How does a 20% discount sound? How about 20% off software from over 30 developers? This list has been growing since One Finger Discount started this week and continues to grow as developers jump on board with a pretty darn good deal if you're in the market for any one of these awesome applications. They run the gamut from productivity to games to blogging software.

Kudos to Daniel Jalkut of Red Sweater Software for putting these deals together on one page, somewhat cheekily as a response to MacHeist, it would seem. The One Finger? Well, that comes from 1/5, 20% discount as opposed to a five-finger discount (free). 20% is still a steal, right? Very clever, Mr. Jalkut -- we'll leave the readers to consider which finger they should order with.

[via Macworld]

Just in case you were waiting for the stop-motion app on your hard drive to be compatible before switching to Snow Leopard, you can stop waiting -- even if you're using some other program to do stop motion, iStopMotion is the best and brightest, and with the brand new update to version 2.1, it's completely compatible with the newest version of OS X.

OK, you probably weren't waiting for this upgrade to bring the OS up to date, but hey, Snow Leopard compatibility is a nice selling point with any app. This upgrade also includes the ability to put markers (with their own name, color, and description) in the timeline of your video, as well as a full Japanese localization, to go along with the English, German, and French already in there. It's a free update for all current users, and considering that iStopMotion has made quite a few appearances in various Mac software bundles, odds are you've already got it anyway.

Software bundles seem to be all the rage nowadays, but in my humble opinion, MacHeist is still the best. It doesn't just lump a bunch of apps together for special price, but instead, it turns getting a discount into a game.

As a recent Mac switcher, I was utterly confused by MacHeist 3, the first edition in which I participated. Someone told me to check out the MacHeist bundle, so I went to the web site to see what applications it contained. But the site didn't tell me. It soon became clear that I was going to have to work for my software!

The whole idea, if you're not familiar with MacHeist, is that you need to complete a series of challenges, labeled "heists," in order to get free software. Yes, free. As in what lunches aren't. And the software isn't anything to sneeze at (neither are lunches, by the way), as there are always some real gems to be found.

UPDATE: We took the 4 from the title as it is currently unknown whether this is actually MacHeist 4 or an early bundle offer.

There are a lot of space geeks out there. You know the type; they wake up in the early hours of the morning to watch launch coverage or live feeds from the International Space Station, they follow NASA astronauts on Twitter, and they're married to people in the space biz. Oh, wait -- that's me!

Yeah, I'm a bona-fide space geek and proud of it, so I was thrilled to hear that the official NASA iPhone app [iTunes Link] is now available free of charge. The app was created by the New Media Team at NASA Ames Research Center, and for their first app it's surprisingly robust, bug-free and full of features.

The front screen of the app provides a window into current and future NASA missions. Along the bottom of the display are buttons for missions, images, videos, and updates. The updates are fairly current -- there were 11 posts about various Earth and space missions today alone -- and often include links to videos.

I found that the app worked best when I was downloading the videos over Wi-Fi, so be sure to keep that in mind if you're trying to get watch a launch video while on 3G service. Check out the gallery below for screenshots from the app.

In my continuing campaign to get as many Apple fans out there as possible to take part in National Novel Writing Month, I'm always looking for deals on writing software. Earlier in the week, I reported on a deal that Scrivener is providing for NaNoWriMo participants. Well, not to be left out of the fun, Storyist Software also has some deals set up for would-be novelists.

If you're in the Bay Area, you might want to take part in NaNoWriMo's Night of Writing Dangerously on Sunday, November 22, 2009 from 5 to 11 PM in the Julia Morgan Ballroom at the Merchant's Exchange Building in San Francisco. Every writer who participates in this fundraising event gets a free copy of Storyist 2 from Storyist Software, and two top fundraisers for the event will each receive an Amazon Kindle and a $50 gift card from Storyist.

Storyist always provides a 30-day free trial version of their namesake software, but this time they'll give you a temporary license that lasts through the first week of December if you contact the company from their NaNoWriMo page. In addition, if you decide to purchase the software at any point during NaNoWriMo, just use the coupon code NANOWRIMO at checkout and you'll receive 25% off of the download-only version (US$59.00) or the boxed edition (US$79.00).

Now you have your choice of two great writing tools to use during NaNoWriMo, so you have no excuse not to sign up for the creative writing event of the year and churn out that novel you've always been meaning to write. Get signed up today!

Many Mac pros are unnaturally fond of SuperDuper!, the accurately-named backup utility from Shirt Pocket Software. The application is inexpensive (free, actually, if you don't want advanced features -- the best US$27.95 you've ever spent, otherwise), powerful, and easily makes fully-bootable backups of your Mac.

