Keycue runs in the background on your computer and allows you to call it with the click of a button. You can view all the menu shortcuts from the current application in it’s beautiful interface, and learn the command keys for these shortcuts. It is perfect for a new Mac user, or if you are trying to learn a new application like Final Cut or Xcode.

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Ergonis, the makers of Keycue, have generously offered 3 licenses of KeyCue to giveaway on the blog. All you have to do is leave a comment with one feature that you would like to see in Keycue in the future. The giveaway will end May 14th, and the winner will be announced shortly after. If you don't win a license of KeyCue in our giveaway, you can buy one for about $31.

For more giveaways and video reviews like this, subscribe to the MacApper Podcast in iTunes and the MacApper RSS feed.

Without further ado, the winners of Photonic are: Henry Yue, kenneth, E.T. Cook, Jens Poder, rmaspero, Maarten, Ryan Sandberg, Joebaynham, Oyvind, Reggie

Congratulations to all of you! You will be receiving an email with your licenses shortly.

Thanks again to everyone who participated, and be sure to stay tuned to the MacApper RSS feed for more giveaways like this.

Photonic 1.0 was just released, and allows you to browse Flickr photos fullscreen from your desktop. It’s fast, beautiful, and clean. It caches photos on your computer, and allows you to filter and search through photos. You can add favourites, send FlickrMail to people, or view your contacts photos. Watch some of the major features of Photonic in action in this video review.

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Barton Springs Software, the makers of Photonic, have generously offered 10 licenses of Photonic to giveaway on the blog. All you have to do is leave a comment with one feature that you would like to see in Photonic in the future. The giveaway will end March 17th, and the winner will be announced shortly after. If you don’t win a licenses of Photonic in our giveaway, you can buy one for $20 until March 15th.

For more giveaways and video reviews like this, subscribe to the MacApper Podcast in iTunes and the MacApper RSS feed.

Without further ado, the winner of ScreenFlow is Bill W. Congratulations! You will be receiving an email with instructions shortly.

Be sure to download the trial version of ScreenFlow and purchase a license for $99 if you find it useful. Stay tuned to the MacApper RSS Feed for more giveaways or subscribe to the MacApper Podcast to see more video reviews.

We had an overwhelming response and we want to thank everyone that participated in the giveaway. The winners of the 2 licenses are Alan B. and Gwen. Congratulations! You will be receiving an email with instructions shortly.

Be sure to download the trial version of Opacity and purchase a license if you find it useful. Stay tuned to the MacApper RSS Feed for more giveaways or subscribe to the MacApper Podcast to see more video reviews.

Also, a big thanks to all who participated in the giveaway. The winners of the four licenses are: Jason, Rusty, and Gwen. Congratulations! You guys will be receiving an email with instructions shortly.

Be sure to download the trial version of Pomoto, and pay for it if you find it useful. Stay tuned to the MacApper RSS Feed for more giveaways, or subscribe to the MacApper Podcast to see more video reviews.

Not until ScreenFlow. ScreenFlow from Vara Software takes screencasting software to the next level. With a beautiful and simple interface, ScreenFlow uses all of Leopard’s Core Animation features to the max, providing an environment for you to capture, edit, and output your screencasts with ease.

Want to add an animation? Just click a button and make your changes. No confusing waveform or curves to adjust. And even when dealing with the most CPU-demanding effects, ScreenFlow handles it with ease. No need to render your clip when editing. No need for dropped frames. ScreenFlow truly redefines what good screencasting software is. For a look at some of the things that make ScreenFlow revolutionary, check out this video review made entirely using ScreenFlow.

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Vara Software, the makers of ScreenFlow, have generously given us one license of ScreenFlow to giveaway on the blog. All you have to do is leave a comment with one feature you would like to see added to ScreenFlow, and you will automatically be entered into the random giveaway. The giveaway will end on March 1st, and the winner will be announced shortly after. If you don't win a copy of ScreenFlow in our giveaway, you can pick up your own license for $99 USD from their website.

For more giveaways and video reviews like this, subscribe to the MacApper podcast in iTunes and the MacApper RSS feed.

Opacity has a very simple interface on the surface, but under the hood you are able to apply tons of filters, create different resolutions, build different factories, and even apply different variables such as color and boolean. And if you are looking to preview your graphics, you can see live previews of how they will look in the dock, menu bar, or even the web. For a full first look at the power beneath the interface of this application, watch the following video review.

