Megabytes

Daring Fireball makes a compelling analysis of the MacHeist sale of independent Mac developer software that I wrote about recently. While the deal was good for purchasers of the software bundle, John Gruber makes the case that the software developers, who were to be celebrated by this promotion, perhaps didn’t get such a good deal.

Ironically, I was using BlogBridge, one of the apps in the bundle, to catch up on blog reading, when I came across this article at Daring Fireball.

Musicovery - a 4-grid matrix: positive - negative, calm - energetic. click in the positive-energtic quadrant and from the database, an appropriate song is selected. You can choose a time-period as well as musical style.

I selected the time period from “before 1950 through 1965, selected Jazz, then clicked right in the middle of positive/negative, a little energetic. Bill Evans’ “What is this Thing Called Love” recording from 1959 began to play. Neat-o!

An additional feature is the groovy looking graphical selection interface. Watch it change colors based on your musical style and ’snake’ all over the browser window. Oh, don’t ecpect me to explain it any better than this. Just go!

The folks at MacHeist have declared this week to be a celebration of independent Mac developers. Their celebration is our good fortune. They have put together a package of 10 applications that between them have received multiple Apple Design Awards, O’Reilly Innovator awards, Macworld Eddy’s, and MacMinute Showtime awards.

If you were to buy these apps separately, you would shell out $288.75. However, this week only (4 days and 22 hours left as I make this post), you can buy them all for $49.00. The 10 apps are:

1. Delicious Library
2. FotoMagico
3. ShapeShifter
4. Devonthink Personal
5. Disco
6. RapidWeaver
7. iClip 4
8. One game by Pangea
9. NewsFire (unlocked when $50k charity is raised)
10. TextMate (unlocked when $100k charity is raised)

What a great idea - promotes the shareware developers, creates visibility for some nifty apps, raises money for charities, AND saves money! Now how cool is that?! Get over there and get yourself a deal.