satukubik

Last time I post about the mac software promotions. One of them is MacHeist. I wrote that the promotion is run from 9th January 2008 and today is just two days from the closing.

So what do they offer? I must say that the bundle is amazing, they include 14 softwares (well, it’s currently 13, but I believe it will be 14 in a very near future). Not all will be useful for everybody but I’m pretty sure you can make use at least 4 of them.

The price is $49 for applications that have original value of $498.60. This is the complete list of the softwares:

1. TaskPaper, a simple GTD application
2. Wingnuts 2, a great-simple flight game
3. Speed Download, a download manager
4. Awaken, an all-round timer for your computer
5. iStopMotion, to create movie from your list of pictures
6. Cha-Ching. a money manager
7. CoverSutra, an iTunes controller
8. 1password, a password management
9. Tiki Magic Mini Golf, a golf game
10. AppZapper, an uninstaller for your mac
11. CSSEdit, an intuitive CSS editor
12. Pixelmator, yet another image editor
13. Snapz Pro X, a screen capturer
14. VectorDesigner, a vector image creator application (still locked for a a while)

I use 1password, Appzapper and SpeedDownload now for everyday computing and use some others occasionally. And they work great… I earn every dollar that I spent…

There is two applications given as bonus if you refer someone else to buy the bundle. So if you are agree that this is a great deal and will buy one, please use my referral link to buy the bundle. Thank you And hurry up…

UPDATE: thanks to everybody who buy from me…

1. TimeCapsule, a companion for TimeMachine. Available in 2 versions. 500GB for $299 and 1TB for $499
2. New softwares for iPhone (Maps, webclips, etc) and iPodTouch (Mail, Stocks, Notes, Weather, Maps).
3. iTunes movie rentals + Apple TV take 2
4. MacBook Air! $1799!!!!!

UPDATE: Here is the recorded presentation: http://events.apple.com.edgesuite.net/f27853y2/event/index.html?internal=fj2l3s9dm

As a Mac beginner, I often forget which key is related to a symbol. So this is the cheat sheet of mac keyboard.

Oh no… all symbolic links are not accessible from Leopard. It shows error message that the target links can’t be found. They are OK with Tiger, so I’m thinking that there is a bug in Leopard. For a while, I can live with copying the file from Linux to Mac and worked with the copy in Mac. But when the first update of Leopard is out, it’s still not fixed so I somehow curious what really happen here.

So today I spent some time to examine the problem and found a suggestion from here to restart the samba server everytime mac connects to it. It’s not that convenient.

Reading more to the links given by it, I found out that simpler solution is available. Just by adding this line to smb.conf (in Ubuntu the location is /etc/samba/smb.conf), the problem can be resolved.


unix extensions = no


Apple Mac is known for its superb dictionary. I really like that they use Oxford for the dictionary not just some simple word to word dictionary. The new Leopard even adds the excitement by including Japanese dictionary which is not so useful for me but probably very useful for many Japanese out there.

But that’s not the point I want to discuss now.

For several days I was looking for a decent Indonesian English dictionary running on the Mac. I’m not lucky since I can’t find any until now. Instead I found out that Mac has a good documented Dictionary Development Kit for they who want to create their own dictionary. That’s mean no need to create the interface, no need to define the index strategy… Just provide the content and voila… you get an Indonesian English dictionary. If you see the picture I gave before, you see that there is a new dictionary named Indonesia on the left end side.
(more…)

Living in Europe makes me miss Adzan so much. A little application called Guidance help me for it.

So now what I miss is only a Quran for Mac.

Note: The header of the website is cool, huh?

Are you using a Mac? These promotions are for you.

• MacUpdate II. Their first bundle is a huge success and they try to do that again this time. Hurry up, the promotion will be ended on Dec 12th tomorrow. Though it’s likely that it will be extended like last time.
• MacHeist II. This is special because you get a trivias to solve and softwares to buy. Watch their website on Jan 9th 2008
• MacSanta. Five companies are giving 20 percent discount each day and 10 percent afterward until the end of the year.
• Give Good Food To Your Mac. Buy up to 10 applications and get up to 70% discount. This is also a limited offer ended immediately!
• MacZot. One software is offered every day and one free license is waiting…
• 20MacApps. Twenty unknown softwares are offered for 90% discount. However, I must warn you that some guys are not satisfied with them in the past so use it with your own risk.

