The United Devs of Sharewaria: What Have MacHeist and MacAppADay Done for the Mac Community? By Dec 10, 2006 - 8:05 PM CST. It’s hard to remember what life was like before and Co. Started giving out shareware applications for free. Through wonderful contests and communities like and, people can obtain awesome Mac applications for naught a dime by voting for a favorite application concept or solving a multi-website jigsaw puzzle respectively. In a, Phill talked about his motivations for bringing together a diverse group of Mac users and giving away millions of dollars worth of shareware, as well as asking anyone reading to try and do their part, however small, in spreading the word about great applications.
Phill and his team have done a commendable job with all of these community projects, and have accomplished a lot. They’ve started the development of three awesome applications through My Dream App, as well as built up massive amounts of hype towards a bundle going on sale Monday with great deals on tons of shareware.
Unrelated to Phill, but with a similar notion, is, which is giving away 5,000 copies of a different application each and every day throughout December. I think that Phill’s biggest underlying point in both these projects is that of goodwill, albeit in a roundabout manner.
Before this fall, I hadn’t purchased much shareware. I used whatever application was least expensive, not what was best.
As is to be expected, through these various events, I’ve acquired applications that I’d been using quite a bit at no cost to myself, like the Iconfactory’s excellent system monitoring utility,. Coincidentally, I was about to purchase it, so through MacHeist, the Iconfactory lost a customer. However, through the charity of Phill and his team in doing so much for us, as well as the goodwill of the developers participating in MacHeist and MacAppADay, I’ve gained a lot more appreciation for what they do, the “thousands of hours of loving care poured into each of these creations,” as Phill says. So in the past few months, I’ve purchased more apps that ever that I’d been holding off on, such as. On another level, by interacting on a more peer-to-peer level with the developers, as well as through their generosity, I now hold a newfound respect for what they do. There’s just something about Phill showing up in the MacHeist IRC room at 2:22 AM and declaring his intention to stay up for the next two days that makes you love this community, and feel good about supporting developers in their endeavors. In that regard, MacAppADay fails, because instead of having fun, challenging puzzles and a great community, they offer you trojan horses, where you take the application into your hard drive thinking of it as a present, when they just want a business opportunity.
As Phill said himself, the point of his projects, as well as MacAppADay, is pretty much as a hype machine, to “excite existing fans of shareware apps” as well as “bringing new users into the market,” and giving away free applications is a surefire way of doing that. For instance, the application given away yesterday morning (at an ungodly hour) on MacAppADay was, an application which allows you to customize what your Apple Remote can do.
Because you can just record straight into your tablet or smartphone. Snowflake usb microphone for mac.
It’s pretty cool, something I’ve tried before, but the price tag has turned me away from giving it much more than cursory once-over. However, by offering free copies of the application through MacAppADay, around 5,000 people downloaded the application who wouldn’t have tried it otherwise, and I’m sure many of them still have it installed.
Good business sense? It’s debatable. Perhaps a few of the people who downloaded Mira today had already been using it, and are now disinclined to purchase a license for it, like myself with iPulse. However, some of the other people who downloaded Mira might never have heard of it. They installed it today, tried it out, and liked it quite a bit.
A couple months down the line, Twisted Melon will debut a new version of Mira with some vool new feature, like scrolling through Time Machine. The user sees that, and wants to try it out. However, the license only works for the version he downloaded from MacAppADay. The developer hope that some users will get hooked enough to fork over for a real license once a better version comes out. Who knows what’ll really happen. Another area where MacAppADay fails is in sociality.
