BundleHunt Spring Bundle

It's been a great week for Mac applications! On Monday MacLegion announced their summer software bundle and today the team over at BundleHunt are offering an equally impressive deal.

You can get seven great Mac applications at the insanely low price of just £32! The bundle includes: 

• RapidWeaver 5 - Web Design
• MotionComposer - Interactive Animations
• FX Photo Studio Pro - Photo Effects
• Fantastical - Calendar
• ExpanDrive - Remote Storage Access
• KeyCue - Keyboard Shortcuts
• IconBox 2 - Icon Organizer / Editor 

I'm particularly excited about this bundle as it includes two of my long time favourite Mac applications.

Firstly, the critically acclaimed RapidWeaver, which is a web design application built specifically for the Mac. With its simple, elegant user interface and powerful integration with OS X, it's the perfect companion for anyone looking to create beautiful websites. It's also one of the few applications that successfully manages to blend simplicity and "power user" features, by offering a WYSIWYG editor, as well as full access to code, including advance features such as snippets, site maps and smart publishing (FTP, SFTP, etc).

AJCShow has put together a great video overview (shown below) that highlights the incredible results you can achieve with RapidWeaver in just a few minutes.

RapidWeaver is normally £54.99 from the Mac App Store, so at £32 it this is a bargain!

The second application is IconBox, which is a slightly unusual, but very cool Mac application. The best way to describe IconBox is "it's like iPhoto for your icons".

IconBox allows you to quickly see all of the icons stored on your Mac, enabling you to customise them with a single click. I'm not normally a fan of customising OS X, however IconBox is so well integrated and has so many great options available, it is difficult not to add a few personal touches. If you don't believe me, I recommend you check out IconPaper, who have an amazing collection of icon and dock packs that are available for free and work seamlessly with IconBox.

Overall this is a great software bundle and well worth the £32 asking price (normally worth £250+). Therefore I suggest you head over to the BundleHunt Spring Bundle website right now and grab this great deal while you still can.

MacLegion Spring Bundle

MacLegion have just announced their latest application bundle for the Mac.

Since the rise of the Mac App Store, I have seen less interest in application bundles, however in my opinion they are still worth a look, especially if you were already planning on buying one of the included applications. For example, MoneyWell (a popular personal finance application) is currently selling on the App Store for £34.99, however as part of this bundle you can get this application and nine others for just £31. That sounds like a bargain to me!

Head over to MacLegion for more information (you have 14 days and counting).

Welcome to the Mac App Store

As expected, Apple are set to launch the highly anticipated Mac App Store tomorrow for Mac OS X Snow Leopard.

In anticipation of the launch Realmac Software, creators of the popular Mac OS X applications RapidWeaver and LittleSnapper, have released a statement on their blog explaining their new prices and software availability.

The good news is that they plan to have RapidWeaver ($39.99), LittleSnapper ($24.99) and Courier ($4.99) available in the App Store on day one, so at least we can expect to see some "Triple A" applications at launch. They also revealed that Courier will become an App Store exclusive app, at the new lower price (all previous customers will receive a refund, see the Realmac blog for more details).

Unfortunately there is some bad news. Due to Apple's Mac App Store restrictions there is no way for you to migrate your existing applications over to the versions sold in the Mac App Store. Therefore you are forced to re-purchase the application when you next upgrade. This isn't a limitation of Realmac Software and will be the case with all applications. As a result it will still be a quite some time before all my applications are managed through the Mac App Store.

All signs are pointing towards a 09:00 launch at the Apple headquarters in Cupertino, meaning it should hopefully appear as a "Software Update" at around 17:00 UK.

Update on Thursday, January 6, 2011 at 4:50PM by Matt (LifeinTECH)

The Mac App Store is now live as part of Mac OS X 10.6.6. The store looks fully stocked and even has some great discounts on major applications such as iLife, iWork, Aperture, Things and many more.

The Mac App Store also seems to recognise some previously installed applications, however you are not able to migrate them so they can be managed and updated through the App Store.

I honestly believe this could be a game changer for the Mac.

The Mac App Store

One of the biggest announcements at Apple's Back to the Mac event in October was the launch of a Mac App Store. This is set to build on the unprecedented success of the iOS App Store and further bridge the gap between the Mac and iOS devices.

The Mac App Store allows consumers to browse, purchase and download full scale Mac applications (such as Pages, Keynote, etc). The App Store will then automatically install the application and handle any future updates. It also acts as an online repository for your applications, allowing you to re-download them at any point.

On the developer side, the Mac App Store still requires Apple's approval before the application is made available for download. An application can be paid, where the financial split remains 70/30 (in favor of the developer), or of course be made available for free. One significant difference when compared to the iOS platform is that developers can still develop and distribute applications using the traditional model, without Apple's approval.

Although the Mac App Store will be a critical part of the next version of Mac OS X (Lion), Apple promised it would be released for Snow Leopard within 90 days. This means that by the time we get Lion next year, the Mac App Store should already be well populated.

Today, Apple revealed to the press that the official launch date of the Mac App Store will be 6th January 2011. Steve Jobs released the following statement:

"The App Store revolutionized mobile apps, we hope to do the same for PC apps with the Mac App Store by making finding and buying PC apps easy and fun. We can’t wait to get started on January 6."

I hope that the Mac App Store will revitalise the Mac by bringing new developers and customers to the platform, as well as dramatically improving the personal computing experience. Although, as with the iOS App Store, it will ultimately be the developer community that defines its success.