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Like Thought, the makers of Opacity, have generously given us two licenses of Opacity to giveaway on the blog. All you have to do is leave a comment with one way you will use Opacity, and you will automatically be entered into the random giveaway. If you don't win a copy of Opacity in our giveaway, you can pick up your own license for $89 USD.

The giveaway will end on February 29th at 12:00AM EST, so be sure to get your submission in early. For more MacApper video reviews, subscribe to the MacApper podcast in iTunes, or to the MacApper RSS feed.

Pick an album, choose a theme, and click publish; your album will be online in a couple of minutes. Then you can share your pictures with the world, with a fully featured slideshow and thumbnail views.

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The developers of Pomoto have given us us 3 one-year subscriptions to the Pomoto service to giveaway to our readers. All you have to do to enter in the random contest is leave a comment with one way that you would use Pomoto in your everyday life. The contest will end on February 27th, 2008.

Be sure to subscribe to the MacApper RSS feed so you never miss any of our regular giveaways.

First a big thanks to the nice guys over at Ambient Design for giving us 4 licenses of ArtRage to give away. We had a really huge response to this one so also thanks to all who participated.

The winners of the four licenses are: Mark, Dave, Kim, and Nasim. Congratulations! You guys will be receiving an email with instructions shortly.

Be sure to download the free version of ArtRage, and pay for it if you need the additional features. Stay tuned to the MacApper RSS Feed for more giveaways, or subscribe to the MacApper Podcast to see more video reviews.

We got a nice response from you all so first of all thanks to everyone who participated in the giveaway. Unfortunately I can only pick 3 winners, so without any more ballyhoo, the winners of the licenses of PopChar are…

MJ Valente, PJ, and ErichD.

Congratulations! I have emailed the guys at Ergonis your details, and I expect they will be getting back to you shortly. Remember to stay subscribed to MacApper for more great Mac software giveaways.

It is just too hard to find an application that accurately makes digital painting as easy as painting in real life. That is, until I found ArtRage.

ArtRage 2 is an amazing application that allows you to draw, paint, and write on your photos in such a natural and accurate way, that you feel like you are drawing on paper. On one hand is ArtRage’s creative side, where you can mix and blend colours just like real paint, while on the other hand is the power and simplicity under the hood, which allows the import and export of layered Photoshop documents, as well as stencils and tracing tools.

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ArtRage is full of amazing features, but at the same time has an intuitive, organized interface, and allows you to produce truly stunning imagery. Thanks to the guys over at Ambient Design we are able to giveaway 4 licenses of ArtRage 2. All you have to do is leave a comment with one way you will use ArtRage, and you will automatically be entered into the random giveaway. If you don’t win a copy of ArtRage in our giveaway, you can pick up your own license for $25 USD.

The giveaway will end February 2nd, 2008, at 5pm EST, so be sure to get your submission in fast. Get more MacApper videos like this by subscribing to our podcast in iTunes.

PopChar strives to get to your recently used characters with ease, and find specific ones you are looking for all in a simply beautiful interface. It’s really quite unique. In this video I will show you how I use PopChar, and if you can answer the question after the jump, you will all have a chance to win one of 3 licenses generously donated by the guys at Ergonis.

First take a look at the video.

Answer one or both of the following questions to be entered for a chance to win a license of PopChar:

How could/does PopChar fit into your daily work-flow?

or…

What feature of change would make PopChar more useful?

Thanks again to Christoph at Ergonis for supplying the licenses for the giveaway. The contest closes January 30th at midnight EST, and the winners will be announced shortly after that time. PopChar is available from Ergonis for $29.99.

Get more cool videos like this by subscribing to our podcast feed or adding it in iTunes.

Video
Looking for video coverage of Macworld is not going to be easy. Very few sites can handle the bandwidth and the load of streaming video from the keynote. However, this year, Cunning.tv, a new Internet tech channel that I helped create, will be getting video of Steve Jobs live out of the keynote. Be sure to arrive to the website early on though, because the video requires a lot of bandwidth, and may be only accessible to a limited number of people. If you are not going to be at your computer during the keynote, you can have live updates of all the cool products Steve launches sent directly to your phone via SMS. Subscribe to Cunning.tv’s twitter feed for live SMS updates of all of the new Apple goodness.

