December 2010 Macintosh Software Bundles

Software bundles have always been a great way of building up a collection of useful applications, and the massively discounted price means you only need a couple of top class apps to make the price a bargain. There are several software bundles available for Macintosh users right now, offering a range of applications for prices between $9.99 and $63. Unfortunately there’s nothing currently available from Macheist or MacUpdate. The bundles are listed here in increasing price, with the second price in brackets a pound/dollar conversion at the current exchange rate (on 6th December 2010).

Macbasket.com – 7 apps for $9.99 (£6.36), ending 9th December 2010:

1. NuKit – Finder productivity enhancer
2. Money³ – Financial Management
3. rooSwitch – profiles for your applications
4. Radium – Internet radio player
5. Healthnut – Diet/health tracker
6. Chronicle 3 – Manage your bills
7. Tracks -Play/browse music from the menubar

MacbundlePro – 7 apps for $19.95 (£12.69), ending 31st December 2010:

1. AirRadar 2 – Wireless network scanner
2. Inpaint – Remove objects from your images
3. MacHider – Hide private data
4. TranslateIt – Language translation
5. ManPower – Man page GUI
6. PacketStream – network monitoring tool
7. DVDsnap 2 – capture screen shots from Apple DVD player

Mac Bundle Box – 12 apps for $29 (£18.45), ending 23rd December 2010:

1. Compartments – Home inventory
2. QuickScale – Batch image resizing
3. Semonto – Web server monitoring for 6 months
4. Radium – Internet radio player
5. iCollage – Image scrapbook
6. AllMyTube – Download/convert FLV video
7. DVD Ripper – Convert DVD’s to other formats
8. PDF Converter – PDF to Word, Excel, PowerPoint, EPUB, Text and HTML
9. Photo Recovery – recover lost, deleted or formatted photos, videos and music files
10. iMedia Converter – DVD ripping and video conversion
11. TinyGrab – Screenshot utility
12. Caboodle – Snippet machine

BundlesForMac – 12 apps for $49.99 (£31.80), ending 15th December 2010:

1. skEdit – Text/html editor
2. Yummy FTP – FTP client
3. MyStuff – home inventory
4. BlogAssist – blog/website editor
5. AlienDestroyer – Secure erase sensitive data
6. Involer – Invoicing app
7. Deliver – File delivery to local and remote destinations
8. ProfCast – Lecture recording app
9. PDF to Word – Document converter
10. iCash – Personal finance
11. PDF to Epub – Document converter
12. GadgetTrak – Laptop theft recovery

MacPromo.com – 10 apps for £39.99 ($63), ending 31st December 2010:

1. TypeIt4Me – Text expander
2. PathFinder 5 – Finder replacement
3. DragThing – document, folder, and application and URL dock
4. Name Mangler 2 – Batch file renamer
5. Personal Antispam 10.6 – Antispam component of Intego Internet Security Barrier
6. MacFreelance 2 – Invoice management
7. Keyboard Maestro 4 – Keyboard macro app
8. Personal Backup – backup component of Intego Internet Security Barrier
9. Folx Pro – Download manager
10. CuteClips 3 – Clipboard history
11. The First 5000 buyers get Star Wars: Empire at War

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Snow Leopard 10.6.1 update released

Two weeks after Snow Leopard went on sale, Apple has released the first system update. 10.6.1. is described as containing ‘general operating system fixes that enhance the stability, compatibility and security of your Mac.’ Available now through Software Update or as a direct download, the 71.47Mb package is recommended for all Macintosh’s running Snow Leopard.

Mac Software Bundles

If you love a cheap bundle of quality software as much as I do there are three offerings available right now, all priced just under $50. First up is TheMacBundles at $49.95, offering the following:

The bonus programs expire over  the next few days so the bundle goes against previous form by getting smaller as time passes, rather than adding software as sales targets are reached. There are no killer apps in this one and it doesn’t offer the same amount of saving as some of the previous Mac Heist or MacUpdate bundles.

The second bundle is MacBundleBox, offering 12 apps for $49. Standouts for me are Freeway Express, iCash and Stomp. The last is a video convertor that looks like it could fill the shoes of the much missed Visualhub. Several of  the included apps sell for $60+ so there’s some fine savings here.

The final package is TheMacSale, with 10 strong apps for $49.99. Standouts for me are Flux, a WYSIWYG web editor with strong CSS support, Iris for photoshop style image editing, and the personnal version of REALbasic for writing software.

