As another year draws to a close, it’s time for the inevitable “end of year bundles”! There are three to look out for this year – The Humble Indie Bundle, Fusion Ads Holiday Bundle, and MacUpdate’s December 2010 Bundle. Each of these offers some excellent software at a great price.
Read on for the lo-down on what’s available, an overview of how the (very unique) Humble Indie Bundle works, as well as a few links to our reviews of the software on offer!
The Humble Indie Bundle
I really love the concept of this offer, as it takes a step away from the traditional budget pricing model adopted by many companies. Focusing on five games (that work on Mac, Windows, and Linux), you can choose to pay whatever you’d like for the applications on offer. You also decide how the money you give is split between the developers, charities, and bundle organisers. A great idea.
The different games on offer are:
Each of these is unique in it’s own way, and I’d recommend taking a look at the different sites to see which – if any – you like the look of.
Also worth mentioning is one of the charities involved in this bundle, a very worthy cause to donate to this Christmas. Child’s Play collect games, cash and book donations for sick children around the world (and have already surpassed a total of $1m this year!).
Here’s a video that explains the bundle, with a few examples of the games in action:
Fusion Ads Holiday Bundle
This one includes a great selection of software and design goodies, and has some of the more carefully crafted copy that I’ve read in a long time. It’s worth visiting, even if just to scroll down the page and appreciate the work that has gone into the design!
If you’re a designer, by all means take a look at the icons and graphics available, but we’ll be focusing on the Mac software here. In the bundle, you’ll find:
- Versions – Versions offers the best way to work with Subversion on the Mac. Thanks to its clear-cut approach, you’ll hit the ground running.
- Kaleidoscope – Use Kaleidoscope to spot the differences in text and image files. Review changes in seconds with the world’s most advanced file comparison application.
- ExpanDrive – ExpanDrive acts just like a USB drive plugged into your Mac. Open, edit, and save files to remote computers from within your favorite programs—even when they are on a server half a world away.
- TextExpander – A simple way to automatically store and quickly retrieve text snippets for use in emails, documents, and everywhere else!
- DrawIt – DrawIt is a vector editing application with support for bitmap-like image filters.
- FontCase – Fontcase is a font management application that provides an elegant and powerful workflow to help you organize the fonts you have installed on your system.
- Billings – Billings logical workflow and intuitive interface make quoting, invoicing and time tracking simple.
MacUpdate December Bundle
The third bundle available today takes a slightly more traditional approach, with twelve Mac applications on offer for the price of $49.99. A great deal if you really need some of the software included – not such a great deal if you only really need one or two apps. Here’s the software that’s up for grabs:
- 1Password – Undoubtedly the headline act, 1Password is a genuinely excellent application that can save you a huge amount of time.
- MacFamilyTree – A unique application for tracking and documenting your family history. Not exactly an impulse buy, and possibly an app that will sit, unused, in your Applications folder…
- DEVONthink – Another one of my favourite apps, used for keeping track of all my scanned paper documents. You’ll need the “Pro Office” version for OCR capability, but you could always upgrade your discounted license to this version at a later date.
- Flux – A solid web design/development tool, that many people strongly recommend. It has a very visual slant, and is great for beginners and advanced web folk alike.
- Default Folder X – This is a tricky one to describe fully, so I’d recommend watching the introductory screencast to see the application’s full set of features. Great for advanced Mac users.
- Art Text + Fonts – I confess that I’m not really a huge fan of this one… It’s something akin to Microsoft’s “Word Art” on steroids – check out the examples to see what I mean.
- Swift Publisher – With all the word processing and publishing apps available already, is there a need for another in your Applications folder? Swift Publisher isn’t going to replace Pages any time soon, but it has a few decent templates included.
- Chronories – If you keep a diary, Chronories might be a fantastic application to help digitise the whole process, and automatically gather interesting information each day.
- Interarchy – Taking the biscuit for a pretty, well-designed file transfer app, Interarchy is a solid piece of software. A welcome addition if you haven’t already bought the best FTP app around.
- Typinator – Although my text expanding tool of choice is Text Expander, this is a great option if you don’t already have an application in this genre.
Will You Be Purchasing?
Personally, I don’t think I’ll be buying either of these over the next few days. I’m not a huge gamer, and I have already bought most of the applications in the MacUpdate bundle (or software that does the same thing). If you’re completely new to the Mac, this could be a great chance to pick up a range of handy software for an excellent price.
Will you be buying either of these bundles today?