Pictures
If you want to feel the joy of clicking refresh multiple times, while looking at high-quality images of his Steveness and the new Apple swag, Engadget’s Macworld 2008 page is the place to go. They have, undoubtedly, the best photos each year. Here, you will find a series of bloggers who are committed to writing up articles as fast as the products are being released. If you only go one place to check what’s happened at Macworld, Engadget is the place with the most coverage.

Text
If you are the old-fashioned type, and just want plain old text, Macrumors Live is the place to go. They are always updating the facts as soon as they are announced, and even have an auto-refresh system in place, so you don’t have to constantly site there hitting F5 or Cmd-R. Macrumors also has a twitter feed to subscribe to for announcements if you are on a cell phone. While you won’t be getting an images on Macrumors, they update much faster, and get the facts to you faster.

This year’s Macworld is sure to be packed with new Apple products, and Cunning.tv, Engadget, and Macrumors Live are the best, and fastest way to get that information. After the keynote is over, you can, of course, watch Apple’s recording over at their dedicated Apple Events page. Happy Macworld to everyone!

The kind folks at PotionFactory have generously given us two licenses of Tangerine! to give away. The two lucky winners of Tangerine! are: Tim Stringer and Cat.

Your licenses will be arriving shortly. Enjoy your software, and be sure to stay tuned to the MacApper RSS feed for any future giveaways.

The good people at SmileOnMyMac have generously given us two licenses of TextExpander to give away to two lucky readers. Thanks to everyone for the great responses (you made the developer smile).

But there are only two giveaway winners, so without further ado, the winners are: Bomar, and E.T. Cook.

Your licenses will be arriving shortly. Enjoy the software, and be sure to stay tuned to the MacApper RSS feed for any future giveaways.

Tangerine works by integrating with iTunes. When you first launch Tangerine! you can see all of the songs in the iTunes Library as well as all your playlists along the side. Clicking the little orange button in the lower right will begin analysis of your songs. The analyzing is done fairly quickly (it took about 5 minutes for 1000 songs on a Core 2 Duo MBP) and calculates the BPM (beats per minutes) and beat intensity of each song in your library. The real fun begins, however, when all your songs are analyzed and you are ready to make a new playlist.

When you are ready to create a new intelligent playlist, just click the plus button and the playlist generation window will come up. You have the ability here to set the length of your playlist and a range of beats per minute and beat intensity of songs selected as well as a generation pattern. The generation pattern determines how the songs are ordered in the playlist. As you can see in my playlist, I have 293 songs that match my requirements.

Once you generate your playlist Tangerine! shows you all of the songs and you can easily customize the playlist by deleting or adding songs. Once you find the perfect playlist a click of the save button will save the playlist in iTunes ready to be synced with your iPod or iPhone. You can also create playlist generation presets and you can even save all of Tangerine!’s BPM analysis to iTunes.

Tangerine! is a great way to create intelligent playlists. It is amazing how a computer can make a playlist with the perfect mix just by analyzing the songs’ BPM and beat intensity. For anyone with a large music library, Tangerine! is a must have. It even works with iTunes DRMed music!. Tangerine! is shareware, and can be purchased from Potion Factory for $24.95.

Potion Factory, the developers of Tangerine!, have generously offered 2 licenses of Tangerine! to giveaway to our readers. In order to enter this giveaway, you must comment on this post with an idea of a playlist that you can make in Tangerine!. Alternately you can add some suggestions on what features you would like to see with the next version of Tangerine!. Be sure to stay tuned for more giveaways as well as announcements of the winners.

The giveaway will end at midnight EST on January 1st, with the winners being announced shortly after that. Good luck!

The good people at Noodlesoft have generously given us three licenses of Hazel to give away to the readers.

The three lucky winners of Hazel are: Jim, Dan, and David.

Your licenses will be arriving shortly, but please be patient as I’m sure the developers are busy around the Christmas season. Enjoy the software, and be sure to stay tuned to the MacApper RSS feed for any future giveaways

The nice folks over at ThinkMac have given us three licenses to giveaway to our readers. So without further ado, the winners of InstantGallery, in no particular order are:

JK, Colby G, and Luis Martins. Congrats guys! Be sure to subscribe to our feed so you don’t miss any of our regular giveaways.

