A little bit more than a year ago I got the chance to test-drive MacKeeper for the first time. I really liked the application, but even more, I liked the potential of it. I’ve been using it ever since, catching up to every update, and looking for improvements. To me MacKeeper is a winner, and you can try it for free by downloading the trial from the MacKeeper site. Have fun with it. It’s worth it.

Macworld is a great opportunity for software developers to connect with potential buyers, and what better way to do so than with a sale and some free advice? Stellar Data Recovery will be at the show this week, and along with demonstrating Drive ToolBox and selling it at the discounted price of $79, they’ll also be offering free technical advice to visitors of their booth (#404) on the show floor.

Perceiving a need, Thomas Tempelmann authored an excellent little freeware replacement for the pre-Tiger OS X Find utility called Find Any File, which he’s just updated to Version 1.5. Unlike Spotlight, Find Any File doesn’t use an indexed database, but instead taps the file system driver’s fast search operations, where available. This lets you search for file properties such as name, dates, size, etc., but not for file content.

I continue to be surprised by the need for a hard drive utility such as Prosoft’s Drive Genius 3. I probably shouldn’t be. Apple’s Disk Utility included with Mac OS X is largely useless beyond the most basic tasks, and all the OS optimizing in the world isn’t going to prevent bugs and beach balls from occasionally popping up. So, a disk utility is a given. And although it’s not given that you should choose Drive Genius, it’s getting closer.

Anyone who does a good degree of writing and coding on the Mac needs TextExpander. That’s right…needs it. By allowing you to easily assign keystroke shortcuts to snippets of code, you can place long, cumbersome blocks of text and code in your documents within a matter of seconds, system wide. In fact, the developers are so certain that TextExpander will be such a huge timesaver for you, that they even tell you how many hours you’ve saved by using it.

Fresh is a brand new application for OS X that is essentially a file management tool. What it does is take every file that you have interacted with, and shows it in a list. If you edit a Word file, download a file, save an e-mail attachment, take a screenshot, etc., it will show up, newest first, in Fresh’s top green “Recently Created” panel. In everyday computer use, this isn’t much help. But when you’re working on a project, it can be a huge time saver.

Black Friday is now plaguing Europe, it seems. Sorry, guys. Hate to put you through this, in addition to the way our mortgage/banking crisis is crippling your economy, too. But, your loss is our gain, as evidenced by Houdah Software offering a discount of 50% on all its Mac software products on Black Friday, November 28, 2008. To get HoudahSpot and HoudahGeo today! Coupon code: BLACK08. The discount applies to single user, single household and single student licenses. Moreover ACTPrinter for iPhone and iPod Touch is free for today only.

Freeverse understands that Thanksgiving is a time for visiting with family and giving thanks for your bounties. And what better way to give thanks than by totally ignoring your family and playing some pretty good games on your Mac? To help you along, Freeverse has knocked 50% off every Mac product they sell. That’s 30+ more »

A few months ago, we reported on the release of CheckUp 1.0 from app4mac, a health monitoring application for our Macs. Now, we bring you good news with the most recent version of this useful program.

For those of you who already know the application, the first two features to notice are the refreshed UI (User Interface) and the price drop. When it came out, CheckUp cost $49; a reasonable price for a well-designed application created to help you keep your Mac in shape, which is not an irrelevant task for anyone who appreciates his computer.

Now, we’ve found an updated version for just $29. It’s a nice price drop, which makes it even more desirable for those of you who wanted to wait, or just decided to pass the first time it came out.

Check out the new and top features after the break.

Wonder Warp Software has shipped version 1.2 of its Mac OS X productivity application ShoveBox. ShoveBox is an organizer and processor for clippings that runs in the menubar. Users can drag data—text, images, URLs, and more—to the application’s icon, where it gets sorted and acted upon according to user-defined rules. It also offers web archiving more »