Deals - page 253

Let’s say you want to program, oh, everything. Websites, responsive-design websites, iOS games, and iOS apps. Then let’s through in, just for kicks and giggles, Ruby and PS6. Cool?

This is hours and hours of classes. If you take classes the “traditional” way in a classroom, getting through all this will take a while. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for in-person classes (I teach them myself), but I’m also a big fan of self-paced, online courses that let you learn at your pace and on your own terms/time.

This is why I like these bundle deals for courses. Like the Programming Bootcamp we kick off today.

Update: This deal is wrapping up and so is the Retina MacBook Pro Giveaway!

Following up on the suggestion to pick up HydraPro before you head off on holidays, here are another couple apps you should toss into your (virtual) kit—Inpaint and iResizer. Why? Because these two apps combined solve one of the most common issues with photos—getting rid of stuff you don’t want in your pictures.

Inpaint helps you remove objects, people, date stamps, or flaws in your pictures. iResizer let’s you take out one element in a picture, remove it, and move the other parts of the image around like it wasn’t ever there. Sweet, eh? More after the jump.

Each week Apple selects a paid App Store app and makes it totally free. CultCast listeners may know this already, but I’m a huge fan of Kayak for creating trip itineraries and ordering plane tickets, hotel rooms, etc.

There’s a free version of Kayak in the App Store that runs on the iPhone and iPad, but there’s also a pro version with additional features that normally sells for $1.

The latest Cult of Mac Deals offer delivers something that ensures you can create (and publish) your own professional-looking websites without having the skills of a professional web developer. That’s because MacFlux 4 makes it so easy – and we’re offering it for 50% off at just $50!

What is MacFlux 4?

MacFlux 4 is an advanced HTML5 website design application, capable of creating stunning sites completely from scratch. This powerful Mac web design software is a creative design environment rather than a template-based solution (although it does include free website templates to help get you started). And if you’d rather not create HTML5 websites, MacFlux 4 can handle standard HTML, PHP, Ruby, JSP, and more…no coding required.

Oh WordPress, let me count the ways I love you…well I should since I’ve written (and am writing) several books on it. One of the parts of the WordPress ecosystem that I like the most is the theming system. I’ve worked with a lot of CMSes in my time and I still prefer how WordPress manages themes.

Of course there’s a catch, with thousands of free themes and hundreds of premium themes to choose from, where do you start? Or you have a few themes you like to use, but you need something new and different for a new project, where do you start?

Let me give you a hint: The ThemeFuse WordPress Trio – Cult of Mac Deals

Also ending soon is Hydra Pro! Grab it now!

No big pitch here, let’s just talk money. I’m lucky that I married someone with a head for managing money. Me, yeah, not so much. For me the barrier has always been finding the right tool to help me manage, track, and understand where I spend money (How much at the LEGO store?!?). Looking at today’s deal—Koku—I think I might have an app to check out. Easy, intuitive financial management. Nice.

Also don’t forget about the other deals on right now:

• Data Backup 3
• MacFlux 4
• Wooden SigniCASE iPhone 4/4S Case

If you’re been waiting to get the new iPad from the refurbished section of Apple’s Online Store in an effort to save some cash, then today is your lucky day. The latest device, which is the first and only iPad to get a high-resolution Retina display, is now available with $50 off.

Let’s face facts here. Adobe Creative Suite might be one of the most powerful and flexible sets of tools going. Of course it probably also has one of the steepest learning curves and most moving parts of any app suite. I’m betting that most of you who use CS use maybe one or two apps really well, dabble in a couple others, and the rest are just mysterious and arcane to you. Now if you take a task like web design, CS has pretty much everything you need to make a great site. The question is—do you know how to best use all the parts together?

Thought not.

Which is why I like the approach this Udemy course we have a deal for. It’s not “learn Dreamweaver for websites” or “learn to make web graphics in Photoshop”. It’s a complete course using all the strengths of the entire suite.

Me, I like a tidy Desktop. Sure I save things to the Desktop (like the images I use for these posts), but once a week or so I clean house, deleting almost everything from my Desktop. Now my buddies AJ and Shane, well they have Desktops that make my eyes bleed. Files and folders everywhere. I’m seriously thinking I should buy them each a copy of DesktopShelves. It’s not going to be a big deal either because, it’s our first $5 Friday!