While there are many applications on the Mac that can do things like this, TextExpander is the most advanced, allowing you to set the cursor and clipboard as well as use other variables. Let me show you how powerful TextExpander can be in your workflow.

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SmileOnMyMac, the developers of TextExpander, have generously offered 2 licenses of TextExpander to giveaway to our readers. In order to enter this giveaway, you must comment on this post with 3 of the most repetitve phrases that you use every day. Make us laugh. Alternately you can add some suggestions on what features you would like to see with TextExpander. If you don’t win a license, and see that TextExpander could be useful to you, you can purchase one for US $29.95 from their store.

The giveaway will end at midnight EST on Saturday, December 22th, with the winners being announced shortly after that. Good luck!

In the following video I will go over the basic power of Hazel in a standard workflow, along with some tips on how I use the software to keep my files organized, and my Mac clean of clutter.

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NoodleSoft, the developers of Hazel, have generously offered 3 licenses of Hazel to giveaway to our readers. In order to enter the random giveaway, you must comment on this post with 1 possible way that you can use Hazel to organize your digital life.

The giveaway will end at midnight EST on December 20th, with the winners being announced shortly after that. Good luck! Be sure to subscribe to MacApper for more great giveaways!

Check out how easy it is to set your backup duration in this video review.

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TimeMachineScheduler is a Universal binary distributed as freeware by Stefan Klieme.

Now if I had .Mac, I could use the built-in Web Gallery feature to publish a gallery, but for those who do not want to dish out the money for .Mac, InstantGallery might just be the easiest way to create, customize, and publish beautiful web galleries as quickly as possible.

InstantGallery has a very simple and beautiful interface that shows you just the information you need. There is no need to read manuals or how-tos to understand how InstantGallery works. While the interface is simple, InstantGallery also provides you with a variety of options and customizations that can tweak your gallery to your desire. From the first time you open the application to the time you publish your gallery, InstantGallery’s interface is flawless, and very well-thought out.

To begin making your web gallery all you have to do is drag your desired photos into InstantGallery. You are prompted for the name of your gallery and then the InstantGallery window expands to show you your gallery. At this point you are just a click away from the Publish Gallery button and your gallery is done. Pretty simple. Just drag-and-drop, name, and publish. While the galleries don’t look quite as good as the .Mac Web Galleries, the ease-of-use is certainly comparable. But of course, the features of InstantGallery do not stop there. It also allows you to customize and apply advanced features to your gallery that will make it unique and perfectly suited to your liking.

Once you choose the photos for your gallery, they will appear in a default gallery design that looks very much like the popular Flickr photo-sharing site. In fact, the default theme is called “Flickery”. You can easily add or remove photos from your gallery with the plus and minus buttons. The bottom of the window will also tell you the gallery size and the number of photos in the gallery. There is also a very useful bar along the bottom that gives you access to all the main features of InstantGallery. When on a specific picture page you can edit the information about a picture such as the name, tags, and a description. You can also rotate images and apply basic effects such as drop shadows, reflections, and borders. RSS photocasts can be produced with just the click of a button and you can also preview your gallery in different web browsers to see what it will look like when published.

InstantGallery also uses a very handy Options palette that functions much like the Inspector in Apple applications. The options palette controls the features of three main parts of the web gallery–general, the thumbnails, and search. The General tab is where you can change your web gallery to any of the 15 themes provided within Instant Gallery as well as use a custom CSS file to make the web gallery blend in to your website. You can also choose what information you want to display with your photos such as names, captions, and image count. The thumbnail options allow you to choose the size of the thumbnails as well as background color, borders, and shadows. Finally, the search pane allows you to enable searching which is disabled by default as well as the ability to show a tag cloud which is helpful for galleries with lots of pictures.

InstantGallery has a beautiful, fluid interface and produces great-looking web galleries in no time at all. If you don’t have .Mac, it is the cheapest and easiest way to produce web galleries with a couple clicks. It is also full of high end features that will appeal to pros such as the ability to add watermarks and tags to photos. For $25, it is a great investment for any photographer that wants to quickly make and publish a gallery for their website.

ThinkMac, the developers of InstantGallery, have generously offered 3 licenses of InstantGallery to giveaway to our readers. In order to enter the random giveaway, you must comment on this post with suggestions for the developer or features you would like to see in InstantGallery.

