MacHeist Nanobundle 2

Well, Macheist has come and gone again, and now I have a couple of gigabytes of new software (mostly Monkey Island) on my notebook’s hard drive. The usual rule with Macheist (and similar deals) is that you only buy it if there’s a product you’d cheerfully pay the fee for in the bundle, and on that basis this bundle was a great deal for me: I’m a sucker for Monkey Island (even though I never really cared for the threequel). I’m also glad to see Telltale Games shipping Mac products (I hope they port the Sam & Max titles: I will cheerfully pay retail for any Sam & Max title until I become jaded, but I’ll probably buy the Wii version otherwise…).

I did end up installing all of the other programs, although some got uninstalled pretty darn quickly.

MacJournal is a really huge program for keeping a journal. I have a cloud-based solution for doing this called WordPress and — unlike MacJournal — it is accessible from anywhere (including my iPhone), it’s free (and open source), it lets me make some journal entries public while keeping others private, has a comment system, does version control, automatically backs up to the cloud, and doesn’t take up a metric buttload of hard disk space. (Uninstalled)

As a side note, MacJournal is a fine example of an attractive, functional, easy-to-use useless piece of software the like of which does not exist for Windows. If you found a niche product like this for Windows it would be a horrible piece of crap. MacJournal is quite lovely — it’s just not useful to me. All of the pieces of software in the Macheist bundle that I’ve installed and used have been very polished, stable products. It’s a testament to the quality of Apple’s indie software ecology, and I think it must be quite terrifying for Microsoft which cannot itself produce such polished products let alone attract third parties to do so.

Ripit is a program that does one thing (rip DVDs to hard disk) and does it very, very well. I have not quite reached the point of ripping my entire DVD library but when I do, I’ll be glad I got a license for this. (Installed but not used, yet.)

Clips is an intriguing little hack that monitors you clipboard and then automatically keeps the last N clipboards around for use at the touch of a key. I think this is a great idea and pretty well-implemented, but it just never occurs to me to use it. I’m running it though and maybe, one day, I’ll actually use it. It’s a lot like multiple-undo, I think — one day you’ll realize you (a) use it all the time and (b) get enormously annoyed by a program that doesn’t have it. (Installed, running, but not used yet.)

CoverScout is an intriguing iTunes add-on. I haven’t installed it yet but I have high hopes that it will actually help sort out my iTunes cover art situation (my wife and I ripped our entire CD collection two house moves ago, and many of the tracks have very odd cover art having been incorrectly identified by iTunes at some point. As I understand it, CoverScout’s sole purpose in life is to fix this kind of thing, so I’m hoping it’s good at it. (Not yet installed.)

Flow I’ve already discussed. I think I may be in love. At minimum, Flow makes Little Snapper irrelevant by doing what Little Snapper does for screenshots for — basically — everything. I still use Transmit without thinking, though. (Installed, used, kept.)

Rapidweaver is a program I’ve considered and rejected in the past. It’s a very similar program to Sandvox (which I also own and don’t use), perhaps a little better put together and with generally more attractive (and, as far as I can tell, flexible) themes. Unlike Sandvox, it seems to have built up a fairly solid third-party plugin ecology and might actually be a useful product for someone looking for a template-based web development tool. More attractive and flexible than Sandvox, produces much lighter weight pages than iWeb (although also much less flexible graphically). Rapidweaver has also been sitting at version 4.3.1 for a rather long time (it used to be one of those programs that would get revved every few weeks) — perhaps the developers are losing interest. (Installed, messed around with, probably will be uninstalled.)

Tweetie is one of those non-solutions to non-problems. Indeed, since it’s a desktop Twitter client it’s something of a meta-non-solution to a meta-non-problem. I installed it and played with it for a few minutes — the fact that it was not especially obvious how to make a new tweet was a very discouraging sign (I did figure it out…). But at least it’s small. (Installed, used, kept… for some reason. Oh, that’s right, it’s 2MB.)

The Macheist folks also snuck in three bonus programs for promoting them via Twitter (further alienating me from Twitter). One of the programs — Tracks (installed, used, kept) — is a very well thought out iTunes remote (in particular it offers Spotlight-like access to your iTunes library from a menubar widget) but the other two — Airburst Extreme (Uninstalled) and Burning Monkey Solitaire (Not downloaded) — are wastes of hard disk space as far as I’m concerned.