Start filling your Mac with softwares!

Yesterday I saw a mac application bundle promotion from MacUpdate. This is a time-limited sale which includes 10 Mac applications. As you can see in the homepage of the promotion, they are Graphic Converter, Fetch, SRS iWOW, Cocktail, ProfCast, Amadeus Pro, and GarageSale. But that just the beginning. When the number of sales went over 2500, they added Little Snitch. It didn’t stop there, at 3800 they added Intaglio, and at 5999 they added TechToolPro. And as soon as this happen, they also added Photo Presenter which never be announced before at all. This makes an eleven application bundle worth over 400 dollar. And they sell this bundle for only $49. This is quite an amazing story, isn’t it?

I thought over this promotion. Why such promotion is only for a Mac software? I believe this should also work in Windows community. And for a saving of over 80%, I believe many users will at least take a look at the promotion. If you sell a bundle of WinRAR, WinAmp, Total Commander, and 7 other great applications for $50, I believe many Windows user will not hesitate to buy it. This can significantly reduce the use of illegal software and in the same time, thickened developers’ wallet.

I can think of several reason why this can’t work in Windows world thought…

1. Windows users are not as rich as Mac users. This might be true, but the number of them is also bigger so it should still works nevertheless.
2. Windows users don’t care to the developers. They might not really love the application, just that they need it. Mac users seem to be really happy with their application and love to pay the developers because of that.
3. Windows communities are not as strong as Apple. The power of being minority is you get stronger community.
4. Windows users are just love illegal software. Hmmm….

I still hope there is a crazy man out there who will try to bundle Windows applications like MacUpdate does and maybe we can see if this is working or not.

If you’re interested but don’t know how, this is the explanation.

The promotion organizer talked to some developers about including their application in the bundle and also the compensation they will get. This is usually fixed but the organizer in the first mac bundle application was just too happy with the number of sales he doubled the developers’ reward (Oh yeah… I forget that this kind of promotion has been held two times including this one, and the organizer of the first promotion is MacHeist). And then they sold it in a website with fixed time scheme. This left big amount of money for the organizer but from what I read, developers were just don’t care about it since they also got pretty big amount of money.

In my opinion, the reason why these promotions are very succesful is because the organizer always do something unexpected for the promotion. For example, in the first promotion, the organizer lowered the number to unlock TextMate, and this boosted the number of sales over the original lock number. The second promotion has more surprise. They also lowered the unlock number, and they also add Photo Presenter to the bundle after the last lock is achieved, … and they also extend the promotion for three days (yess… it’s still running now), …. and who knows… they might add more surprise later (I certainly hope so…).

And to add the surprise, MacHeist (the first bundle organizer) joins the crowd and adds four more application and two early access to a beta applications for they who buy the bundle from their site. This makes the original value of the bundle is $531.67. Customer loves surprise and many of them eat it. The current number of buyer is over 6000 people.

If you are an Mac user, do you buy the bundle?

Disclaimer: I don’t have any affiliation to the promotion nor get any advantage for writing this article

29th June 2007 will be a very remarkable day for a long time. Well, at least for me.

The biggest news is of course that Apple launch its iPhone. I witnessed the queue in front of Apple Store in Las Vegas 8 hours before it officially launched.

Second thing, for those of you that uses Java. Eclipse Europa is launched in the same day. The press is not so big, maybe because of all Apple iPhone news. But it’s here with all new features that are very tempting, especially those Mylyn offered. This plugin is the first project that got included in standard distribution of Eclipse Java Package.

The last, 29th June 2007 is also big day for TopCoder. The winner of TCO07 is announced and I got the opportunity to see the magnificent event myself. See the official blog to know more about it. But you probably already screwed if you miss the webcast.