Tag: Mac OS X

Seems we are in the bundle season. In case you are not familiar with it, the indie application bundles are one of the great advantages of the Mac software ecosystem. You can frequently purchase a bundle of great applications at 80% and 90% discount regarding their normal resale price. Some of these applications are live savers and others are just great productivity enhancers.

You can find an application bundle from the macupdate website at www.mupromo.com, a great bundle at BundleHunt and apparently another one seems to go live somewhere in the next days at Maclegion.com. Keep checking their website or subscribe their twitter account

Macupdate

The Macupdate bundle has Data Rescue 3 of which i already wrote here. In short, it’s a great data rescue app and it saved my royal bacon when no other application seemed that could do it. So if you need a data rescue app or want to have one just in case, now is your chance, as even if you bought the full bundle you would already saved 50% of the normal resale price.

I can’t vouch that enthusiastically on the other apps though. Roxio Toast 11 it’s a waste of money as optical storage is going the way of the Dodo and in case you need it you can either use the Disk Utility that comes with your Mac or simply use the free alternatives Burn or LiquidCd. (( Both have been slow on development lately but i’m guessing this has to do with previous mentioned Optical Storage Extinction Phenomena. ))

The other apps are just meh… For Concealer for example, you can either just do the same using a Disk Utility encrypted sparse-bundle image (( which i do for example to store receipts, serial numbers and other info)) or it’s already done naturally by the Mac OS Keychain. And if you purchased another Mac application bundles in the recent past you probably have some equivalent of most of the other apps.

The only one that stands in the crowd is Printopia, which allows for iOS devices to use any printers available in the house. Although i have a license for it, i lack any experience with it (( i keep waiting for a payola iPhone from Apple PR department but it never seems to find my way…)) but the general feedback on it seems to be rather good.

BundleHunt

A much more atractive bundle seems to be BundleHunt. (( this is an affiliate link. If you purchase a bundle, part of it will end helping to pay this website hosting costs. It wont make say anything i don’t agree with though. The hosting costs aren’t that high… )) From it i already have Launchbar and WriteRoom. And i love both of them.

Writeroom is very easy to explain. It turns your computer in a two color retro screen for distraction free writing. If you need to do serious writing and everything around you is distracting, Writeroom is the answer. My mac instantly turns in a green on black screen with a blinking cursor; and it’s Heaven!

Launchbar however is more complicated. It’s a launcher, in the same way as Quicksilver or Alfred. But at the same time is much much more… The interface could use some improvements, but basically you would could do everything that you would usually do on you Mac on/by it; simply by using the keyboard which is faster and less error prone than the mouse. Launch an app; open files; send them to the Mail app or a contact on your address book; open a website; search in google; send any data, either text, files or clipboard content to any other app; open most apps recent documents; browse your disk (and see the invisible folders if you want); and much much more… I admit, it took me a couple of months until i understood the potential of the app. And a couple of web tutorials to realize it. But if you have the chance to purchase it, go for it.

From the other apps Colorschemer seems great for any web or document design. Matching colors, and the family of colors that you can use in a document without it appearing a garish rainbow from hell is a strong plus on your presentation skills. In fairness though you can get a similar function at colorschemedesigner.com but i assume the native app probably has more content and functionalities. Haven’t tried it yet. Divvy is a usual on other websites recommendations. Hype is a fairly new HTML5 web design app but it has garnished very good reviews.

There’s more apps on the bundle but you should check it out for yourself as they fall out of my natural software usage and so, I can’t really assess their usefulness. Personally, what would interest me in the bundle would be the 3 ThemeTrust WordPress themes of my choosing for a redesign of other of my web projects as i already have some of the other applications.

But this bundle seems a good one so evaluate if the software on it has any interest for you. You probably won’t have the chance to buy it this cheap so soon.

Keep checking those bundles

You can regularly find the current Mac bundles at Squidoo and i recommend you keep it in your bookmarks and check it monthly. Sometimes you can get great value for 2 or 3 apps that you already wanted but weren’t ready to pay full price for them.

The nice folks at MacLegionBundle are providing a great bundle of applications for the mac. I’m not usually a big fan of paid bundles as they never seem to get more than one application that i might want, and usually for just one is cheaper to buy it isolated. In fact, the only “bundle” i ever adquired was one of the free macheist nano bundles. But this specific bundle seems to hit the jackpot and provide a bunch of really great applications at a really great price — total cost is 49,99$ or, for europeans, roughly ~34€.

About the apps, some i had heard of before, as Forklift ( a nice FTP app that doubles as Finder replacement ) or Screenflow, which i read about in some newsite and thought that would make a really cool way to do the “newbie videos” i want to do here at the maccouch. For Launchbar i’ve heard several compliments by Ben Brooks at the BrooksReview, a blogger i usually read. I haven’t tried it as i wasn’t ready to shell out the usual price for it as i use AlfredApp, a free simple launcher. But all together, these small 3 apps already were under my eyesight for a while and i used to check their websites from time to time, looking for a promotion. If not only for these 3 i already thought this macbundle would be interesting.

But then another application catches my eye. Data Rescue 3. And now i’m interested. You see, about 2 months ago, i had a problem with an external drive, the one where i had my old music collection. Really old eclectic mp3 collection, accumulated musical knowledge from the last 10 to 12 years. Stuff from when Napster and Kazaa were roaming the earth alone to my first very own “ripped” mp3 from household cds and audio tapes. Even my very first mp3 files ever, brought by a friend through the faithful sneaker net.

It was a messy folder structure, completely disorganised, full of low quality mp3 and stuff that i had heard once and forgot after. But it was my music! And i missed it! Very. You only realise how much your digital data is part of your identity when you keep remembering strange music you want to hear, or moments that happened with those background tunes and you simply cannot hear it again, because the music files are missing in the “bad disk structure” void.

I don’t specifically know what happened. I just remembering getting an error about bad disk information, allowing the disk utility to try to correct it (big mistake…) not even checking what it was because i was busy with something else, and suddenly it happened. I couldn’t get to my data. It was still there i knew. Disk Utility just tried to fix something in the disk main journal, it didn’t take that much time, the data was surely still  there but i simply wasn’t able to get to it.

During the las two months i tried a couple of solutions or free programs i found on the web, when i had the time. With no luck. I constantly tried to repair the disk structure, i spent hours leaving the programs doing deep scans to the data, i went trough endless file name and possible recovery options. No chance. And to be perfectly honest i was starting to despair. But suddenly here comes Data Rescue 3. Another data rescue software i never heard of. But it comes on this nice bundle. Should it be the reason i would buy it?

Download the trial, start it up, perform a initial scan. Bingo! Jackpot! Eureka! My data structure is there. I can see the folders as i remembered them, the endless and confusing folder structure. All of the mp3 files inside of them. Some lost WMA files from when i tried Windows Media Player in the early 2000’s. The old university group songs. Ah… Heaven! And apparently, in less than 20 minutes from start to now, Data Rescue 3 could help me get this back again. Tried it with a single mp3 file. Done. Got it back! People of LostDataLand, this is the answer to your prayers.

You then add to these 4 great apps the Contactizer Pro which appears to be the lost personal information and task management i was looking for, you have a really compelling bundle right here. During the next days, i will try to try out most apps in this bundle, check them out and see if they fit my needs or use patterns. I’ll write my thoughts about them here, so keep reading.

Undoubtedly, I’m so getting this bundle.