The giveaway will end at midnight EST on Wednesday, December 19th, with the winners being announced shortly after that. Good luck!

The folks over at Mamooba have given us ten licenses to giveaway, so your chances of winning were actualy about 1 in 7 this time around. Not too bad! So without further ado, hit the jump to see if you are one of the lucky winners…

1. Jonnyspaceboy
2. Gand
3. Ty
4. Sherry W
5. Maco Hui
6. Danny Tang
7. Mark
8. Alex P
9. Jort
10. Jeremy

Congratulations on winning TrackTime and much thanks again to the guys at Mamooba. Your licenses will be emailed to you shortly. Be sure to subscribe to MacApper for future giveaways!

If you want to get the most out of iChat, Chax is the plugin for you.

MarsEdit 2 is miles ahead of its inaugural release. Most of the bugs found in the previous version are now gone, and now it is more powerful, and easier to use than ever. Still, you may say, what is the benefit of using a desktop client for blogging, when you can use free, online alternatives? What does MarsEdit offer that no other online service offers?

MarsEdit makes it remarkably easy to manage posts and edits for multiple blogs. Before I heard about MarsEdit, I would have all my blogs in Safari’s Bookmarks Bar, and I would have to click each one and log in, in order to see if there were any new posts written, or if I wanted to edit something. Now, I am just a click away from MarsEdit, where I can check and edit all of my blogs at once. MarsEdit downloads the text and images very quickly, so that you can even blog and edit posts while you are offline, which is great for a laptop user. As soon as you reconnect to the internet, you can send all of your edits and posts to the internet. But enough of me talking about how great it is. Let me show you how easy it is to use.

One of the most amazing things about Marsedit, is it’s Quick Start window. The first time you open the application, you are prompted to enter in the name of your blog, along with the URL, and MarsEdit will immediately chug away, configuring all the settings for your blog. It will do this automatically as long as your blog is built on one of the more popular blogging platforms. MarsEdit works with WordPress, Blogger, TypePad, Movable Type, LiveJournal, Drupal, Vox, and countless others. After you provide your username and password, MarsEdit is all set up.

The main interface for MarsEdit is simple, and easy-to-use. Your blogs show up on the left, much like mailboxes in Apple Mail, and you can browse through the posts for certain blogs. To see if there are any new posts, all it takes is a simple tap of the Refresh button. You can also manage the posts on your blogs very easily, through a simple click of the Edit, Delete, or New buttons in the toolbar.

The actual editing window of MarsEdit provides all of the features of a standard, web-based blog editor and more. You edit the blog in standard HTML, which requires that you know some HTML basics. Aside from that, however, everything else is simple and intuitive. A click of the Options button presents you with the Categories from the server, in which you can place your post. You can choose which weblog you want to write for from the drop-down menu, and get a full, live preview of your blog post in a separate window. If you have a favorite text editor such as BBEdit or TextMate, MarsEdit integrates with them, and allows you to do your writing in a separate application. MarsEdit works by saving drafts of blogs you are working on locally on the computer, which allows you to edit offline, and only requires you to have an internet connection when you publish your post. MarsEdit also contains a cool Media Unloader that will upload the media to the web, and automatically embed the HTML into your post. The Media Manager can also integrate with your Flickr account.

While MarsEdit does have a beautiful interface, and has some awesome features, I find that the overall UI is too “Window-y”. There are too many windows that open, and need to be seen, and it makes it hard for MarsEdit to be used on Macs with small displays. However, even with this slight user interface flaw, MarsEdit still beats all of the online blogging solutions hands-down. With it’s strong feature-set, ability to manage multiple blogs from one dedicated app, and offline freedom, MarsEdit is an app that is completely worth it’s $29.95 pricetag, and will make any blogger more productive, more creative, and more involved with their blog.

Joon. Joon asked for Automator and Applescript support that can automatically trigger the start of a screen cast. Joon, we will be in touch with you shortly, and thanks again to everyone who participated. Stay tuned for our next giveaway!

TrackTime gives you a visual representation of everything you did during the day. It tracks all the applications you used, what times you used them, and how long you used them for. But it doesn’t stop there. It actually tracks what music you were listening to when you were doing a certain thing. And if you were browsing the web, it would tell you exactly what websites you went too, and how long you were on each site. But most amazing is the way TrackTime is able to display all of this information.

