With 2022 officially and fully in the rear-view, we’re all looking at how 2023 will be different. But some things don’t need to change. With that, it seemed only fair that we look back at some of the apps that made the biggest difference this past year. With so many apps to choose from, knowing the ones we (the Cult of Mac team) actually used and loved this last year may even help you nail that New Year’s resolution.
Few things improve productivity like having more screen space to play with. Plenty of us rely on two screens to keep our workflows straight. And if you’re a gamer, you might want even more screen so your experience is truly immersive. With this lightweight add-on, you can get all of the above straight from your laptop.
Designers, illustrators, recording engineers, stock brokers…. Plenty of us use two screens so we can maximize productivity at the computer. That can make laptops feel like a downgrade, but with this simple upgrade, you can carry your dual-screen arrangement with you.
It’s possible for anybody to cultivate focus and mindfulness, with the right help. Some take up meditation, or yoga, or chanting, but technology also offers a way to train your mind.
This week, email service Fastmail added snooze to its web and iOS apps. You can now click on a button inside any email in your inbox, and make it disappear until you’re ready to deal with it.
Got a late-Friday-afternoon work email from your boss, and don’t want to see it every time you check your mail over the weekend? Worried that you’ll get so used to ignoring those great tips for your vacation that you will forget about them when you actually go away? Do you already use your email inbox as a de-facto to-do list, and would love more control?
Then Fastmail’s snooze is for you. Let’s see how it works.
Apple has slowly been turning up the dial on what iOS can do, trying to make it more and more “computer” like. With iOS 13, one of the points of frustration with computing on iOS – and especially on iPad – is finally being addressed thanks to changes in the Files app.
With iOS 13, the Files app is taking a huge leap toward the Mac model of file management. There’s a whole bunch of smaller changes, as well as some big upgrades that make it really compelling.
Technology is supposed to make us more productive, but it can also be a mighty distraction. That’s especially true when it comes to our cell phones. But with this multi-device productivity tool, you can make each of your devices a window onto your tasks and to-do lists.
This week we take a ride with Swapfiets bikes, mangle music with Eventide’s new iOS effects apps, save money with Spend Stack, and more.
Apple’s suite of iWork productivity apps received a big batch of updates today for both the Mac and iOS versions.
Keynote, Numbers and Pages for the two platforms added a bunch of new features. The biggest addition is some new outline styles. There are also a couple of new customization options for Apple Pencil and a face detection feature that intelligently positions people in placeholders and objects.
This week we find nearby friends with Yoke, count our steps with Pedometer++, add lights and shadows to our photos with Apollo, and enjoy Ulysses’ superior split view on the iPad.
Music does many things: It soothes, it inspires, it excites, it distracts. But music also can be made into an instrument for staying on task, reducing stress and producing other productive and healthy results.
How many times have you stared at the same list of stale tasks on your to-do list? I have whole sections that have been there so long they’ve become invisible to me —- just like the sign in by bathroom telling guests to sit down to pee has become invisible to certain of my antisocial visitors.
Now, today’s tip isn’t going to help you to finish off those lingering tasks. You may as well just delete them, because you’re never, ever going to complete them. But it might help you rescue newly added tasks from the same stagnant fate. It’s called the “question mark to-do list trick”, and so far it’s working for me.
Is the iPad Pro a laptop replacement? Despite what you might think, and what many reviewers will tell you, it can be for a lot of professionals. But not by itself.
If you’re going to use your iPad to get real work done, and to be as productive as possible, you’ll need some things to go with it. In this roundup, we’ve listed affordable accessories that turn iPad Pro into a productivity powerhouse.
We all know adulting is hard, and staying on top of day-to-day tasks is a big task unto itself. Paper and pen are great for staying organized and capturing ideas. But we live in the digital age, so it pays to have digital tools.
If you use a lot of productivity apps on iOS, the chances are one of them was made by Readdle. The Ukrainian company has built some of the biggest and best software for getting things done, including Spark, Scanner Pro, and PDF Expert.
Readdle launched its first app in 2007, just a few months after the very first iPhone went on sale. Since then, it has built 40 products and assembled a team of 135 people in eight locations around the world.
This week, Readdle hit a major milestone: 100 million downloads. Here’s how it happened.
Fortune favors the bold, and there is no shortage of bold people whose success we can all learn from. This bundle of interviews, insights and life hacks from top creatives and influencers will teach you the skills you need to succeed in today’s busy world.
Anything that saves time and energy while coding is welcome indeed. Saving keystrokes or screen time can be done with good habits, and with good apps. So we’ve got a roundup or workflow-improving apps for developers on Mac.
You know when somebody wants to meet up with you, and you end up spending so much time going back and forth trying to agree a time and date that you end up hating that person, and cancel the meeting? Maybe you just lost a multi-million dollar contract for your company, and it’s all the fault of scheduling annoyances1.
WhenWorks fixes that by letting folks book time with you online, using a form that is connected to the calendar on your iPhone.
Chances are, your inbox is a mess. No matter how finely you tune your spam filters, the junk mail and obsolete conversations add up. So we can all use some help giving our inboxes a cleaning.
Scheduling a meeting should be a simple task, but it never is. WhenWorks is a new app that takes away the pain by allowing clients and colleagues to book time with you only when you’re free.
All you have to do is decide when you want your meetings to take place.
If you work with other people, you know the grinding feeling of being in a meeting that’s going nowhere. Getting together with your team should be productive, not painful. And with a little help, it can be. In the case of Steve Jobs, he had three ways to running productive meetings: keep meetings small, each participant should be responsible for one specific agenda, and don’t make meetings too formal.
Watching people like Elon Musk change the world every few seconds, it’s easy to feel less than productive. But even the top entrepreneurs and creatives are human, so their output is the result of habits that anyone can develop.
Apple’s Notes app gets better and better, with the iOS 11/macOS Sierra version bringing all kinds of amazing features. But however good any notes app is, you still have to find your notes, and for most of us that means scanning a list until we find the one we’re looking for. Today we’ll see how to add a custom image thumbnail to any note, so you can quickly identify it in the list. Even if you use search to narrow down the results, an image will still make notes easier to spot.
Time at the computer is a constant fight to stay focused. Keeping distractions at bay and your mind on task has a lot to do with your environment. So the right music can make all the difference.
These days, we’re all typing countless emails, social media posts, messages and other text based communications. That means a lot of chances to make the wrong impression thanks to poor spelling or grammar.
