MacHeist Bundle - 3 more days only - Mac apps for charity

The MacHeist bundles are always a good deal, but this one is the best ever. Buy hundreds of dollars worth of new, full Tiger and Leopard apps for only $39 (Tiger apps also work on Leopard. If you're running Tiger, download the Leopard apps too for later on.)

No joke. $25 bucks from each sale goes to important humanitarian and conservation charities.

Things you may find interesting in the bundle include:

- iSale for making eBay pages (Tiger)
- Kinemac for making 3D animations (Tiger)
- PhoneView which lets you work with your iPhone or iPod Touch like a hard drive (Tiger)
- Little Snapper (Leopard) and Acorn (Tiger) image editors
- WireTap Studio (Tiger) which can record and convert any audio your Mac plays

There are also some games, a newsreader and other good stuff.

You get 12 applications today for your $39 and 3 more are possible, depending on how many people buy the bundle in the next 3 days. BoinxTV is the next one to be unlocked, a TV studio program that sells for $199 normally. These are full versions too, not demos.

You can download the 12 free and unlocked apps immediately after you pay. Everyone who buys the bundle is entitled to all the apps that unlock during the event, so there's no reason to wait until the end to buy them. Remember to print your receipt with your unlock codes and bookmark the receipt page so you can go back and get any apps that unlock over the next couple of days.

Apple photobooks 20% off until May 11 (USA only)

I've heard these are really nice looking, but I haven't made one yet. It's supposed to be super easy to make photobooks with iPhoto and there's a tutorial here on Apple.com

Mac Game Store

Play Defcon free this weekend - till 6pm GMT Monday

Win-OSX-Linux online multi-player (or single player) strategy game

PC world said: "Through 6 p.m. GMT on Monday, August 27, Defcon is free for all to play; gamers are not required to enter key codes to have access to the full game.

Defcon is a throwback to the Cold War. Your job, as a general hidden in a deep underground bunker, is to totally destroy the other side - inflicting massive civilian casualties and disarming your opponent using a thermonuclear arsenal, trying to protect your own forces and people as best you can.

If the game sounds disturbing, it is -- its tagline is "Everybody Dies," and Introversion and Ambrosia don't shy away from showing you the dark side -- and the reality -- of global nuclear conflict."

59MB download
If you decide you like annihilating the world, it's $25 for a license after Monday.

[While you're at that website, you may notice that Ambrosia software also makes Snapz Pro, which is a tempting screen capture utility for OS X, but I like SnapNDrag and iShowu better and they cost a lot less. The Firefox extension PageSaver does a great job of capturing long web pages in one shot too.]

How to type all those special characters on a Mac

Accents, symbols, everything. Download the PDF file(s) and you'll always have it on your Mac when you need it, for email, word processing, general lettering and typesetting work.

I used to use PopChar for this but it's US$30 now and I don't need special characters that often these days. PopChar is very fast though, so if you want to use lots of special characters it might pay for itself in time savings.

For making special characters in HTML you'll need an entity list instead.