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Proton Mail is part of a growing suite of privacy-focused applications developed by scientists who met at CERN. Designed with security and freedom as core principles, Proton Mail not only offers robust encryption—it also delivers a clean, user-friendly interface.

In this video, Lee guides you through everything you need to know to get started. You’ll learn how to set up different types of Proton Mail accounts, compose encrypted emails, and see what it’s like for someone without a Proton account to receive a password-protected message. Lee also covers how to forward emails from Gmail into Proton Mail—and even how to migrate your entire Gmail account if you’re ready to make the switch.

Focusmo is a new app on the scene that streamlines task management. You can use it to capture text from anywhere on your computer, then begin a related task right away, or save it to your queue for later. You can organise you tasks then work through them one by one using the built-in Pomodoro timer, which invites you to take short, regular breaks. All of your completed tasks can sync retroactively to your calendar so you're able to look back on your completed work and its duration. Download your trial of Focusmo and follow along with Darcy as he shows you the ins and outs of this useful app.

Focusmo runs on macOS 11 or newer, and offers a 3-day trial, after which you have a few purchase options — see pricing link below for details.

More of a conceptual video this time round as Lee walks you through his menu bar setup, starting with a look at how it's structured, followed by a brief look at the software used to manage it. Then, the bulk of the video centres on some brief overviews as to the apps themselves, and how they are used. If you are looking for inspiration as to how to set up your own menu bar, or just look for some new apps, this could be the video for you.

If you've decided to go all in on Apple Notes for your note-taking needs, it doesn't take long for it to get messy and disorganised.  Those short notes that you capture over the course of the day can build up and before you know it, you have a slew of them that make it difficult to navigate easily.In this video, Lee demonstrates how to organise your notes so that you can find what you need when you need it. You learn about folders and Smart folders, and how to use tags (and its lesser-know cousins, negative tags!).  Get ready to give your Notes collection a much-needed overhaul!Notes requires macOS 11 or newer, iOS or iPadOS 9 and later.

Large language models (LLMs for short) have been making lots of waves in the past year especially, but Google's NotebookLM takes a different approach. It does so by providing answers based on only the sources you choose to upload to it. This gives you responses that are much more specific and relevant.

In this episode, Mike covers the new iOS version of this one-of-a-kind research assistant. You get to learn how to create notebooks, have a chat with your source documents and files, create a two-host podcast based on your sources, and much more. Mike also points out the differences between the iOS version and NotebookLM on the web.

NotebookLM on iOS requires iOS 17 or newer.

Sindre Sorhus is a prolific Apple developer who has 55 apps (so far) and this week, Allison Sheridan will introduce you to 3 of them.

• Dato is a menu bar app that gives you access to your calendar and reminders, even creating them right from the menu bar. You can join video calls right from Dato and tailor the app to the view you like. 

• Aiko gives you on-device transcription using Whisper AI, which means your data isn't shared anywhere, and it runs on macOS, iOS, and even visionOS.

• With the browser picker app Velja, you'll be able to control where web links open, including directly to apps like Zoom instead of taking a trip through Safari first.

Raycast have an extensive offering on Mac. Not only as a replacement for Spotlight but as a repository of different app extensions. The company have now released an offering on iPhone and iPad with some shared features in Notes, Snippets and Quicklinks, as well as an extensive AI assistant. This incorporates many of the different GPT models to assist you in writing, researching and learning.

AI tools are all the rage recently, but most of the time, their focus is on eliminating or automating mundane tasks. In this episode, Mike shares two AI-enhanced capture tools for iOS that are designed to assist in the distinctly human creative process. He guides you through the features and benefits of Whisper Memos and VoicePal, which give you a lot of useful tools to help you capture ideas on the fly.

Whisper Memos runs on iOS 16.1 or newer; VoicePal requires iOS 15.1 or newer.

A Whisper Memos subscription is $39.99 per year.

Access to VoicePal Pro is $9.99 monthly, or $89.99 annually.

In today's video, Darcy showcases Progress, an app that focuses on the simple act of tracking your goals and habits using increments. If you plan to work out a certain amount of times per week, study, cook, or save money, you can easily create a tracker in Progress, as well as view it using widgets on your Home Screen, on iPhone or iPad. Darcy also demonstrate how to use the available Progress Actions in Shortcuts to keep track of your goals without opening the app. Download your copy and follow along!

• Progress runs on iOS or iPadOS 16.0 or later, macOS 13.0 or newer, and visionOS 1.0 or later.

• Progress Premium costs $7.9 annually or $0.99 monthly. You can buy a Lifetime Unlock for $19.99.

In show 1449, Lee started to walk through BusyCal, an alternative calendar application on the Mac (also available for iOS), that offers far more features than the native Calendar app. Whilst that video mostly looked at basic features, in Part 2 we look at elements that set it apart. This includes tagging events to help with organisation, Smart Filters that only show you what you need to see at a given time, and also how to integrate BusyCal with Zoom so you only need one interface to schedule that all-important conference call. By the end of this screencast, you'll be ready to take your calendar management to the next level!

