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November 5, 9:10 PMSF Business Tech ExaminerJeffrey Fritz

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Get six Macintosh applications for free
Image credit: MacHeist

Looking for free business software? Here's your chance to grab six interesting and temporarily free applications for your Mac.

The folks at MacRumors have joined forces with MacHeist in promoting their Mac application bundle deal. For a limited time, they are offering what they refer to as their nanoBundle. These are six different Mac applications that the web site says normally cost $154. But for the next few days they are offering this software for free. Each application represents the full licenses—these are not trial applications or sampleware. And it all appears to be totally legit.

Although people say that you don't get something for nothing—this may actually be the one exception that breaks the rule. It sounds like it might be just too good an offer to pass up.

For my business use, the most useful application in the bundle is HogBay's WriteRoom ($25 normally.) In case you are not familiar with it, WriteRoom is a no frills word processor. By default, it fills your screen with nothing but a black background while the letters that you type are green. Think pre-Microsoft Word and pre-WordPerfect. WriteRoom hearkens back to WordStar or even to an IBM mainframe editor.

I like this application—so much so that I wrote this column in WriteRoom. Why would I use something so retro and basic when I have Microsoft Word, Apple Pages and OpenOffice all at my disposal? Simple. When writing with WriteRoom there are no distractions, There is nothing else running on my desktop. No clocks, no battery status meters, no background applications. I only see just what I am typing. Plus, call me nostalgic, but I like retro things. (My obsession with the retro Grundig Aviator G6 shortwave receiver has already been documented in a previous column.)

My MacBook Pro suddenly looks and almost feels like my trusty old 1983 Apple ///. (To be candid, WriteRoom is not totally nostalgic. The mouse still works, the spelling checker works automatically and the Mac menus are hiding in the background ready to make themselves known. But this is good enough for me.)

The other applications are also interesting, but will require a bit more exploration on my part to determine just how usable they will be in my business. Also included along with WriteRoom are:

• ShoveBox ($25) - use this to capture important bits of information
• Twitterific ($15) – a Twitter client
• TinyGrab ($14) - allows you to quickly share screenshots with other users
• Hordes of Orcs ($25) - a tower defense game (not really a business application)
• Mariner Write ($50) – a fast, streamlined word processor

Note that one application in this bundle, Mariner Write, requires 500,000 total bundle participants to be "unlocked" before it will be free.

So tell your friends. Free doesn't come around every day. Come and get it!