The latest version of SuperDuper! has just been released. Version 2.6.2 is now available and has a ton of new features and fixes. Here's the scoop from the revision history:

• Significant copy speed improvements (up to 2 times faster!)
• Preserves compression when copying
• Fixed extra copying under Snow Leopard
• Scheduled copies in old format are now disabled and we prompt the user to recreate
• Scheduled copies work on Japanese systems and with more Unicode/composed character drive names
• Backup-on-mount should work on 10.4.11
• Adjusted SDUtil path to improve robustness when application is moved (now symlinked/refreshed)
• Minor copy tweaks
• Reworked SL status to use 1000B = 1MB, 1024B = MiB for Leopard and earlier.
• Fixed crontab escaping if user has tcsh as their default shell
• Fixed issues with explicit Spotlight disable/enable under 10.5+

If you currently have SuperDuper!, you'll be notified of the update the next time you fire it up. If you don't have it, get it.

Thanks to Scott for the tip!

As you probably recall, Microsoft dropped Visual Basic from Office for the Mac with Office 2008. At the time, I was working for a company that had a huge investment in systems that relied on Visual Basic, and that change was a real blow. In fact, we didn't upgrade past Office 2004 just to avoid trouble and plan our next step.

If anyone else is using Office 2004 for that reason, here's a thin shard of hope for you. This week, Microsoft's Office for Mac Team announced that mainstream support or Office '04, scheduled to end on October 13, 2009, will be extended through January 10, 2012.

Why extend support? As the blog post notes, Visual Basic support will return in the next major release of Office for the Mac, scheduled to hit the stands in 2010. This way, folks reliant on VB will be able to hold on until that new release is available. This is good news for anyone who was wondering how to migrate from a slew of mission-critical scripts.

After several years of trying to figure out what task manager for Mac and iPhone worked best with my peculiar style of organization, I finally settled on Things from Cultured Code. The Mac application is easy to use, uncluttered, and can take advantage of many keyboard shortcuts, while the iPhone app [iTunes Link] gives me a portable version of the Things database to take on the road. While the iPhone app can do a local sync to a Mac, it still doesn't do over-the-air syncing, which I hope Cultured Code will add in a future release.

When I made Things my task manager, I needed to make sure that I could use the same database on both my desktop Mac and my MacBook Air, since the Mac version doesn't do syncing either. It turns out that one of the easiest ways to do this is to use the wonderful cloud storage application Dropbox to hold my Things database, and then point Things on both Macs to use the shared database.

Fortunately, a Brit by the name of Bradley Wright had already done all of the hard work and had written up some command-line instructions on how to do this. Brad does all the work in the Terminal; here, I'll describe how to do most of the work in the Finder with the exception of creating a symbolic link at one point.

I'm a sucker for anything that allows me to get secure remote access to my home machine, so when I saw that FarFinder, the remote access tool from FlyingMac, was on sale for US$20, I jumped on the chance to buy it. It'll be on sale until October 22nd, so if you want to get the application for US$15 less than the normal price, you'll want to head over to the FlyingMac site right now. The family license is US$20 off during the sale, and is available for US$45.

The last time someone at TUAW wrote about FarFinder was back in 2008, when blogger Mat Lu referred to it as "your Finder on the web." That's a perfect way to describe FarFinder, since it makes your Mac's files and folders (plus any network-attached or external drives that are mounted) available to you from most web browsers and your iPhone (see screenshot at right).

FlyingMac offers a 20-day free trial of the application. One thing I really like about FarFinder is that once you've purchased it, there are no extra subscription fees. That means that US$20 price will give you service forever...or at least until there's a major upgrade you need to purchase.

Okay kids, this is starting to get a little out of hand now. Palm has once again pushed back at Apple, releasing webOS 1.2.1 today that "resolves an issue preventing media sync from working with the latest version of iTunes." What's that issue, you might ask? Well, I'd say the fact that Apple isn't too happy that Palm is breaking all sorts of rules to make their device appear as an iPhone.

It all started back in May, when it was determined that plugging a Palm Pre into a Mac will allow it to sync content with iTunes with no issues. This honeymoon period didn't last too long and once Apple figured out what was going on, Apple swiftly released an update to iTunes that prevented syncing from non-Apple devices.

Apparently, that wasn't good enough for Palm and it was determined that they were trying to make the Pre appear to be an Apple device when it was plugged in for syncing. Palm turned around and released yet another webOS update that fixed the sync and it worked well until the USB-IF got involved and sided with Apple, telling Palm they had to cease and desist.

Looks like Palm is back on the attack and this latest release is sure to stir up the pot once again.

If there's one Mac application that has seemingly been around forever, it's StuffIt. This compression and archiving utility was the tool to use for compressing files years ago, and I'll still occasionally run into a .sit file extension when pulling up old files. The original application was the source of a bit of Mac folklore, as it was developed and supported for quite a while by a young student by the name of Raymond Lau.

