Tris Hussey

I swear my Contacts are a mess. It’s all because of the time I was doing outside sales (this was like 8 years ago now) and I imported the entire prospect database into my address book. Granted I’ve used some of these addresses since, but, wow, do I have some serious cruft in there. Not only do I have addresses that I don’t need, I have lots of outdated addresses that are as good as useless.

Geez I wish there was something that would scan and update my address book for me. Update everything. Automatically add important contacts. Merge accounts and cards. Oh right! There is! And we have WriteThatName 3-month Premium subscription free for you!

I think PDF is one of the best file formats around. I send client files in PDF. Invoices in PDF. Resumes in PDF. Reports in PDF. The problem is when I get PDFs…and I want to do something else with them.

Yeah, that’s where PDF files can fall down. PDF files are awesome if the folks on the receiving end just need to read or review the content, not build on it. Sure, I can mark up PDF files. I do it all the time for galley proofs of my books, but when I get data or large chunks of text that I need to use in some other document…I can be up a creek.

This is exactly the situation PDF2Office is for—Edit PDF Files with PDF2Office Professional v6: Convert PDF & Windows XPS files into Editable Information

Do you take great pictures? Or maybe you know someone who does? How about getting some of those pictures printed on canvas to display like the art the are? And this doesn’t even have to cost an arm and a leg…only $49. Sounds like a great present—Turn Any Photo Into Art With CanvasPop (16“x20”): Create a Custom High-Quality Canvas Print And Get $30 for Your Next Purchase

How’s your Mac doing today? Sluggish even when all the apps are quit? Running out of space? It might finally be time for you to check out MacKeeper. Good thing we have it as our deal today—Keep Your Mac Safe With MacKeeper: Keep Your Mac Secure, Clean & Fast for the Rest of its Life.

Personally, I’m not a big gamer, but even I can see how awesome this deal today is—The Mac Gamer Bundle Featuring Call of Duty 4: Get Your Game on With 6 Killer Mac Games worth $195 for Only $30!—it’s really crazy good. Six great games for just $30? There has to be a catch or something. Nope. Here are the 6 games included:

Today’s deal—Learn to Create Successful iPhone Apps Freebie: Design Quality Apps with this Free E-course—pairs extremely well with yesterday’s deal—Now Is Your Chance To Learn Xcode To Make iOS Apps—since while you’re learning Xcode to make your app, it’s probably a great idea to make sure it looks good too.

I don’t usually start off these posts with the money aspect, but in this case I think it’s essential that I do. This course is usually $497 and the deal we have here is $79. Okay? Big savings. Now the best part, this course from Udemy is a soup to nuts course on how to build iOS apps in Xcode—The Ultimate Xcode For iOS Apps Course: Build & Launch iOS Apps With The Most Comprehensive Xcode Course for Beginners.

So if you have an idea for an app, but absolutely zero coding experience…this is the course you need.

If you have a previous generation iPod nano (the touchscreen one), you’ve probably seen the straps and kits to make it a watch (you know I never did see one that made a nano look like a pocket watch). Since I had the chance while working for an Apple retailer to see lots of samples of these straps and kits, I can tell you something with authority—most of them were junk.

Most of the samples I saw looked awful on your wrist or looked cheap or…just bad. The ones that looked best were the ones that employed more “watch-like” features like…screws, links, real bands. This is what I like about the Lynk Watch Kit, it looks like a watch band—The Lynk Watch Kit By LUNATIK (Black): Get an Ultra-Lightweight, Stylish & Comfortable Watch Piece That Will Fit Any Occasion.

One clipboard rots. That’s all there is to it. You copy one thing, then another, and…you always need the first thing you copied again. Myself, I’ve been using the clipboard manager tool in Alfred (with the PowerPack add-on), but it’s pretty basic. So I’ve picked up ClipBuddy today because it’s free right now—Free Clipboard Manager For Macs: Automatically Organize All of Your Copied Text With an Intuitive Copy & Paste Utility.

I get a boat-load of email everyday. Every morning I have pretty much the same routine, skim through my inbox to try to find the important stuff, skip the cruft, and prioritize. After that skim, I need to delete most (if not all) of the cruft. Annoying, time consuming, and worst of all sometimes I miss important emails buried in the cruft. Now, I’m also very skeptical about services that interact (or intervene) with my email. I don’t want to lose or miss something important. I also don’t want spam, bacon, or cruft in my inbox either.