TrackTime shows you a lot of information in very simple ways. The main view is the Time line view that is much like Garageband, but instead, for your entire day. There is a time bar along the top that tells you what time it was when you used each application, so you can easily go to 9:00AM and see what you did at that time. Then there are different tracks. The three main tracks are Applications, Music, and Websites. The Applications track is your main track, and tracks your changes between multiple applications by color coding them. If you click on one of the segments in this track, it will tell you what application you were using at that time, and how long you used it for. You can easily scrub along the timeline to look through your whole day, and see all the applications you used. On the lower right of the window, there is also a zoom slider that allows you to view more or less of the timeline at once.

The next track is the Music, or more appropriately, the Audio track. This is probably one of the most unique features of TrackTime. It will keep track of all the songs and podcasts you play throughout the day. Actually, anything you play from iTunes will be recorded in this track. But what’s even more cool, is that there is a little pie chart next to each song. This will tell you how much of the song you listened to before you skipped to another song, or stopped the music. Looking at this, can visually tell you what songs you like the best, and enjoy listening to.

The final track is for websites, and is only active when you are in a browser. This track will record all of the websites you visit during the day, and at what time you went to these websites. The websites will be color coded as well, so you can easily see if you are spending your whole day on Youtube or Facebook. The rest of the window provides easy access for you to pause or resume the tracking, as well as just pausing or resuming certain tracks.

Now you have all of this information. So what? What are you going to do with it? TrackTime doesn’t just stop at organizing the information – it actually analyzes it for you. All it takes is a click of the “Show Statistics” button.

The statistics view, allows you to see exactly how much time you spent in a certain application each day. You can see the number of times you switched to the application, and the average duration of each “session”. You can take this data, and sort it by time, or the average duration, to see where all your time is going. Most of my time is in Safari, iChat, MarsEdit, Twitterrific and Newsfire (I’m a little embarrassed about the Twitterrific one). This can help me plan out my days, and aim to spend less time chatting, and more time blogging. The statistics view extends for all your tracks as well. You can also view your Music and Websites, to see which artists you listen to the most, and the amount of their songs you listen to before skipping to another song. Finally, you can view which websites you spend the most time on. I guess this can help you set limits, and manage your time more efficiently.

I can go on and on talking about the features of this application. You can schedule tasks, and set date ranges for statistics. You can set privacy settings, and set Growl notifications. TrackTime is a really powerful app that gives you so much information about everything you are doing. However, it not only gives you the information, but helps you manage your time in projects, and look at your day, and plan it out. My only problem with apps like these, are that they run in the background. I hate having processes run in the background, because I fear that they take up too many CPU cycles and RAM. To put it bluntly, I was blown away by how few resources TrackTime uses to gather all this information. I am using a MacBook Pro, so your results may vary, but I found that TrackTime used only 0.4% of my CPU while I was in an application, and only peaking at to 2% for a second when switching between applications. Is it worth it? I think it is. For all the information it gives you, it has almost no effect on the speed of your computer.

TrackTime is a wonderful application that finally answers the question, “Where has the time gone?”, and helps you to organize yourself to be more productive, and hopefully more efficient as you work on your Mac. It’s not for everyone, but if you’re a statistics junky I bet you will really like it.

The guys at Mamooba have very graciously given us 10 licenses of TrackTime to give away. In order to enter the random giveaway, you must comment on this post with suggestions for the developer’s, or features you would like to see in Tracktime. If you can’t handle that we will also except a list of the three applications that you think you use the most on your Mac.

The giveaway will end at midnight EST on Monday, December 11th, with the winners being announced shortly after that. Be sure to subscribe to MacApper to not miss any of our regular giveaways.

The industry is changing. People now find pirating music, movies, and software the norm. Many can’t imagine paying a cent for a piece of software. How is a developer to make money in an industry like this? An industry where torrenting and P2P are so normal that it almost feels right. They can’t go on selling software the same as they have before. There has to be a different way. Sure, buying software in a box works well for Final Cut Studio, Adobe CS3, and iLife. But what about smaller applications like Rapidweaver and TextMate and Delicious Library and Disco? How are they to attract new customers?

