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Save 25% on Take Control Books and 15 Mac Apps in SummerFest Sale

Joe Kissell may have taken control of Take Control (“Take Control Books Acquired by Joe Kissell,” 1 May 2017), but we still want to make sure TidBITS readers are aware of the ongoing SummerFest sale. In it, you can save 25 percent on all Take Control titles and numerous other apps from indie developers. I was late in covering SummerFest, so the participating developers agreed to keep the necessary SUMMERFEST2017 coupon live through Thursday, 29 June 2017.

Since Joe took over last month, he and the Take Control team have released three new books:

  • Scholle McFarland’s all-new “Take Control of Calendar and Reminders” is one of those sleeper titles that Tonya and I pull out whenever Apple’s Calendar and Reminders apps get weird on us, which happens all too often. We’ve also been consulting that book more as we rationalize our shared calendar setup with Tristan, now that he has graduated from high school and is preparing to head off to Cornell in August.

  • Michael Cohen’s “Take Control of Pages, Second Edition” is the canonical reference for Apple’s Pages word processor and layout program. The current version of Pages has acquired new and useful capabilities, such as collaborative editing, while simultaneously regaining features lost in the jump to the cross-platform Pages 5.0 back in 2013.

  • Joe’s own “Take Control of the Cloud, Second Edition” is designed to answer all your questions about what “the cloud” is, what you can use it for, and how you can ensure your privacy and security while relying on cloud services. Joe covers using the cloud for storage (Dropbox, Amazon S3, Backblaze B2), syncing (calendars, contacts, email, notes), backups (CrashPlan and Backblaze), productivity apps (for graphics, databases, meetings and screen sharing), and more. He also explains how to evaluate cloud providers, how to set up a personal cloud if you don’t trust the big companies, and how to automate cloud services. For answers to additional questions, you can tune
    in to live webinars that Joe is hosting on 6 July 2017 and 8 July 2017!

What I most like about SummerFest is that it’s a group effort by software makers who don’t have big marketing budgets. By working together, they can achieve more than the sum of their individual contributions. Other apps on which you can save 25 percent in the SummerFest sale include:

  • Aeon Timeline 2: Plot out timelines for creative thinking
  • BBEdit: Our choice for text manipulation and TidBITS writing
  • Bookends: A reference manager for collecting, annotating, and citing information
  • DEVONagent Pro: Search, filter, and explore data across multiple sites
  • DEVONthink Pro Office: A powerful and flexible document management app
  • HoudahSpot: Go beyond Spotlight when searching for content on your Mac
  • Nisus Writer Pro: It’s what all Take Control books are written in
  • PDFpen: For when you need to edit and manipulate PDFs
  • Scapple: Jot down notes and draw lines between related ideas
  • Scrivener: A writing studio for novels, scripts, and research papers
  • Storyspace: The preeminent tool for writing interlinked hypertext documents
  • TaskPaper: Plain-text to-do list utility backed by full outlining capabilities
  • TextExpander: Because you can do more when you type less
  • Tinderbox: A powerful personal information assistant and note-taking tool
  • WriteRoom: Full-screen writing and editing without distractions

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