I’ve passed on TheMacBundles and bought TheMacSale package. I’m tempted by MacBundleBox so will probably end up buying that as well. The real benefit of these software packages is that after buying them for the past few years I have an app for most things you could want to do with a Mac.

ACDSee Pro for Mac

The ACDSee image viewing software has been around for a long time on Windows, and if I’m not mistaken there was a Mac version several years ago that fizzled out. ACDSee Pro for Mac appears to be a completely new app available now as a free beta download, with Macworld reporting the final version is due in 2010 at $170. The current beta lists the expiry date as February 19th 2010.

Mac Os 10.5.7 released

Apple has today released the latest update to its Mac OSX Leopard operating system. 10.5.7 offers the usual mix of bug fixes and security updates, and is available as an updater for 10.5.6 or a combo updater for any version of 10.5 Leopard.

Many components are updated in this release, including RAW image support, Nvidia graphic updates, Widgets, Finder network searches and printing. Knowledge base article HT3397 covers the update in greater depth. And for anyone wanting the last word in detail, Macworld has an article that lists just about everything updated.

My advice for anyone applying the update (hackintosh or macintosh) is make a backup before attempting. We all make regular backups though, don’t we? I’ve just had a 120Gb hard drive die that was fortunately used exlusively for playing games on Windows XP, but at just over three years old and light use it was certainly not an expected failure.

10.5.6 on Hackintosh

The latest update to Mac OS Leopard is now out, and 10.5.6 looks so far to be working fine on my hackintosh. I installed Leopard using the Chameleon/Boot132 method a while back which allows the use of Software Update for OS upgrades. This time around the update installed just as it would on any other Mac, a couple of restarts and the system was up and running again. Apple have an article listing all the fixes and changes for anyone interested.

As usual, I strongly recommend making a backup before the upgrade, especially for hackintosh users. SuperDuper has been suffering a problem recently on my system so I’m back to using the excellent (and free) Carbon Copy Cloner.

UPDATE While the install was painless the results since have been less than smooth. I expected to copy some kext’s from my backup to get audio and the basics (reboot, sleep etc) working, but even with these the hackintosh would not sleep correctly. Every time I tried waking from sleep the system rebooted, so for now it’s back to to 10.5.5 using Carbon Copy Cloner to restore from the backup.

The Macintosh Virus issue

Or should I say, the lack of Macintosh Virus issue. There’s still no serious threat in the wild, and anti-virus software vendors still warn we should be running anti-virus software on our Mac’s just incase there is a threat in the future. Macworld published an article this week looking at the recurring question, and concluded you don’t need anti-virus software on a Mac if you follow good practices.

I must confess that I am currently using VirusBarrier X5, as it was part of the current MacUpdate bundle. There was nothing wrong with Clamxav, but since I had the software I thought I might as well give it a try, if only to scan downloads destined for a Windows virtual machine. It works well, doesn’t appear to slow the computer down and has some neat features to speed up scanning. Would I pay for another years updates after this subscription expires? Probably not with the current lack of threats, but that may change as Mac’s continue to become more popular.

Mac VM’s – November 2008 Part 1

It’s been a while since I took a look at three Virtual Machine packages for the Macintosh, and all three have moved on from the previous versions. Parallels has recently seen a step to version 4, VMware Fusion is now on version 2 and so is Virtualbox. With the release of Parallels came claims of big speed improvements so it’s time to try all three again and see if one has edged ahead of the pack.

To start I decided to try a simple task. Most users  will likely be installing Windows (Vista was used here) in their VM, so the first tests are how long does it take, how many steps are involved and how good are the default options chosen for you.

Mac VM software updates

Two updates to report today in the Macintosh VM market. First, VMware Fusion 2.0 sees the release of RC1. Lots of bug fixes in the update, as well as the addition of McAfee VirusScan Plus for Windows. I tried this yesterday and found it easy to install from a menubar option. This is a sensible addition given the risks attached to accessing the internet on an unprotected Windows machine. Other improvements include Spanish and Italian language support, Unity 2 and multiple snapshots. Full details at the Vmware web site.

The other update is Virtualbox, which has today seen the release of version 2. Again, a lot of updates which are listed at the Virtualbox web site. I haven’t had a chance to try this yet, so it’s next on the install list. It’s nice to see the free option progressing well along with the comercial offerings, and I’m wondering how long it will be before Parallels has a big announcent.

Security Update 2008-005 released

The latest Apple security update is now avaliable, and has installed fine on my hackintosh. There’s no major changes with this, and the kernel is still version 9.4. As usual be sure to make a backup before installing. For more information on what security fixes are included visit http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2647