DesktopShelves does one simple thing. You create “shelves” (they look like shelves you have on your wall) to hold files and folders on your Desktop. It’s a virtual thing, really, everything is still in a folder in the Finder, but it looks better. Check out the movie after the jump.

Your iPhone case says a lot about you. Functional? Funky? Retro? Modern? Wooden. Yeah, I said wooden. There is something classic and soothing about something made from wood. Why not an iPhone case?

These beautiful, laser-etched iPhone cases fit the iPhone 4/4S snuggly, don’t add a lot of extra weight, and protect your iPhone and look cool. Pick one of six designs made from bamboo, sapele, or walnut and you can have something that I’m pretty sure other folks haven’t seen too often.

And that says a lot too.

This deal is only for the Continental U.S.

You’ve made the next great app. Kudos! Now comes the real challenge—marketing it. Sure there are stories of apps found by Apple and become overnight successes, but really it takes work to market your app. And by the way, we know that marketing probably isn’t your strong suit, and, by the way, that’s okay.

Well, it’s okay if you understand that you need to learn more about marketing and then do something about it. We have another Udemy course for you today that can help close the gap for you: Master The Art Of Mobile Marketing.

If there is one, single thing that has bailed me out in my 30+ years of using computers (starting with an Apple IIe, thank you very much), it’s that you must have backups. Thirty years ago, even 20 years ago when I was in college, the idea of so much of our lives (documents, pictures, music) only existing in the digital space was science fiction. Today, today it’s a fact of life. I don’t know about you, but I’d say I have hard copies of less than 1% of the thousands of photos I’ve taken in the past 14 years.

So the question is—are you backed up?

Now, don’t get me wrong, TimeMachine is a solid app (and better now under Mountain Lion), but it’s not perfect. Things like easy exclusions, backing up other volumes, making bootable backups—TimeMachine just doesn’t do. Good thing our deal today—Data Backup 3—does.

If you live in Massachusetts and are in the market for a new Mac then you’re in luck. Massachusetts will once again be holding a tax holiday on the weekend of August 11-12. This might be a great opportunity to save some money on Apple products. Here’s what you need to know.

Readdle makes some of the best productivity apps for professionals who want to use their iPad to edit PDFs, scan docs, create advanced calendars, write notes, or even learn a little bit about Shakespeare. Today is their 5th anniversary, so to celebrate they’re having a huge sale for the next 48 hours. Some apps have been discounted up to 70% off, which is a pretty great deal considering the quality you’re getting.

Here’s some of the apps you can grab:

Sometimes you need to create an “old-school” webpage. And by “old-school” I mean a static, html-based page that can run anywhere. Not a WordPress template or other CMS template, an honest to goodness html page. I’ve been hit with this need myself. Sometimes it’s needing a semi-complex table to go into a post. Maybe I need a quick and dirty landing page for a site-in-progess. The thing is that while I learned html back in the day (pre–1995 thank you very much), I don’t like to code by hand. Heck, few of us really like to code by hand.

This is when you need to turn to a decent (and I stress decent) WYSIWYG html editor. Have one handy? Maybe not. How about checking out MacFlux?

One of the coolest parts of digital photography is being able to use software to make your photos better than you could ever had imagined. I’m not just talking about fixing exposures or adding special effects—both of those things are very cool—I’m talking about things like HDR photography.

HDR (High Dynamic Range) is entails taking several images (one correctly exposed and several over and under exposed) and combining them into a new image that make the picture much more like how we see the world. And how is this done? Software. Software like Hydra Pro

While this post is ending, don’t forget to check out the SayHelloThere freebie!

In the past few months I’ve learned something very interesting. Facebook can be kinda cool. I mean I’m using Facebook to talk about comics and other geekdom, so I enjoy that, but the one thing I haven’t been enjoying is managing the pages. Checking comments, tracking answers, running contests.

For a network that is built on frictionless sharing, it’s sure hard for the folks managing the content to do stuff.

