With Thanksgiving upon us, it’s time for the annual avalanche of Black Friday sales—and Pre-Black Friday sales, and Cyber Monday sales, and Weekend-Before-Cyber Monday sales, and…you know the drill. But most of those sales, whether online or in physical stores, focus on hardware and gear. If you’re looking for some great Mac software, either for yourself or for your favorite gift recipient, there are currently two big Mac-software bundles, each offering a bevy of apps for one reasonable price. Even if you just wanted the Mac Gems each bundle contains, both are bargains, but each also includes a bunch of other good software that sweetens the pot considerably. (All apps included in these bundles are full versions.)

Productive Macs Bundle

The Productive Macs bundle (available until November 30) includes nine apps for a total of $30, compared to $239 if purchased separately at regular prices:

TextExpander (Mac Gems review; normally $35): Text Expander is my favorite text-expansion utility—I type a few characters, and the utility expands that abbreviation into a longer snippet of frequently typed text. TextExpander has, according to its built-in tracking feature, typed over 300,000 characters for me in just the past six months.

Path Finder (Mac Gems review; normally $40): A powerful replacement for the Finder, Path Finder includes a dual-pane file browser, a drop stack for temporary file/folder storage, window tabs, folder bookmarks, a built-in Terminal-style shell, a file-transfer queue, file tagging, batch renaming, and hex and ACL editors. And those are just the features the developer notes in its one-sentence summary—Path Finder includes many more “I wish the Finder did this” options.

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Tapbots on Thursday released Tweetbot for Mac in the Mac App Store, though at a price higher than the company had initially intended to charge. The company says the app’s $20 fee comes due to Twitter’s increasing limitations on third-party apps.

Twitter’s new restrictions have left third-party app developers scrambling to figure out how to sustain their businesses. Among the limitations is a hard cap on how many users third-party apps can support; the base limit is 100,000 users, but that number goes higher for apps that had already exceeded 100,000 users by the time Twitter implemented the cap. Back in August, Tapbots pulled the Tweetbot beta to avoid filling up too many of its allotted tokens with free users. The company says that Tweetbot for Mac’s limit is at least double the 100,000 default cap, but hasn’t gotten more specific than that.

“We specifically picked this [$20] price point so that we could continue to support the app even if we run out of tokens,” Tapbots’s Paul Haddad told Macworld.

Haddad says that the token cap and other API restrictions didn’t discourage the company from finishing up Tweetbot for Mac. “If anything,” he said, “it pushed us to get it released even faster.” He did indicate that his company has asked Twitter to raise the token cap for Tweetbot for Mac. “The answer so far is ‘no,’” he said.

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Some developers say that Apple is slowly getting worse at approving apps for the Mac App Store. Apple, of course, reviews all apps submitted to the store, just as it does with the iOS App Store; developers are thus at the company’s mercy when it comes to getting their apps—or updates to those apps—available to customers through the Mac App Store.

And if Apple’s slowing down, developers have little recourse: If you want to sell your apps in the Mac App Store, you play by Apple’s rules. That’s why developers implement sandboxing when Apple says they must—there are no other options. And that’s why many developers, along with some of their customers, are wary about the Mac App Store in general.

What’s causing the slowdown?

Sources suggested to Macworld that when Mac App Store approval times first started slowing down, the blame fell squarely on iOS 6 and the iPhone 5. Developers rushed to submit apps that took advantage of the new operating system and the new iPhone’s taller screen, and Apple chose to reallocate resources from the Mac App Store approval queue to the iOS queue instead.

In theory, though, the iOS approval rush should be over by now. While some developers are still updating their apps with iOS 6 and iPhone 5 compatibility, the days of endless update badges appearing on the App Store seem to be behind us for now. But for some Mac App Store developers, approval times haven’t yet shown signs of improvement.

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This week, Macworld reviewed the new iPhone 5, solved annoyances in iOS 6 and elsewhere, and covered a humble Maps apology from Apple CEO Tim Cook.

The iPhone 5

Although many millions of you didn’t wait for it before buying one for yourselves, our iPhone 5 review was ready for reading. We put the iPhone 5’s battery to the test, and we speculated about why Apple chose to run older apps centered on the taller iPhone’s screen.

