Reactionary

The MacHeist promotion reached its zenith today with the announcement of the software bundle that the whole thing was supposed to promote. I was underwhelmed with the bundle. Here’s what it consisted of and here’s what I thought of it:

1. Delicious Library: What the whole use of the term “delicious” is and how it relates to anything other than food escapes me. But this was the first app revealed and also the greatest, most pleasant surprise. It’s gotten a lot of good reviews, I’ve read them, but I don’t think I ever would have bought it on my own as it has a high price tag of $40. It organizes your CD, DVD, and book collections for you on virtual shelves and uses your DV camera as a bar code scanner to recognize the item and download its information from the web. It’s actually cool for the first 25 items I could scan as I wait for my license to arrive. It might take an entire year of weekends to scan my books in, though. Or that Christmas holiday I’ll have nothing to do during.

2. FotoMagico: Wha’? Not only does Apple include ways to make photographs into slideshows for FREE making this app useless, but what’s up with the name? Anything more than Fade to Black as a slideshow effect is cheesy and overboard. The whole thing feels like it’ll turn you into an annoying person who tortures their friends with cheesy, stupid slideshows of their kids’ pictures no one wants to see but is too polite to say so. Sheesh. How stupid!

3. ShapeShifter: I think this is supposed to make it possible for you to change the look of your Mac’s already perfect layout, colors, etc. I’m not a PC user. GO AWAY! Another total bomb.

4. DEVONThink Personal: Besides the hokey name, it’s supposed to be a personal digital scrap organizer, much like StickyBrain or Journler. I’ll have to look into it. It looks promising. Too bad I already bought that NoteBook program, though.

5. Disco: I bought it from MacZOT, got a free registration and gave THAT away already. I’m not quite sure what I’ll do with a third registration. I’ve yet to use it.

6. RapidWeaver: Like iWeb, it’s supposed to be a dumbed down version of WYSIWYG. Nothing beats Dreamweaver in that realm of apps but I prefer my SubEthaEdit for that kind of work. I’ll give this one away. I can think of someone who may like to use it. It’s supposed to make making websites easy but they never look like you want them to if you take the easy way out and themes are for the complacent.

7. iClip 4: Bought it from MacZOT. I’ll be gifting this one. It’s an okay app. I can’t say I use it a whole lot. But when I was writing my website, it would have been invaluable. Now that I’m in maintenance mode, I don’t find as much of a use for it.

8. One Pangea Game: You were given a choice of three and while I usually hate games, Bugdom’s pretty cute. It shipped with my first iMac, my lime green iMac DV. It’ll bring back memories. Graphics are cute, too.

9. NewsFire: Fantastic application. I wish they had chosen to go with NetNewsWire, though since I already have NewsFire and love it. NewsFire is better-looking, but NetNewsWire is more functional. I’ll be gifting this one as well.

10. TextMate: I have heard this praised to the highest heavens, but it’s unlikely to be distributed since $100,000 has to be given to charity for it to be unlocked for everyone. I’m not hopeful. Only 25% of every sale is going to charity.

So, three hits for me. Three others I would have liked if I didn’t already have them. And three utter crap. One unlikely to be released so it’s a moot point. I had to buy it because I felt bad participating if I didn’t since this was the point of the whole thing. Not a single app released was on my wishlist, though. Not a one. I’ll have to buy the rest or, more likely, go on without them.

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Acquisition

Posted on December 11th, 2006 under Tech •  Print •  Email • RSS 2.0 feed • Leave a response, or trackback