Enter SaneBox—Spend Less Time In Your Inbox With SaneBox (1-Year): Keep Your Inbox Clutter-Free & Your Mind Sane With a 1-Year Subscription—which after watching the intro video (below) I figured I’d give it a shot. Why not, I can try it for a couple weeks for free before I even have to enter my credit card. Yeah, well I’ve pushed a few email accounts through it this morning and…wow.

I write about courses and education a lot here. Video training courses are pretty popular items to offer. We all know that we need to hone our current skills and pick up new ones in today’s knowledge economy. This course bundle—I just read through the course offerings again—is like going to design school for $100.

Seriously. It’s all there. Sure you might be more interested in making WP themes with Dreamweaver and creating logos (first 1000 buyers only get that bonus!) or maybe InDesign and Illustrator, but the point is that you can now pick up the skills you need in the core apps that creative folks use all the time—Learn To Design Bundle.

We have another pair of BodyGuardz earbuds for you check out today—Premium Lyrics Earbuds From BodyGuardz (Black): The Precision-Crafted Surfaces Will Make You Forget They Are Even in Your Ears—I mean it's not like there is any other news or anything, right?

These earbuds are supposed to be so light and comfortable that you will either a) forget you have them on (I've done that, which is why my MacBook Pro headphone jack is skewed) or b) just want to wear them all the time. Now I can believe “a”, but “b” might just look strange. Regardless…

Raise your hand if you’ve needed a background image or texture for a project and been pretty much SOL. Yeah, me too. A few times I’ve wandered about with my camera and found some cool textures I could use, but you know if it’s the middle of the night or you don’t have time to wander around with a camera, what then?

The “what then” is having textures and backgrounds on hand to use. Websites, apps, presentations, Twitter, whatever I think we need backgrounds more than ever now. Now with 375 textures to pick from, I bet you’ll find something you like—The Professional’s High-Resolution Textures Bundle: Take Your Designs to the Next Level with 375 Stunning Textures.

There was a time, not so long ago, that every laptop I owned as adorned with stickers from various Web 2.0 companies. And when I mean “adorned” I mean covered. Like every square inch of the lid. It was a “thing” a few years ago and it certainly made it easy to spot me and my laptop in a crowded conference room.

Times have changed and I only have two stickers on my MacBook—WordPress and Iron Man—however I still dig stickers for branding and giveaways. The question that I’ve always faced is where to get stickers, custom stickers, at a good price (and usually the last minute)…looks like I might have an answer—Create Custom Logo Stickers & Decals With StickerYou ($25 For $50): Get $50 Worth of StickerYou Credit For Only $25.

Prepare to conquer the world! No, this isn’t a call to arms from an evil genius, it’s more like Risk, on steroids—Rule The World With Making History II: Prepare For The Ultimate Grand Strategy Experience With This Fun Mac Game.

My father-in-law is really into these games. He spends hours researching and playing strategy games on his PC. I don’t know what my mother-in-law thinks of all this virtual carnage and destruction, but I think it’s pretty cool. If my father-in-law had a Mac (he does have an iPad), I’d get him this game for his birthday (since it’s next week) because it looks freakin’ cool.

There isn’t much that needs to be said about a free pack of great graphics—The PSD Design Resource Bundle Freebie: Premium Graphics for Multiple Design Needs—I grabbed these myself last night because I always need a graphic here and there (especially here). I went through most of the sets (mostly the social icons) and …yeah these are great graphics. While right below is a button we created for these posts…

Let’s see a few examples of what you get…

Yes, this is a fish story. Over the summer my son and I were fishing on the lake in Maine where I’ve been fishing for nearly 40 years. One day I caught the biggest fish (smallmouth bass) I’ve ever caught anywhere, any time. The problem is that you won’t believe me (I don’t expect you to) because I don’t have a picture of it. Why no picture? Because I didn’t want to risk bringing my iPhone or camera in the boat with us. Later I thought, because I had seen them before, “I wish I had one of those uber-waterproof, floating case/bags for my iPhone…”

Well, guess what’s on sale now (and a few months too late for me), yeah you guessed it—Waterproof Your Smartphone With DryCASE: The Ultimate Dry Case for Your Smartphone—and let me tell you why it’s cool and why you should have one.