Quite frankly, you should be impressed that we wrote all that when we could have been playing with our brand new iPhones squeeeeee!

If you still didn’t get an iPhone 5 of your own, you can now reserve one online to pick up in an Apple Store, keeping your human interaction time and your iPhone waiting period each to a minimum. And if you live in the right place, you could theoretically choose a regional carrier for the iPhone 5 instead the usual national suspects.

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In addition to the many other updates Apple fielded on Wednesday, the company released updates to its two popular photo-editing desktop apps, iPhoto and Aperture, both centered on adding features present in iOS 6.

Both the iPhoto update and the new Aperture update include the ability to use Mountain Lion’s new Shared Photo Streams feature. And each app now features a menu command letting users open iPhoto libraries in Aperture—and Aperture libraries in iPhoto. Both apps also feature performance and stability improvements.

Additionally, iPhoto was tweaked to let users add comments to photos that have already been published to Facebook; the app also adds new card and calendar themes to its library of existing options.

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Rosanne Cash is best known for three things: her lush voice, the folk/country/rock/blues songs she composes and sings, and an affinity for her father Johnny Cash’s music, which she mingles into her repertoire. Less well known is her addiction to technology for both personal and business purposes, which bit her and at least hundreds of thousands of iCloud users over the last few days during an email outage about which Apple has provided few details.

Cash, an avid Twitter user who last year performed a concert drawn from followers’ requests from a new album, took to that social network when iCloud went down. She wasn’t alone: Twitter, Mac user forums, and Apple’s support boards were filled with complaints, anger, and questions about an estimated 30-hour failure in iCloud email. But Cash puts a prominent face on an outage that affect many more users whose experiences might otherwise go unnoticed.

During that time, according to the iCloud status page, first less than 1 percent and then 1.1 percent of iCloud users couldn’t check email either via an email client or the iCloud website. The site continues to update with terse data about affected users and the time of the next update. Apple hasn’t responded to Macworld’s request for information about what caused the outage and how it was communicated to users. While iCloud has 150 million users, Apple doesn’t break out how many of those rely on email. It is likely only a modest fraction because iCloud may be enabled without creating a Me.com address, unlike its predecessor, MobileMe. (I have an iCloud email address which receives spam and email offers from Apple, and I never check it.)

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Ping has ponged. Apple’s social networking service for music, which debuted as part of iTunes 10 in 2010, has come to an end. A message on the service says that it will no longer be available as of September 30. The news was first reported by 9to5Mac.

A social network that allowed you to see what music your friends recommended or were purchasing on the iTunes Store, Ping was announced to great fanfare, but the feature never quite took off. A hint of the service’s demise came in May of this year, when CEO Tim Cook, speaking at the All Things Digital conference, said of it:

We tried Ping and the customer voted and said, this isn’t something I want to put a lot of energy into. Some customers love it, but there’s not a huge number that do, so will we kill it? I don’t know. I’ll look at it.

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PopChar X ( )—the longrunning and well-reviewed application from Ergonis Software for help typing unusual characters—scored a bump to version six on Monday. As always, the app lets users (especially designers of multilingual or technical documents) locate “glyphs” like trademark symbols or the pounds sterling sign, and choose from different versions of those symbols to best match the font of the surrounding text.

The updated version of the software makes it easier to do that matching—PopChar now features a “font preview” that lets users see a character shown in various fonts and sizes; it also includes a customizable “sample text” feature to see how the selected glyphs will look in context, rather than going through a cumbersome choose-then-undo process before hitting on the right font for the character. PopChar also now features new keyboard shortcuts for power users.

PopChar X 6.0 requires OS X 10.5.8 or later, and is compatible with Apple’s new Mountain Lion operating system. The Austrian company’s website lists the software’s price only in euros, not dollars—a single license for the app is €30 (about $38 at today’s rates), and a “family pack” that allows use on up to five computers costs €45; existing users of PopChar can upgrade for €15.