BusyCal requires macOS 11 or newer.

Sometimes we have tools at our fingertips that we may believe only have one purpose. The App Switcher, that is built into macOS, is one such example. Using Command and Tab to switch between applications is muscle memory for many users. However in this video, Lee shows you that it can also be used to quit apps, hide them, as drag and drop files between them, and more.

The App Switcher is a feature available on all version of macOS, so Command-tab away!

The native Calendar app on macOS serves a purpose for most users, however there are alternatives that offer more with their feature set. In this video, Lee starts walking you through his application of choice, BusyCal. It's been around since 2006 and in that time, has always iterated, and added useful features along the way. This first of this two-part series looks at the basics of adding accounts, working with the different event types you can add (did you know you can journal within a calendar application?) as well as customise your view settings and work with the menu bar to quickly add items using natural language. Lee also shows you how you can group related calendars together, then quickly reveal or hide them with one click.

BusyCal requires macOS 11 or newer.

After giving a thorough introduction on how to use both the free and Powerpack-driven versions of Alfred, Lee takes a deeper dive into building customised workflows. In this video, you learn how to build simple Keyword and List Filter workflows, understand how arguments and variables work and break down a complex workflow into its component parts, allowing you to better grasp each one.

At the end of the show, Lee shows his most-used workflows that can be obtained directly from the Alfred Gallery, including some on popular applications like DEVONthink, OmniFocus, and Obsidian.

Alfred requires macOS 10.14 or newer.

Back in show 1032, Lee covered Session in one of the Tuesday Tip videos. Since this show was released, the application has developed significantly and he now uses it as his main tool for staying focused on his work. Session is an application that uses the tenets of the Pomodoro Technique to split the working day up into focused sessions of work, encouraging you to set intentions, eliminate distractions and take frequent breaks, ensuring you make the most of the time you have available.

Focusing on the Mac version in this video, Lee walks through not just how to use the app at a functional level, but also offers some ideas for how you may want to set it up for yourself. Lee also looks at some of the useful automation functionality Session has to offer, such as Shortcuts integration and the ability to support URL schemes, allowing you to start custom work sessions by clicking a link.

Session runs on macOS 10.15 or newer, and iOS 13.4 or later.

Clipboard management on our mobile devices has been problematic for years. Alexander Picard's OneTap is here to help remedy this. By utilising its dedicated keyboard, you're able to create shortcuts that can paste text, photos, URLs, as well as links to documents. This eliminates the need to repeatedly paste the same content over and over.

In this video shot on iPhone, Lee walks you through how to set up OneTap, as well as use Apple's versatile Shortcuts app to create shortcuts using the app.

OneTap will run on:

iOS and iPadOS 15.0 or later

macOS 12.0 or later

visionOS 1.0 or later

Apple’s build-in Reminders app has received a lot of love recently and the requests for utilising a Kanban view for managing reminders has been granted. Splitting your reminders into different columns offers a new way to organise your tasks and projects. In this video, Lee shows you how to set that up using a real world example. And with Templates now available for those projects you often repeat, Reminders has become even more useful.

The version of Reminders used in this screencast is the latest one available for iPadOS. The features shown here are identical on the Mac as well as iPhone. Make sure your devices run iOS 17 or newer, and macOS 14 or newer.

In this video, Don takes you on a rapid refresher of some of the basics functionality of Numbers, Apple's spreadsheet app that's been around for quite some time. He follows this up by sharing 10 of his favourite tips and tricks, which he uses almost daily when working with Numbers. Don is using the latest version of Numbers which runs on macOS 14.0 or later.

In last week's show, Lee walked you through the features available with the free version of Alfred. This week, he takes it up a notch by showing what you can do with a purchase of the Powerpack. It both extends the free functionality as well as adds new features to an already rich application.

In this video, you'll learn how to use Alfred to navigate your folder structure, buffer files for actioning later, access Contact information, manage Music playback, integrate with 1Password as well as get started on building your own workflows to improve your productivty.

Alfred from Running with Crayons runs on macOS 10.14 and newer.

Pricing information for Powerpack

Alfred has been Lee's go-to app and file launcher since he first logged onto a Mac over 10 years ago.  During that time, it's continued to evolve with new features added on a regular basis. It can be a one-stop shop for creating automation workflows to make your Mac sing and dance, which can at times seem daunting.

For many of us though, the free version is more than enough to make you switch from, or use alongside Spotlight. Finding and opening files, creating custom web searches, and easily accessing many system settings is easy with Alfred.

In this video, Lee shows you how to make the most of this great utility without spending a dime (yet...).

In Allison's fourth round of Tiny Mac Tips, inspired by the series she's been posting on her website, and designed to help you become a Mac power user, she teaches you how to:

• Get access to more display resolutions

• Use Quick Look to triage files

• Use your iOS device to scan documents directly into your Mac

• Uncover all of the hidden capabilities of the Dock

You also get a quick tour of podfeet.com where Allison shows you where to find her collection of Tiny Mac Tips!