This is a truly great freebie. ColorStrokes (formerly ColorSplash) is doing a big push for its new version. So as a nice little bonus, you can get this awesome mac app for free right now. I have this app myself (and for iOS) and love to play with it. I think I actually take pictures with the sole intent to use ColorStrokes on them. So, just do something cool for yourself, grab this freebie, take some pictures and have some fun.

For all you lucky sots who have an iPhone 5 already, I bet you’re still looking for a great case (or maybe alternate cases). Here’s a great looking case, but with a little twist—Style Up Your iPhone 5 With The #CLEANSLATE Case (Black): Keep Your iPhone 5 Safe With This Sleek Case.

This case doesn’t just protect your iPhone, it helps kids in Kenya have better schools.

There are times, believe it or not, that you just need a basic web page (or site), and using WordPress is just getting in the way. Maybe you need to layout a table in HTML. Maybe you just need a splash page as a place holder. Regardless of the why, the need is clear and you need an app to make it happen.

Oh, sure, you can code by hand. You know how to code complex tables by hand and maybe toss in some in-line CSS too, right? Right, neither do I. That’s why I have a copy of RapidWeaver. Yeah I got it years ago (in an app bundle) and I’ve installed it, deleted it, and reinstalled it several times now (I’ve finally wised up and I’m not deleting it again). Why? Like I said above, sometimes you just need a solid WYSIWYG HTML editor—Create Powerful Websites With RapidWeaver 5: Build Beautiful Websites & Get Realmac’s Nobility Theme to Get You Started.

This is short and sweet for a Sunday. Have an iOS device with a 30-pin (old school?) connector? Have extra chargers, car charger, cable, or headphones? No? You should. Keep a set in your car. Keep a set in your bag (a set that doesn’t come out of your bag except on the go). Right now we’ve got a power bundle for $20—Stay Charged With The iOS Power-Pack Bundle: Charging Adapters, Headphones, & an Apple Dock, Oh My!—than is just the ticket to have extras around. Snap this up, it’s a great deal.

Need to round out your app toolkit? New a few new WP themes? How about some graphic elements for projects? Oh yes, it Productivity bundle time and we have another fantastic value pack for you—The Mac Productivity Bundle 2.0: Get 11 Best Selling Mac Apps & Design Goodies For One Shockingly Low Price.

Remember, picking up bundles isn’t about needing all the apps, but needing a few of the apps or goodies that you need right now and tapping into the others when you need them.

“I’d probably like a pair of those.” That’s what my wife said when she saw this deal. My wife has taken up running and doing quite well at it. She is, however, going through ear buds on a regular basis. Other runners I know have the same problem. Earbuds that fall out, wear out, aren’t comfortable, all that.

Well, looks like these earbuds might just fix that—The Active Lifestyle Earphone Package From MEElectronics: Stay Locked-in for Every Beat With The Sport-Fi S6 Earphone Set.

Which app has you stymied? You know the app that no matter how hard you try you just can’t “get”. For me it’s Illustrator. Not that I a) have it or b) have needed to use it very often, but when I’m faced with a vector graphics app, I’m just stuck.

Now, you and I both know that really knowing apps is the key to success in our business. Doesn’t matter what you do, you use apps and you need to know them. Period. The challenge always finding the time to learn the apps when you have, well here’s an idea for you—Develop Software Expertise with Total Training: A 1 Year Subscription to 200+ Award-Winning Online Software Training Courses

If you create websites these days there are a few big players who dominate the field—WordPress (my fav), Drupal (my second choice), and Joomla (not one of my favs, but…)—and while all of them are pretty easy to get, they have their own quirks and tricks that you need to learn to get the most out of them. I should know, I write books on WordPress…

But I digress. The thing is that while making great sites isn’t hard, having some guidances to help you along makes things a lot easier. Hence…Learn To Build Websites With OSTraining: Get 1 Year Of Unlimited Access to Over 800 Online Tutorials That Will Teach You How to Use WordPress, Joomla & Drupal.