 4.5 stars worldwide. Download MenuBar Stats today to see for yourself why so many people rely on it to monitor their Macs.

Our thanks to MenuBar Stats for sponsoring MacStories this week.


BetterTouchTool: The Essential App to Customize Your Mac Experience [Sponsor]

BetterTouchTool is an essential Mac application that has stood the test of time since it was one of the first to be covered by MacStories back in November 2009. In its early days, BetterTouchTool was a simple application primarily designed for adding customizable gestures to MacBook trackpads and Magic Mouse.

Today, BetterTouchTool has evolved to become a powerful tool that enables users to configure customizable gestures for Magic Mouse and Magic Trackpad (1-3), customize the Touch Bar and map keyboard shortcuts, bind mouse buttons, create custom mouse gestures, and customize the Siri Remote. Additionally, BetterTouchTool can connect and configure MIDI devices, works great with the Shortcuts app on macOS Monterey & Ventura, and comes with a plethora of predefined actions that can be combined to perform virtually any command on your Mac.

Recently, “Generic Devices” support has been added, enabling advanced users to add support for many devices on their own using simple JavaScript. For example, users have already created scripts even for exotic devices like the Griffin Power Mate, a Philips Foot Control, or the Microsoft Adaptive Controller.

Moreover, a fantastic feature that is currently being finalized and set to release by the end of April is the “Floating Widget Menus.” These menus are scriptable and customizable and can be placed anywhere on the screen, attached to particular windows, or shown upon demand. With a unique plugin system in place, these menus can integrate custom SwiftUI-based widgets and will even work seamlessly with BTT Remote on iPhone and iPad in the future.

Also, check out the new “Transform & Replace Selection With ChatGPT” predefined action that lets you use ChatGPT directly in any of your apps.

BetterTouchTool comes with a 45-day trial, after which you can choose between a license that includes all updates for 2 years and a lifetime license.

For a limited time, MacStories readers can purchase BetterTouchTool for 20% off by using the coupon code MACSTORIESBTT_2023 at checkout. So, don’t delay. Go to folivora.ai to learn more about this fantastic Mac app and take advantage of the special limited-time, 20% discount on BetterTouchTool.

Our thanks to BetterTouchTool for sponsoring MacStories this week.


SaneBox: Clean up Your Inbox Today and Keep It That Way Forever [Sponsor]

SaneBox is the all-in-one solution to email clutter and overload, so you can spend less time managing email and more time on what matters. It works with any email client or service, and any device - literally anywhere you check your email. Oh, and there’s nothing to download or install. It just works.

SaneBox is like having a personal email assistant that automatically organizes your inbox, so you don’t have to, saving valuable time. SaneBox works in the background, so your most important messages always reach your inbox. The rest of your messages are carefully organized into designated folders like SaneLater and SaneNews for later. You can snooze emails, too, setting them aside to deal with when you have the time.

Better yet, if there’s something you never want to see again, drag in into the SaneBlackHole folder. It’s far easier than the hit or miss process of unsubscribing from email lists.

Recently, SaneBox added Deep Clean, the perfect tool for cleaning out old emails from your inbox, which will keep you more organized than ever before. The feature will clean out the old messages automatically, so you won’t need to pay your email provider for more stoarage and can enjoy a completely unclutterred inbox. Just run Deep Clean and review messages, which are organized by sender, making it easy to decide which to delete and which to keep.

Sign up today and save $25 on any subscription. You’ll see big benefits immediately as the message count in your inbox drops, and you’ll be able to maintain control going forward with SaneBox’s help.

Our thanks to SaneBox for sponsoring MacStories this week.


MindNode: Where Tiny Thoughts Turn into Big Ideas [Sponsor]

We asked ChatGPT to write a sponsorship post for MindNode, and this was the result:

“Looking for a powerful and intuitive mind mapping app that will help you organize your thoughts and ideas on your Mac and iOS devices? Look no further than MindNode!

MindNode is a versatile and easy-to-use mind mapping app that offers an array of features to help you visualize and develop your ideas. With its clean and intuitive interface, you can easily create complex mind maps with ease, and collaborate with others in real-time.

Whether you’re a student looking to organize your notes, a business professional preparing a presentation, or just someone looking to brainstorm new ideas, MindNode has everything you need to take your creativity to the next level. You can add text, images, and even links to external resources to your mind maps, making it easy to keep all of your ideas in one place.

With MindNode, you can also export your mind maps in a variety of formats, including PDF, OPML, and plain text, so you can share your ideas with others easily. And with the ability to sync your mind maps across all of your devices using iCloud, you can access your ideas anytime, anywhere.

So why wait? Download MindNode today and start organizing your thoughts and ideas like never before!”

We couldn’t have said it better. If you are a procrastinator as we are, why not use our Shortcut to generate your mind maps with ChatGPT.

Our thanks to MindNode for sponsoring MacStories this week.


Kolide: Can Zero Trust Be Saved? [Sponsor]

Right now, “Zero Trust” is in serious danger of becoming an empty buzzword. The problem isn’t just that marketers have slapped the Zero Trust label on everything short of breakfast cereal–it’s that for all the hype, we don’t seem to be getting any safer.

At the heart of Zero Trust is a good idea, but the way most companies execute that idea is incomplete. Specifically, most security practitioners forget that device compliance is a crucial element of Zero Trust.

Think about it: your identity provider can ensure that only known devices access your company’s apps, but just because you recognize a device, doesn’t mean it’s in a secure state. A malware-infected laptop running an outdated OS can’t exactly be “trusted.” And you can’t count on MDMs to achieve total compliance. Things like unencrypted access credentials are out of their reach, not to mention Linux devices writ large.

Kolide solves the device compliance element of Zero Trust for companies that use Okta.

Our premise is simple: if an employee’s device is out of compliance, it can’t access your apps.

Kolide’s unique approach works with Okta to make device compliance part of the authentication process. If a device isn’t compliant, users can’t log in to their cloud apps until they’ve fixed the problem. And instead of creating more work for IT, Kolide provides instructions so users can get unblocked on their own.

Kolide works across your Mac, Windows, and even Linux devices, with mobile support coming soon. Our lightweight agent complements your existing tools, brings a lot of compliance issues into scope and under control, and can complete your Zero Trust picture.

To learn more and see our product in action, visit kolide.com.

Our thanks to Kolide for sponsoring MacStories this week.