Every great idea or project starts with a single thought. And another. And then a million more. MindNode is the most delightful mind mapping app for macOS, iPadOS, and iOS. It helps you capture your thoughts and create a clear picture of your idea.

When you’re in the middle of brainstorming, the last thing you want to worry about is how to use your tool of choice. MindNode excels at getting out of your way, letting you focus on what’s on your mind and exploring where your ideas take you.

Once your idea has formed, MindNode is ready to take it to its next phase. Feel free to rearrange your mind map and easily hide branches by folding them. Attach files, notes, images, links, and stickers to your thoughts and style them just as you wish, or take advantage of the built-in themes. Explore your idea as an outline or capture new thoughts instantly with Quick Entry.

MindNode’s discreetly powerful features let you fully take advantage of the mind mapping process. Add more context to your thoughts and make new connections with Visual Tags - a great way to prioritize ideas and discover groups of ideas that are otherwise not connected. When your thoughts are too distracting, put a spotlight on a single idea with Focus Mode and fade out all the rest.

Try mind mapping with MindNode by downloading it today and experience all of its features with a free 14-day trial.

Our thanks to MindNode for sponsoring MacStories this week.

Re:Schedule is a new kind of calendar for busy professionals and team leaders that fuses time management, team collaboration, and meetings into a comprehensive package that will help you work more efficiently than ever before.

The power of Re:Schedule starts with its Day View, a unique take on managing the two competing demands on your time: meetings and tasks. By combining them side-by-side, you can allocate your time better than ever before. For example, you can drag tasks to your calendar to block off time to ensure they get finished or review a meeting’s agenda and its open action items all at once.

Organizing collaboration with Re:Schedule is a more natural way to work with others too. Information is organized by time, eliminating the overhead of managing folders, projects, teams, and permissions. The week and month views are perfect for managing tasks and understanding what needs your attention now.

Meeting workspaces bring every aspect of a meeting together in an easy-to-use interface that keeps your meetings on track and productive. Just tap on a meeting, and its workspace opens, allowing you to organize notes by agenda item and assign tasks to meeting participants who can follow along with the agenda during the meeting. When your meeting is finished, Re:Schedule automatically shares your notes with each participant. Even your team members who don’t use Re:Schedule can benefit from it thanks to email notifications.

Re:Schedule is fantastic for recurring meetings too. The app tracks a meeting’s history, organizing notes chronologically to help track past decisions and progress. Re:Schedule also enables you to see open tasks from past meetings and syncs with your Google Calendar account.

Transform the way you work in 2020 by signing up for Re:Schedule’s 30-day free trial today.

Our thanks to Re:Schedule for sponsoring MacStories this week.

Toggl brings together simple time tracking with powerful reporting. It’s a combination that allows you to account for your time effortlessly and gain valuable insights, and now is a terrific time to sign up for a paid annual plan. That’s because to celebrate the new year, Toggl is offering 20% off its annual plans if you sign up before January 17th!

With iOS, Mac, and web apps, it’s easy to start and stop timers whenever and wherever you’re working. All it takes is a single click or tap and you’re up and running with your time entries syncing seamlessly in the background. Each app is free and designed for the hardware on which it runs. For example, on iOS, Toggl works with Siri and Shortcuts. There’s an Apple Watch app too.

On the Mac, Toggl has been redesigned to more closely resemble the company’s web app. The update added dark mode, simplified adding of clients and projects, streamlined time tracking visualizations, and improved offline support.

There’s also a fantastic new timeline view on the Mac for quickly pinpointing the gaps in your day. Toggl can also privately monitor the apps you use on your Mac to help remind you of how you spent your time. The app can even set Pomodoro timers to remind you to take breaks, and for Macs with a Touch Bar, there’s a handy Global Toggl Button for starting timers that’s always visible when Toggl is running.

Tracking only gets you so far though. That’s why Toggl generates powerful, professional reports that provide valuable insights and make bookkeeping a breeze.

Simplify your time tracking. Download Toggl today for the Mac and iOS and be sure to take advantage of the 20% discount on paid annual plans by signing up before January 17th.

Our thanks to Toggl for sponsoring MacStories this week.

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.