The Blog of Brad
Posts tagged free
MacHeist has FREE nanoBundle
Nov 7th
MacHeist nanoBundle
For the next 5 days everyone is welcome to download 5 Mac apps which retail for $154, for FREE! They’ve offered:
- ShoveBox ($25)
- WriteRoom ($25)
- Twitterrific ($15)
- TinyGrab ($14)
- Hordes of Orcs ($25)
and in MacHeist tradition, once 500,000 bundles have been given away everyone will get a copy of
- Mariner Write ($50)
The key part of this bundle is this:
What would you pay for this bundle?
FWIW: you should know that MacHeist is 100% legal, the developers are NOT getting swindled out of sales; MacHeist is a marketing promotion organization.
Ninite Application Installer
Oct 25th
This week has been an interesting week: it’s been Windows 7 week! I chose not to write about Windows 7 this week because for most people it’s not big news –I’ve had it for months from MSDN, a lot of those who care have tried the betas, and most “regular” people don’t upgrade their operating systems until they get a new computer. However it’s worth mentioning that there is a great service out there that will be useful for those reinstalling their OSes (recommended as opposed to an in-place upgrade for Windows 7), reinstalling your Vista or XP install, or just got a new computer and need to get all of your applications on your computer. Ninite has a solution for you.
Ninite, a new service that allows you to check-off what software you’d like to batch-install, creates an executable that takes care of downloading and installing the applications you chose from the list that they provide. However there are free and open source programs on this service, you can also get paid software such as Microsoft Office 2007 Standard, which just downloads a trial of it, allowing you to activate it using your purchased product key.
As I said before, this site creates a batch installer mini-program that takes care of downloading and installing your applications. I should clarify that the application you download from this site is small, less than a megabyte (165KB in my case). When this program is executed it does the downloading, meaning that this will not install applications offline such as downloading this on a computer with an internet connection and trying to install applications on a PC without an internet connection won’t work and trying to use this to install applications on a PC with a slow internet connection won’t be beneficial.
Here is how the interface works:
And this is what the installer app looks like in Windows 7:
I give this service top marks for it’s usefulness, uniqueness, ease-of-use, and wide selection of applications. However I’m interested to see if they will offer a way to do offline installs of applications (a lot more useful if performing a lot of installs on a lot of machines).
iPhone App: Discover
Jul 30th
Since the early days of jailbreaking the apps that allow the iPhone to be a web or file host has been popular, and this app gives you that, and access to your iDisk, for free. This is the free, ad-supported sibling to Discover Pro, and offers the user WebDAV sharing with optional user permissions and password protection. Without doing any configuration you can use a WebDAV client (Mac OS X Finder, many Linux distributions’ file manager, Transmit, etc…). Users of this app which are connected to the same WiFi network are able to share files and this app is also a client to MobileMe’s iDisk or the Discover Server, a free Windows/Mac download from the developer’s website (which is currently inaccessible as of writing this). [For clarification, this app will work with or without internet access, however you can only share files when it is connected to WiFi.]
You can get this app for free in the App Store.
iPhone App: Shazam
Jul 4th
This is an amazing app which has been around since the inception of apps in July of 2008. Shazam is a free and amazing life tool, it identifies songs that are playing where you are by taking a thirty-second sample using the built-in microphone, and within a few seconds has analyzed the song and presented you with a useful screen displaying the song title, artist, album, and links for a Youtube video, to buy it in iTunes, and to Tweet about the song.
I’ve included some screen shots of it from my use—and in my few days of using it, I’ve found that it’s incredibly accurate at identifying music, even in noisy environments.
Get this app for free from the app store. [link]
Strangely, this app requires an iPhone, however could work on a 2G iPod Touch.
Sun xVM VirtualBox – by Macworld
Aug 30th
This is an episode of the Macworld (magazine) video podcast. This podcast cover’s Sun’s new addition to the Mac virtualization game-competing with VMWare Fusion and Parallels Desktop for Mac. The best part is that VirtualBox is free! Here is Macworld’s Video review.