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This week, Apple announced an announcement, Amazon unveiled a Kindle armada, and we covered a virtual metric ton of Mac and iOS apps (assuming metric tons can be virtual, which is an open question).

Perhaps the biggest Apple news of the week concerned something that hasn’t even happened yet: The company announced an event on September 12, at which it will unveil an iPhone 5. Or execute five people. Or celebrate someone’s fifth birthday. Whatever it is, we’re pretty certain the event involves a five. In truth, we made a slew of predictions about what Tim Cook and company might announce next week, and we podcasted some, too.

From TechHive

Amazon unveiled four new Kindle Fires and new Kindles, too. Because Kindles and Kindle Fires are different things. Because that’s not at all confusing.

Fact: There are two 8.9-inch models of Kindle Fire, and only one of them has 8.9 in its name.

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Nokia’s marketing is looking increasingly like, well, marketing. Elsewhere, FedEx prepares for a deluge of packages, there’s no use crying over broken glass, and Tim Cook and Jonathan Ive make a dynamic duo. The remainders for Friday, September 7, 2012 are getting out of town on a boat goin’ to Southern islands.

Nokia faked the still photos too (sefsar)

Designer Youssef Sarhan points out that not only did Nokia fake the video it supposedly shot from its new Lumia 920, but also the still shots that the company posted on its website. Maybe the reason Nokia wouldn’t give a ship date is because the product doesn’t exist.

FedEx Planning for ‘Surge Volume’ Event September 21-24, Coinciding with Rumored iPhone 5 Launch Date (MacRumors)

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Mozilla released Firefox 15.0.1 on Thursday in order to fix a bug that potentially exposed the websites visited by users while in “Private Browsing” mode.

The goal of the “Private Browsing” mode is to enable Firefox users to surf the Web without leaving any traces of the visited websites behind.

According to a support article on Mozilla’s website, while running in Private Browsing mode the browser shouldn’t save visited pages, form and search bar entries, passwords, download entries, cookies, or temporary Internet files, which are collectively known as cached Web content.

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Apple has released a fix for a critical Java vulnerability, while also taking further steps to distance itself from the technology, which has become a major security risk in Web browsers.

Apple released the fix Wednesday for Mac OS X Snow Leopard, Lion and Mountain Lion. The patches, Java for Mac OS X 10.6 Update 10 and Java for OS X 2012-005, shipped a week after Java-steward Oracle released an emergency patch.

As as of this week, more than a quarter-million computers on the Web have been infected with malware exploiting the vulnerabilities, said Atif Mushtaq, a security researcher at FireEye.

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Turns out Twitter needs considerably more than 140 characters to explain its increasingly restrictive application-programming interface (API) changes to developers. On Wednesday, the company started spelling out more details of version 1.1 of that API. (Third-party Twitter apps function using the API, which provides the necessary hooks for developers to fetch and post tweets, look up users and hashtags, and so on.)

Some of the changes are of consequence only to developers, such as the fact that whereas some API calls used to return data in one of several formats, in version 1.1 they appear to return data only in the JSON format. Also notable to developers is that entities—bits of metadata about a tweet, such as which user(s) it mentions, or what hashtags it includes—are now required elements, and not optional; in practice, that won't affect much for endusers.

There is some good news for users (and developers): For example, the substantially improved rate limits on certain common API calls—most now can be accessed at least once per minute, with some supporting many more calls than that. That means encountering API rate-limiting errors should become a thing of the past.

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Nuance on Wednesday announced the launch of Dragon Dictate for Mac 3, the latest generation of its much-loved voice transcription software.

The revamped software is the first update to Dragon Dictate since July’s Mountain Lion debut—which included the introduction of a basic underlying dictation service of its own. But Dragon Dictate still offers advantages to Mac users, most notably its availability for offline use, as well as a customizability that allows the software to recognize and transcribe a user’s personal, idiosyncratic speech patterns.

Nuance says that the latest version of Dragon Dictate is more powerful than its predecessors, offering a 15 percent improvement in transcription accuracy. And Nuance has piled on more options to improve that accuracy, with the addition of “Smart Format Rules” that allow the software to recognize when a speaker is using abbreviations and numbers, along with an “Express Editor” that lets users speak the text they desire—then quickly paste that text into a document in a different app.

