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WinterFest 2016 25%-Off Sale on Take Control Books and 13 Mac Apps

Now that we’re firmly ensconced in the holiday shopping season, we have again joined forces with small indie developers who produce useful Mac apps for the simple, gimmick-free WinterFest sale. Through 10 January 2017, you can save 25 percent on all Take Control titles, each going far beyond potentially unreliable or obsolete articles to help you (or that friend or relative who keeps calling) in a variety of ways:


  • Learn more about WinterFest apps: When we talk about how WinterFest is collaborative, we mean it. If you’re considering buying some of the cornerstone apps in the WinterFest sale, such as DEVONthink Pro, PDFpen, and Scrivener, we have recently updated books, created in partnership with those developers, that will help you get started and become proficient quickly.

  • Stay current with Apple’s latest: Whether it’s Sierra or iOS 10, watchOS 3 or tvOS 10, we have books that both delve into new features and make sure you’re not missing out on other recent or significant changes.

  • Get more productive with your apps: Our catalog extends to many other apps. We want to make you better at what you do with books about apps like 1Password, Audio Hijack, Dropbox, Parallels Desktop, and Slack. We also cover plenty of Apple apps, including iTunes, Photos, and Preview, and we even have comprehensive documentation of Pages, Numbers, and Keynote.

  • Make your Mac work better: Our friend Joe Kissell recently released some new and updated Joe On Tech titles that explain how you can back up, speed up, maintain, and troubleshoot your Mac.

The WinterFest sale also includes a curated collection of 13 apps, some of which we rely on daily. If you use your Mac to do serious work, do yourself a favor and invest in the tools that let you most effectively convey your ideas to the world. You can combine these apps for even more power; the developers have suggested some ways to link their various apps.

  • You can plot out the chronology of any story with Aeon Timeline.
  • Every TidBITS article is edited in the powerful text editor BBEdit.

  • If references are essential in your writing, check out Bookends for help with collecting, annotating, curating, and citing published information.

  • DEVONthink Pro Office is a superb tool for storing notes and research materials, and it’s a vital part of Joe Kissell’s paperless office strategy.

  • Build precise searches and find your files faster with HoudahSpot.

  • For long, complex documents and macro-driven text manipulation, the word processor Nisus Writer Pro is unparalleled — we create all Take Control books in it.

  • When it comes to editing PDFs, Smile’s PDFpen hits the sweet spot between Apple’s free Preview and Adobe’s pricey Acrobat Pro.

  • Literature & Latte’s Scapple helps you record and connect ideas, and Scrivener enables you to turn your research and ideas into a polished manuscript.

  • Create plain text to-do lists with the outlining capabilities of TaskPaper.

  • TextExpander saves you from typing out frequently used words and phrases, and Tonya and I both use it heavily.

  • Eastgate Systems’ Tinderbox helps you organize, plan, and map your thoughts, and Storyspace is the app in which I wrote my senior honors thesis about Hypertextual Fiction at Cornell University way back in 1989.

For more information about each app and to take advantage of the 25 percent discount, start from the main WinterFest page. Make sure you use the WINTERFEST2016 coupon code when ordering.

Thanks for supporting Take Control and these artisanal software developers!

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