December has arrived and Christmas is now not far off. As we know, there will be many deals towards the holidays, but right now we’re focused on the early days of the month. This week in Mac App Store deals, we have an app to tell you if it’s going to snow soon, another that’ll enable you to read RSS feeds in a stylish way, and a most useful one that can save your passwords for nearly everything.
In fact, we have more deals this week than we have had in a while, so let’s get started.
Yoink
Say you have a file to drag to another window. You could use CMD + Tab to switch, but that’s old-fashioned and sometimes glitches. A better way of doing things is using Yoink. All you have to do is drag the item to Yoink in the lefthand side of the screen, find your destination, and drag it to that. There’s no navigating through the many windows or tabs on your screen, nor do you have to hold down the left click button to drag something. It’s sort of like an enhanced clipboard. The app also lets you drag multiple files into it and then preview them or get them out one by one. All of this is very useful if you run apps in fullscreen often. Yoink was previously priced at $2.99, but now it’s only $1.99.
Price: $2.99 » $1.99
Requires: OS X 10.7 or later with a 64-bit processor
Developer: Matthias Gansrigler
Weather HD
Despite there being a dedicated category for them in the Mac App Store, you don’t see many good weather apps floating around. Most either have bad user interfaces or don’t function properly. Weather HD is the closest thing you can get to visual perfection and great functionality, especially in fullscreen mode. It has the usual 7-day and 3-hour forecasts with a beautiful visual interface. There are high definition pictures of rain, sun, the stars, and more to give you an app that can be mirrored over AirPlay to show things off. It also supports over two million locations and radar in three countries. Crazy? For 99 cents, you bet.
Price: $3.99 » $0.99
Requires: OS X 10.6.6 or later
Developer: Vimov LLC
MobileRSS
Sales are one thing; free apps are even better. Welcome MobileRSS, a simple and efficient Google Reader client that belongs in your Launchpad. The interface is similar to iTunes with a nice grid-like look that supports images. There’s also a three-pane option that displays the sources, all posts with their images, and then the content to the far right. MobileRSS also has support for multiple sharing services and an offline mode after you download articles. If you already use Reeder, this may not appeal to you, but for free, it’s worth trying out.
Price: $4.99 » Free
Requires: OS X 10.6 or later
Developer: Nimbirutech Limited
LEGO Harry Potter: Years 5-7
Now, for a game of quidditch. Harry Potter and the lot have returned for the final three years of the franchise in LEGO form. Wield the power of true magic in this game, building your way to the end of J.K. Rolling’s masterpiece. There are over 150 playable characters at your disposal, many levels of co-operation with friends, and beautiful graphics ahead. As the game is currently $10 off, it’s worth purchasing it right away, but make sure you have the right system (see the Mac App Store page for more information).
Price: $29.99 » $19.99
Requires: OS X 10.6.8 or later with a supported graphics card (see page)
Developer: Feral Interactive Ltd
Clean Writer Pro
I’m sure you didn’t see this coming. Irony aside, this Cognitive Bits app is a fun alternative to the many other distraction-free Markdown editors available. It has preview, focus mode, over four colour schemes, gives you the exact word or character count as you type, and, best of all, copies the HTML of your document to the clipboard so you can publish it. At only $1.99, this is a bargain if you’re looking for few features. However, if you want something more powerful, try out the free Mou.
Price: $3.99 » $1.99
Requires: OS X 10.7 or later
Developer: Cognitive Bits
TapeDeck
From a developer whose name is far too long to be one word comes an app of simple recording. Perhaps you’ve considered GarageBand too complicated for your minimal tasks, or maybe you just never got trained how to use it. Whatever the case is, this app should be able to assist you in thoroughly recording anything. It’s like the Voice Memos app on your iPhone, or the Sound Recorder from Windows — you can quickly capture any audio without putting a lot of effort into the setup. TapeDeck uses the built-in inputs of your computer, unless you change it to an external microphone, and captures in either mono or stereo audio. It can then compress them to lossless (ALAC) or traditional AAC. All this doesn’t sound like much for $24.99, but maybe the sale price of just $4.99 will do.
Price: $24.99 » $4.99
Requires: OS X 10.5 or later
Developer: SuperMegaUltraGroovy Inc.
But There’s More?
It’s the end and we’re still not finished. 1Password is still on sale this week, even though the developer claims it’s a 30 percent sale for Thanksgiving. If you hop around Web sites and devices often, it’s perfect for keeping everything in sync, but do remember keeping everything in one place is how it can get stolen.
And that’s it! Let us know what apps you bought this week, and we’ll see you again in about seven days.