Look around you this Christmas season. Look at all the Mac bundles and discounts. They are everywhere you look. On blogs. On websites. In ads. The bundles attract you with a low price (around the $50 range), and give you a bunch of applications. Some that you want, and others you’ve never heard of. But the bundles give the developers exposure, and next time the app gets updated, the customer may pay for an upgrade. It seems to works well for everybody – the consumer and the developer. The consumer gets a bundle of new Mac apps and saves a ton of money, while the developers get their apps into the hands of their customers.

The key to this system is in the way these apps are marketed. Let’s take a look at some of the bundles and discounts that are around this holiday season.

The MacUpdate bundle is new this year, and is comprised of seven applications valuing over $230. You can have all of these apps for $49 – almost an 80% savings. And as more people buy this bundle, even more apps will be unlocked, and included in the bundle for free. The apps aren’t all small apps. The MacUpdate bundle includes ForkLift, RapidWeaver, Xslimmer, PulpMotion, and even XMIND 2008 Pro which retails for $300! However, there are also some apps that you may have never never heard of. After you download them and try them out, you may love them and swear by them, or never use them again. Nonetheless, it give these developers the opportunity to get their apps into your hands, and then let the apps speak for themselves. Better hurry though, the bundle ends December 11th.

MacSanta is not new to the discounted apps scene. They started last year, and were very successful in capturing the Mac community’s attention. The idea behind MacSanta, was to get a bunch of developers together, and give consumers 10%-20% savings on their apps. This way, all the money goes directly to the developers. Each day, they feature different apps that you can buy with a coupon code and save 20% on. They offer a wide variety of apps from many different developers. The deals are only featured for one day however, but if you miss the day, you can still get the apps with a 10% discount until December 24th. Already, I have discovered many new applications that hadn’t heard of by visiting their site every day.

Givegoodfood2yourmac is a very interesting new idea put together by a bunch of European Mac developers at WWDC07. The idea behind it, is that you should ”feed” good apps to your Mac. The website allows you to make a “custom menu” of apps that you want to buy from a list of developers. This is actually one of the only bundles that lets you choose what apps you wish to buy. The more apps you put on your “menu”, the more money you save, as the discount increases. You can save anywhere from 30% to a whopping 70% off your meal, and you get to choose the apps you want. But again, like the other bundles, this will only last for a few more days.

Macheist is really the idea that started this whole movement of offering apps for a discounted price, or even for free, in order to attract mac users to shareware apps. Although it has received a lot of criticism, its success speaks for itself. Last year, they sold over 16 000 bundles generating them over $800 000 in revenue. They were able to pay the developers, donate $200 000 to charity, and still pay themselves. The consumers got a great deal on software, and got a lot of entertainment out of it. To this day, I still buy software from developers that I had first heard of from Macheist. The idea behind Macheist is to have heists and puzzles that the members must accomplish by scavenging the internet. It is challenging and mind-bending, but as a reward for completing the heists, the members get free applications from developers. Why would developers give away free apps? Because they know that their apps are good enough, that the users will love them and come back time and time again to pay for upgrades. As Erica over at TUAW notes, Macheist II has just launched, and will be going on throughout this Christmas season, leading up to the final bundle that will be sold starting January 9th, 2008.

I think the entire Mac development market is changing. It is no longer good enough to make a good app. Developers (except for maybe Panic) must learn to let go a little, and market their apps. Participate in bundles, giveaways, and heists. Plug their apps on websites and blogs. Get their apps into the hands of consumers. I think this year is the beginning of a revolution in the Mac market – both for consumers and developers. Developers are realizing that there is more they can do to promote their apps, and get them into the hands of consumers, while consumers are finally getting used to paying for good quality Mac shareware.

What do you think? Do these bundles and discounts encourage you to buy apps and support developers? Or does it have the opposite effect?

Finally, the good folks at Skype have released an update. Although the update is not complete, they have released a very-stable beta version. The new beta touts complete Leopard compatibility, and new 640 x 480 video resolution on Skype video calls from computer-to-computer. This is a very welcome upgrade, as Skype is now able to compete with iChat in the A/V chat space. There is still no multi-person video, but the quality of Skype video chats have drastically improved.

Although the new Skype is still in beta, it is remarkably stable and drastically better than any other version of Skype on Leopard. There are no more Leopard bugs, and finally Skype fits into the Leopard environment. As for the increased video resolution, it is slightly noticeable, but still far behind iChat on the media front. I would recommend the Skype 2.7 beta to any Skype users using Leopard.