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Realmac Software on Wednesday updated Analog ( )—its photo filtering software for the Mac—to version 1.2. In addition to improved support for Mountain Lion and the MacBook Pro with Retina Display, Analog 1.2 adds a variety of improvements for editing your photographs.

Among the new features are a pair of options for better positioning your filtered photos as you apply frames. In previous incarnations of Analog, you could apply borders to your photos, but couldn’t control the specifics of how those borders looked. In version 1.2, however, you can drag the original photo to better center it inside its frame, and you can choose to zoom in or out on the image within its frame, too.

That addresses a criticism we levied against the app in our initial review. Before, frames cropped photos too destructively in some cases; now, that’s no longer a problem. It’s a significant improvement.

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The iPad mini’s hardware may just be a copy of the iPad 2’s, Apple does nothing but copy-and-paste from others, and app developers now have a way to report copycats. The remainders for Tuesday, September 4, 2012 copy loud and clear.

Predicting the “iPad Mini” internals (Marco.org)

Instapaper developer Marco Arment takes a stab at predicting what kind of technology might be inside a putative iPad mini, and guesses that it’ll be awfully similar to an iPad 2. So what you’re saying is there’s an iPad mini inside every iPad 2? Let’s crack that sucker open!

Apple Never Invented Anything (Monday Note)

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The on-again, off-again version of Tweetbot for the Mac is on again—though in a limited beta form.

Over the weekend, Tweetbot maker Tapbots announced via blog post that it had released a beta of its Twitter client for the Mac. But there’s a catch: The current Tweetbot for Mac beta won’t let you add or reauthorize any accounts. In other words, the new version essentially works for people who were already running the Tweetbot for Mac alpha, but not for new users.

“If you try to add a new account or launch the app with no accounts created you are going to end up right here on this page,” Tapbots’ Paul Haddad writes in the blog post announcing the beta.

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The end of August can only mean one thing: The beginning of September. It’s true that time’s unceasing march reminds us that at each new moment we’re older than we’ve ever been. But as inevitably as one second follows the next, you know that Macworld’s Weekly Wrap will once again appear come week’s end, offering up pointers to some of our biggest stories from the past seven days. Let’s get to it.

The password is: Advice

If some nefarious miscreant is going to break into your Dropbox account, at least make him work for it. We step you through enabling Dropbox’s new two-step authentication process. It makes you wonder: If someone invents a new dance craze inspired by such two-factor authentication, will it be called the Two-Step Two-Step?

If you store your iTunes music library on a separate drive, you might find that the app sometimes chooses to forget all about where you store your library and instead reset your library location. There’s a solution for that. Besides cursing, I mean.

We figured out how to use your iPad with AT&T’s new Mobile Share plans. At least, we think we did; AT&T called us and said that maybe the customer service representative we spoke to got some details wrong. At least, we think that’s what the AT&T spokesperson said; it was hard to understand, since they called us on our AT&T iPhone.

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It seems like it was just yesterday that we kicked off our annual Summer of Mac Gems marathon, where we featured a quality, inexpensive Mac app every weekday. We got through a lot of different programs, from tools for managing your Instagram photos to battery saving utilities and everything in between. In case you missed a few, here’s our complete list of products from GemFest 2012.

System Enhancements

Gemini 1.1 combs through your folders and looks for duplicate files, spitting out snarky phrases while you wait.

Speed Download 5.3 combines two functions into one: a simple download manager and a more-complex download and FTP manager.

FileXaminer 2.8 is the Finder’s Get Info command for power users. It adds file management features including Super Delete (which grants admin access for deleting stubborn items) and Force Empty Trash.

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Mountain Lion (aka OS X 10.8) is now available, and thanks to the Mac App Store, the process of purchasing, obtaining, and installing Mac OS X is faster and easier than ever. Like Lion, getting this version of the OS no longer involves driving to the nearest Apple Store or retailer, or waiting for the FedEx truck to arrive. But the better shape your Mac is in before you install Mountain Lion, the better experience you’ll have during and after the upgrade. Let Macworld Senior Editor Dan Frakes help you through the installation process, from the simple to the outrageously complex.

