MacHeist

Bill McGonigle — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 17:05:00 -0500

This is a good deal if you’re in the market for any of the software packages on the block, and the proceeds go to charity. I was planning on getting three of them sometime, so it’s a no-brainer for me. Act now, this deal ends on Wednesday.

Rough edges:

Some of the apps have special promotion versions that would be difficult to download again later, one presumes, so I’m going to have to file and back up those special installers.
And they all have registration codes, which I have to file and protect. This is friction in the shareware economy.
WingNuts2 is a 500MB+ torrent, and you have to go through their e-commerce store checkout. I got a generic discount code for them - I wonder how they verify that I actually bought @MacHeist.
As of now, the Tiki Golf download link isn’t working and the registration system for Vector Designer isn’t working yet. I’m sure these are temporary problems.
CoverSutra is Leopard-only

Neat:

1Password uses an image file for a key - presumably some form of steganography.
MacHeist is adding new apps as they go and mailing new licenses out to those who have already purchased.
Quarter million dollars for charity so far, with 3 days to go.

Not including the torrent download, it took me 50 minutes to download, install, and register all the apps. I would rather see them all OpenID-enable their apps and see a network & pki-savvy .mpkg file to make this a 1-click process.

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