New iPhone and Watch Announcements, a Utility for Great Demos, and More
Here are the things we published this week and last. You can also stay up-to-date by following us on Twitter and RSS.
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MouseposĂ©: A Handy Little Utility for Better Live Software Demos »
Earlier this year, I attended the Macstock Conference & Expo where I saw Mike Rose share about a few tools to give better live software demos. One of the apps he mentioned was an app called Mouseposé, a simple macOS utility by Boinx software that I had somehow never come across before.
Essentially, what MouseposĂ© does is help you focus your audience’s attention on what you’re doing by highlighting your mouse cursor as you share your screen. It does this by adding macOS accessibility features that enable you to give live software demos that look a lot like polished screencasts or course videos you might find here at The Sweet Setup. You can highlight your mouse position, show mouse clicks with simple animations, and even have a ribbon display at the bottom of your screen that shows keystrokes for things like keyboard shortcuts.
Simple Mindfulness Meditation with Center »
I recently re-read (listened?) the Audible Original How To Train Your Mind by Chris Bailey about the productivity benefits of mindfulness meditation. The short version is that you gain back an average of 7 minutes for each minute you spend meditating. This obviously only works up until a certain point, but this statistic has rekindled my motivation to make mindfulness meditation a regular practice again.
One thing that struck me about this “book” is that the type of mindfulness meditation Chris champions is simply focusing on your breath. While I still think Headspace is a great option for most folks who want guided meditations, I recently embarked on an App Store quest to find a simple meditation app 1) without a guide that 2) has a clean UI and 3) integrates with Apple Health.
What I landed on was Center Meditation Timer by Tanner Christensen.
Customize Your Stream Deck Using BetterTouchTool
The Elgato Stream Deck is a USB peripheral that gives you a grid of customizable buttons that you can assign to actions on your computer, like controlling Hue lights or muting your audio in Zoom. You can assign individual actions to physical buttons, and an LCD display allows you to customize the appearance of each button with an icon or text that you specify. So instead of trying to perform finger gymnastics to hit the right keyboard shortcut in the middle of a video call, you can just press a physical button instead.
Is your productivity busted?
If you feel like you could use a tuneup for how you manage your tasks and your time, get access to our Productivity Workshop.
Shawn Blanc (founder of The Sweet Setup) covers:
1. The four most common symptoms of a busted productivity workflow
2. What you can do to overcome them
3. How to improve your approach to managing and organizing your tasks.
You’ll also get the downloadable templates and cheatsheets.
Interesting Links From Our Friends and Around the Web »
- (Snazzy Labs) Apple’s iPhone 14 Event “Surprised” Me
- (Mac Power Users) #657: New Hardware & iOS 16
- (Marques Brownlee) iPhone 14/Pro Impressions: Welcome to Dynamic Island!
- (Six Colors) Apple’s September event: Winners, losers, and those in between
- (MacStories) Apple’s September 2022 Event: All The Small Things
- (Christopher Lawley) How I’m Using Craft for Note-Taking and Project Management