Allow us to introduce the Mountain Lion Installation Guide, available now on the iBookstore, Amazon Kindle store, Nook Bookstore, and as a PDF and a PDF/ePub/MOBI bundle for you to read anywhere you like.

In this book, we cover the requirements for running Apple's newest OS; the things you should do to get your Mac ready; and the purchase and download processes. We walk you through the actual installation; recommend some post-install tasks; discuss some upgrade challenges; and help you decide if a "clean install" is for you. We've also got instructions for creating a bootable Mountain Lion installer disc or drive, as well as for installing Mountain Lion over Snow Leopard (Mac OS X 10.6).

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Congratulations on your ebook settlement—now just don’t spend all of your refund in one online bookstore. Elsewhere, Tim Cook and Larry Page have a tête-à-tête and one fellow makes the most convincing fake Apple Store you’ve ever seen. The remainders for Thursday, August 30, 2012 are almost too real.

AG announces $69M ebook settlement (ABC2News.com)

The settlement struck by three major ebook publishers with 49 states and five U.S. territories now has a price tag associated with it: $69 million. That’s how much will be reimbursed to eligible consumers, who can choose their money either in check form or as a credit for future ebook purchases. Because there’s no reward like giving people money that’ll just get paid back to you anyway!

Exclusive: Google, Apple CEOs in talks on patent issues (Reuters)

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The two best-known virtualization products for the Mac, Parallels Desktop for Mac and Fusion, have both now produced updates optimized for the upcoming Windows 8.

Parallels released Parallels Desktop 8 for Mac Thursday as an upgrade for current users, following VMware, which shipped its Fusion 5 last week.

Both titles sell for $50, although Parallels will price the non-upgrade edition at $80 when it ships that version Sept. 4. VMware also sells a corporate edition, Fusion 5 Professional, for $100.

Both Parallels Desktop 8 for Mac and Fusion 5 have been reworked to take advantage of OS X Mountain Lion, the operating system Apple launched last month, and promise solid support for Microsoft’s upcoming Windows 8.

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First, the bad news. Once again, Mac users are at risk due to a flaw in Java, similar to the one that enabled the Flashback Trojan. Even worse, there isn’t (yet) a patch to fix that vulnerability. But don’t worry: This time around, there’s good news for Mac users: Thanks to changes Apple has made, most of us are likely to be safe from this threat.

That said, although you likely aren’t at risk today, it is clear that Java still represents one of the biggest, most persistent security problems facing users of all operating systems. So I recommend you consider implementing the precautions suggested below.

What happened

On Sunday, August 26, security vendor FireEye published information about a new Java attack that used a previously unknown Java vulnerability. The attack, which originated from China, affected the latest version of the Java Runtime Environment (Java 7, version 1.7). The attack comes through your Web browser when you browse to a malicious site and allows an attacker to silently take complete control over your computer.

After FireEye’s initial post, details about the vulnerability quickly became public and exploits taking advantage of it appeared in multiple attack tools. Further research by security vendor Immunity Inc. indicated that the active exploit actually took advantage of two separate unpatched Java vulnerabilities (what we, in the industry, call zero-days).

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Parallels on Thursday announced the launch of Parallels Desktop 8 for Mac, the latest generation of its applications that lets users run Windows on Mac computers. Current users can upgrade immediately for $50; new users will have to wait until September 4.

The revamped application has been upgraded with Apple’s latest-generation computers and operating system in mind—it supports the high-definition Retina display available on the new MacBook Pro, and it offers a number of features that take advantage of Mountain Lion, including the ability to use the new dictation tool in both Mac and Windows, the addition of Windows notifications in the Mac’s Notification Center, the ability to organize Windows apps in Launchpad, and the use of Mountain Lion gestures (such as pinch-to-zoom) in Windows applications.

Parallels said the new offering is also speedier than its previous product, Parallels 7, beating the speeds of the elder product by as much as 30 percent when gaming, and 25 percent when conducting “virtual machine” operations.

