Support shareware, good causes, and load your Mac up with MacHeist

I've been waiitng for the unveiling of the MacHeist bundle and was pleased to see a truly fantastic selection of top-shelf shareware offerings assembled to promote awareness of the shareware industry on the Mac platform. The bundle of applications is a great value, offered as it is at a very steep discount from the combined cost if you were to acquire all of these titles individually. How big a discount you ask? How about close to $300 discounted to $49?

Not only do you save a significant amount of money, 25% of the proceeds from each bundle sold are being donated to one of eight worthy causes or divided equally between all of them. The first day's tally stands at $13,825 as of the time I'm writing this – that translates to 1418 bundles sold in the first day. Not a bad start.

The folks behind MacHeist describe the offerings this way:

To provide the best possible introduction to Mac shareware applications possible, we've assembled a diverse lineup of ten Mac applications that together have received multiple Apple Design Awards, O'Reilly Innovator awards, Macworld Eddy's, and MacMinute Showtime awards. In addition, these products have built their stellar reputations with enthusiastic word of mouth from literally hundreds of thousands of happy customers. Whatever your tastes or needs, you will not be disappointed. 

If you're looking for a holiday present for your Mac, this is a great value, supports a number of worthy causes, and loads you up with some great software. Another nice touch... if you already own one or more of the titles in the bundle (as I do), you can "gift" them to a friend. I like that... a lot.

Here are the titles in the bundle:

• Delicious Library
• FotoMagico
• ShapeShifter
• DEVONThink Personal
• Disco
• RapidWeaver
• iClip 4
• A Pangea game (choose one from a nice selection)
• Newsfire (if the amount raised for charity exceeds $50K)
  
• TextMate (if the amount raised for charity exceeds $100K)
  

Update: I just checked the site (12-13-06) and sales have now reached $36K. Excellent.