Anyone whose ever spent some time on the MacHeist forums knows what I’m talking about, almost everyone is friendly and helpful, and there’s a strong level of bonding, even when the comments do get rough. The community is even more apparent during the heists themselves, when dozens of forum threads pop up with people from all around the world working to solve these challenging heists. From to, there’s a level of community very rare in these days of flame wars and forum trolls. MacAppADay offers nothing more than a comment box for people to thank the gracious developers. Sure, some people (myself included) have stayed up to acquire some of the applications, however, there’s nothing tying those waiting up together. Overall, I have nothing but gratitude to those developers who give up potential sales in order to foster community goodwill, and want to give my dearest thanks to Phillip Ryu and his team of hooligans, as well as Mark Howson and Vincent Tavera of MacAppADay, for organizing such awesome events and bestowing Mac users everywhere with wonderful applications, and to the developers of wonderful applications who kindly give us free copies of their lifeblood. It’s hard to appreciate what the developers do on their side of the internet, and I think both MacHeist and MacAppADay do a pretty good job in bridging that.
However, because of how MacHeist operates, it’s a lot more likely we’ll be seeing a sequel to MacHeist this time next year than a MacAppADay 2. If neither of them reopen, however, the sense of community gained in MacHeist is still there, and I’m sure that the developers will notice some rises in sales, all thanks to Phill Ryu and his crew, and to prove me right, go out there and support the developers, developers, developers!.Although I ended up buying Stattoo instead, which is made by Panic, a company closely affiliated with the Iconfactory. Grant I was not holding out on buying apps while doing the MacHeist, with the exception of some unsanity Haxies (and Shapeshifter is in the bundle!). But because of this, I bought Delicious at full price with the charity drive excuse, and there it is in the bundle, damnit! This one really burns because with my Heist discounts, the bundle will be less than I spent a few days ago on Delicious.
But, I helped out a charity, so that should mae me feel better, right? I am now trying to rack my brain for whom I could give this app to as a holiday gift, but can’t think of anyone who has a book or movie collection like mine and uses a mac I have been holding out on Disco because I rarely burn discs, I still have two of my three demo burn remaining, and am hoping for it to be in the bundle. But in general, the MacHeist promo has definately turned me on to software I wouldn’t have tried and gotten me in touch with developers that I might have missed. I am a bigger app user because of the Heist, and consequently because of the Zot that I did not know of before.
I have probably purchased seven or eight apps during the Heist, plus the GiftZot. This was directly caused by the Heist and Zot introducing me to software I might not have come upon. I do think that I will not purchase anything after the Heist bundle until the MAAD promo is over, because they have dropped a few apps in my lap that I have recently purchased and between previous purchases, Delicious and the Bundle, i believe that I have filled my quota for giving myself holiday gifts. (Of course that is all BS as soon as I come across something that looks really useful, especially if I can Zot for a discount that allows me to justify it!) But the promo definately worked on me, it broadened my horizons on software and developers that are out there and has me spending good money on independant software and loving it. And as I was typing this up, Disco was added.
I wouldn’t necessarily say that Phill Ryu or MacAppADay had anything to do directly with the following, but for some odd reason, I’ve found myself justifying the cost of shareware apps over the past few months. Looking at my bank statements for for the past month alone, I’ve managed to spend well over a hundred dollars on applications. Anyone familiar with the cost of applications knows that the registration fees are more than stomach-able. Maybe I’ve come to realize the fact that developers deserve recognition and monetary compensation for their work? Indirectly, the two aforementioned sites have opened my eyes to the vast number of options available to Mac users.
Hell would freeze over before I would ever consider throwing my money around for utilities / applications as I do now on the Windows side of the fence Strange. Comments are closed.
Submit anything pertaining to IRC and the reddit-related channels. Chat quotes are allowed and encouraged here. Preferably make them in a self post. Internet Relay Chat is a text-based chat protocol. Users from all over the world can connect to servers and discuss anything. Links.
To connect, either:. Download an, then paste the following url into your browser, or click the link below. It should open your installed client and join #Reddit.
Best Irc Client For Mac
If you have trouble, please make a post. irc.snoonet.org port: 6667 - ssl port: 6697 IP addresses and hostnames are obscured for your privacy by default; to completely hide your host you can register with nickserv via /msg nickserv register password email.