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Researchers have found a second zero-day Java vulnerability that attackers are using to hijack computers on the Web.

An analysis of exploit code found shortly after the first Java flaw was discovered Sunday revealed the second vulnerability. The code has been tied to attackers in China.

“The beauty of this bug class is that it provides 100 percent reliability and is multiplatform,” Esteban Guillardoy, a developer at Immunity, said Tuesday in announcing the discovery of the second bug. “Hence this will shortly become the penetration test Swiss knife for the next couple of years.”

Users of Java, which is installed in billions of devices worldwide, are notorious for not staying up to date with patches. Rapid7 estimates that 65 percent of the installations today are unpatched. However, this time around, people with the latest version of Java were the ones most open to attack.

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Twitter’s API changes have claimed a prominent—if temporary—victim. Tapbots on Monday pulled the download link for the alpha version of its Tweetbot Twitter client for Mac. The company was quick to assure customers that it hasn’t cancelled plans to release Tweetbot for Mac sometime soon; rather, the company simply stopped offering access to the prerelease version of the software because it didn’t want to prematurely inflate its user count unnecessarily.

Among Twitter’s recently announced API changes is a new cap on the total number of users third-party Twitter clients are allowed to support. (To be clear, we aren't talking just the number of users who can be logged in at the same time, but the total number of users who are allowed to log in with that app; if you log in under two different Twitter accounts, you count as two users.) For existing apps, the limit is either 100,000 users or double their user counts as of August 16, whichever is greater; for new apps, the limit is 100,000 users.

Tapbots unveiled Tweetbot for Mac in alpha form before the 100,000 limit was in place, but lead developer Paul Haddad declined to tell Macworld precisely how many users the alpha app had accrued. He did confirm that the alpha release had more than 100,000 users before Twitter’s rule changes.

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Everybody in Cupertino, move up one rung. Apple on Monday announced that two of its influential executives have been promoted and are joining the company’s executive management team.

The lucky gentlemen are Craig Federighi, Apple’s vice president of Mac Software Engineering, and Dan Riccio, the vice president of Hardware Engineering. In addition to joining the company’s executive team, both men have been promoted to senior vice president and will now report directly to CEO Tim Cook.

Additionally, Apple says that Bob Mansfield—the senior vice president of hardware engineering who announced his retirement in June—will remain on at the company, reporting to Cook and working on “future products.” Mansfield’s new title was not specified.

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This week, Macworld solved such mysteries as The Case of the Sleepless Mac, How To Stop Google From Endlessly Checking for Updates, and What to Call a Big Group of iOS Apps. The Weekly Wrap is here to catch you up on those and other chilling tales. from the week gone by.

Mac advice

Mac won’t sleep? We can help you figure out what’s keeping it awake. We can also assist you in getting video from a DVD to Facebook by way of iMovie. (If you read that one backwards, you start with Facebook and end up with a movie, just like in real life.)

It’s possible to organize everything with plain-text notes. Start by writing one that says, “Remember to read that article about getting organized with plain-text notes” on a Post-It, then stick it on your forehead. Trust me on this.

If you have software from Google installed on your Mac, it phones home to the mothership with surprising frequency. It’s not asking for new instructions from its alien overlords (probably); rather, it’s checking for software updates. If you’d prefer not to allow the software to constantly poll for such updates, you can disable the updater rather simply.

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The latest update to Mountain Lion may restore some MacBooks' battery life, but the OS can also stop certain applications in their tracks. Meanwhile, Facebook’s iOS app gets a new lease on life, thanks to the injection of some native code. The remainders for Friday, August 24, 2012 have infinite diversity in infinite combinations.

Mountain Lion update can improve battery life for some Mac notebooks (Ars Technica)

If you’ve been experiencing battery life issues since installing Mountain Lion, you may want to consult a physician—or, possibly, install the 10.8.1 update that dropped yesterday. According to Ars, some users say that the latest version of OS X has increased portable battery life, while others just claim that it’s revitalized their computers, restoring the MacBook’s healthy sheen.

Exceptional Apps (Red Sweater Blog)

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