So if you troll the Mac web you’ve probably heard about MacZOT but I’ll rehash the general principle just in case. Basically, MacZOT has a great deal on one piece of Mac shareware, marked down to significantly below retail price, each weekday. It’s a pretty great idea (though not exactly an original one), because it encourages people to register shareware (which is always a challenge) and generates a lot of ‘Word of Mouth’ about the particular product (again another particularly difficult thing for most shareware).
They’ve been going for a few weeks now and have had some interesting deals, but, IMHO, the selection of software has been a bit limited to shareware that does something cool rather than useful (or just looks cool) and AppZapper (which is understandable because the same team that runs MacZOT makes this program, but, like Gruber, I don’t see much need for uninstaller utilities).
Of course, I say that as somewhat of a power user. I don’t need a program to make image edges or business cards for me, that’s why I have Photoshop. Web design? I’ve got DreamWeaver and GoLive. Secret folders? Got that covered with the Terminal & encrypted disk images. Anyway, you get the idea (sorry to drag that one on).
So when I read that the MacZot of the day was SubEthaEdit from CodingMonkeys I was pretty excited. This is a piece of software I use everyday to do plain text editing and it rocks. It’s hard to understand the importance of plain text editing to anyone who doesn’t need it but if you do need it, then you know what I’m talking about. If you do any sort of coding or scripting, plain text is only way to go. Sure, I could use BBEdit if I really wanted to get deep into the text editing but I prefer the lighter footprint of SubEthaEdit. SubEthaEdit also has an amazing feature that BBEdit (and all other Mac text editors to my knowledge) lack: collaborative text editing. I’ve tried it out a few times and it’s quite amazing (I see it becoming very important to my workflow if things go as planed this summer).
Now that I’ve gushed about SubEthaEdit, you probably want to know how much it costs right? Okay, it’s normally $35 but it’s on sale (as of posting) for $19 (dropping all the time). But the real the reason I’ve been writing this whole damn post is because it should be free by the end of the day. Basically, with BLOGZOT 2.0 on MacZOT.com, MacZOT and TheCodingMonkeys will award $105,000 in Mac software (in free copies of SubEthaEdit) if enough people mention this promotion on their blogs. So I’m paying my dues here, because ‘software is better when it’s free’ (paraphrasing Linus Torvalds there).