Which is why I’m going to take a real, hard look at the deal kicking off today—AgoraPulse Platinum—which sounds like it might just solve a lot of issues for me.

Instead of talking about something new here today, we thought it would be a good idea to do a little recap of some deals, freebies, and giveaways that, well, you should know about!

Like the iStack Bundle (extended through tonight!) or Website optimization ebook or the Retina MacBook Pro giveaway. More after the jump.

Let’s keep this short and sweet. The amazing iStack Mac Bundle ends today (Thursday). This is it. Last chance.
No more excuses or “I’ll get it tomorrow” or “I don’t know will I really use all those apps…”. Look, the best thing about these bundles is that there are hidden gems that you didn’t know you needed until you have them. Maybe for you it will be Disk Drill to fix your Mac. Maybe it will be SnagIt to grab an image. Maybe it will be Text Soap when you have a mailing list to fix up. The only thing left for you is to…

Let me paint a scenario for you. You’re a creative type. Maybe professionally or as a hobby or maybe you’re just the go-to person in the office. You need to pull a rabbit out of your hat—again— and you’ve got nuthin‘. Like less than nuthin’. What you need are some creative resources to browse through and use for your project.

Most of us have a few things stashed away to use, but those get old and stale fast. Which is why from time to time you need to pick up some new fonts, textures, graphics, icons, and such. Something like The Creative Design Bundle 2.0.

It’s bundle-o-rama here! We have the iStack Mac Bundle still going on (which is awesome), but today we have a little bundle. Something, focused, targeted…more creative.

The OndeSoft Mac Bundle brings you a clipboard manager (I can’t live without one!), audio recorder (podcasts from Skype recordings FTW!), & a screen ruler (sure pixels are dimensionless, but they still have to fit on screen).

More after the jump.

Radio Shack is now offering multiple iPhone models on AT&T and Verizon for significant discounts in its retail stores. These iPhones have been “refreshed and remanufactured,” meaning that they have been either used or repackaged internally. You can get a 16GB iPhone 4S on AT&T or Verizon for $100 off Apple’s $200 retail price, and there’s also a $100 discount for the 32Gb iPhone 4S. The iPhone 4 is also being offered for free on both carriers. All discounted models obviously come with a two-year contract.

Here’s the unit/price breakdown:

You already know that OS X is one of the most powerful and easy to use UNIX based OSes around. You wouldn’t be reading Cult of Mac if you didn’t. The thing that a lot of us don’t really know—or tap into—is the server version of OS X.

Sure it’s like OS X, but it also has all the power of an enterprise server behind it. Email server? Check. Calendar server? Yep. Document server, chat server, wiki…you get the idea. Anyway, it’s powerful stuff. And, so I’m told, pretty easy to manage. Pretty easy, not drop dead easy. Which means a few lessons and tutorials might come in handy just to make sure you get your OS X Lion Server set up the right way the first time. Hence today’s deal—OS X Lion Server Video Course – Cult of Mac Deals.

Let’s face it, windows can get out of control. Lost windows off the side of the screen, clutter, window positions… Or this situation, you’re working on a project where you’re taking screenshots or doing a screencast of something. You can’t finish all at once and have to come back to it. Now, how do you think you’ll get the windows back exactly the way they were before?

Oh you can try to do in manually—and wind up pulling out your hair—or you can pick up today’s giveaway Breeze. Usually this is a (well worth it) $8 app, but right now you can grab it for free (which is exactly what I’ll be doing in short order).

If you want to see how it all works before you grab the app, check out the Autumn Apps site and watch the screencast (they had me in the first minute).

Contrary to the name, putting a laptop on your lap, isn’t actually a great idea. Laptops can get rather warm, not to mention it’s impossible for air to get below your laptop to help keep it cool (do you think Apple made these glorious devices out of aluminum just for kicks and giggles?). Likewise laptops just on a desk or table not only don’t let the machines cool as well as they could, but they aren’t terribly comfortable to work at for long periods of time.

It’s pretty hard to find a device that works great on your lap and on a desk (believe me, I’ve looked and there aren’t many), which is where the iLap comes in.

Only available in the Continental U.S.