Mac OS X did its best to kill off StuffIt by adding built-in support for Zip compression, but the utility has continued to flourish over the years. During the last week, Smith Micro released the newest version of the application, StuffIt Deluxe 2010 (US$79.95, with an introductory price of US$29.95 through October 15, 2009).

Since compression has been part of Mac OS X for quite a while, you might think that this application would have limited usefulness. Smith Micro is spinning StuffIt Deluxe 2010 as a better way to share large files over the Internet. How does it work? Read on, my friends...

A TUAW reader zapped us a note with his BlackBerry device to tell us that as of today, BlackBerry Desktop Software for Mac is available (we first noted it as "coming in September" back in July).

It's a free download [link], and requires Mac OS X 10.5.5 or better, BlackBerry device software version 4.2 or higher, and iTunes 7.2 or newer. Key features of the software include the ability to synchronize your iTunes library with your CrackBerry, sync calendars, contacts, and appointments, & add or delete apps and files.

This is the first time that Research In Motion (RIM) has developed their own solution for syncing Macs and BlackBerry handhelds. In the past, the company made a version of PocketMac for BlackBerry available at no cost to Mac-owning customers, and other third-party developers such as Mark/Space have had BlackBerry solutions available for many years.

Thanks to Storry for the tip!

The long awaited and much vilified AT&T MMS service was finally launched in the U.S. yesterday. I've scoured the Apple support boards, and it seems like it was pretty tame, with some reports of failure to get the update, failure to get the MMS functions after an update, late delivery of MMS messages, and so on.

In my own circle of friends it seemed to go OK, but most of them didn't need MMS and didn't really care about it one way or the other.

So how was it for you? The update of your dreams, or your worst nightmare?

The first time I saw the classic movie "2001: A Space Odyssey," I was 10 years old. If the story and the underlying meaning were confusing to me as a kid, the futuristic technology wasn't, and I liked the video communications devices and the flat Newspad.

It's almost 9 years late (2010), but we finally have a cool way to communicate with video, and it doesn't require using a wall-mounted AT&T pay phone. 12mail Video Messenger [iTunes Link] for iPhone brings clear, fast video messaging to your device in 12-second chunks.

An offshoot of 12seconds.tv, 12mail Video Messenger grabs up to a 12 second video on the iPhone 3GS and delivers it to your Facebook and Twitter pals with push notification. If your buds don't have 12mail, they can view the video on their Facebook wall or through Twitter.

While there's not a lot you can say in 12 seconds, the app is great for sending friends short video blips, showing them something funny, or inviting them to join you for a drink. Since 12mail uses geolocation, your friends will know just where you sent your message from.

Some folks may wonder about the advantages of 12mail over MMS, particularly since AT&T is supposed to finally "flip the switch" on that service today. Those advantages are the integration with Facebook and Twitter, as well as the fact that this won't use up your text message allotment.

12mail is fairly simple to use, although I had some issues returning a video message to a person who had just been added to my Twitter "following" list. A query to 12mail's tech support got me a quick response, and I found out that I just needed to tap the refresh button in the top left corner of the list of Twitter users to get the latest people that I'm following. One other little bug seems to be that the "tilt iPhone to start recording" function doesn't work, at least not for me. If you don't have an iPhone that supports video recording, you can still record audio and take one picture to illustrate what's going on.

If you're a Twitter or Facebook user, particularly one with an iPhone 3GS, installing 12mail is a no-brainer. It's fun, it's free, and it's a taste of the future. Check out the gallery for some screenshots of 12mail.

We took a look at CameraBag for the iPhone in June. It's a nifty little app that applies several pre-set filters to your photos. Now, the developers have released an almost identical app for the desktop.

Users got hooked on the ease of adding filters and altering photos, and they wanted it on their desktops and laptops too, so now it's a reality.

CameraBag Desktop for the Mac gives you 9 basic filters, 7 vary the color to match various films, and 2 filters provide gray scale filters.

The filters can be layered one on top of the other if you desire, and with the 'reprocess' command. Every time you press it you get a variation on the original filter.

As on the iPhone app, you can choose a border for your picture, and then output the picture at the original size or you can scale it down.

The filters mimic the look of old instant camera films, and a host of other camera, film and lens combinations.

CameraBag is not for the advanced digital photographer, but if you want to take an image and quickly apply a filter and a border this is a welcome tool.

I'd like to see some more things added, like saturation controls and sliders for color temperature and sharpness. Adding those features combined with the filters would give a user almost unlimited control of the look of the images. As it is, your starting point is always what the designer of the filter had in mind. While you can reprocess, you have no control, and the parameters change at random.

In the gallery I've included some variations on a single photo to show you some of the possibilities. You can also visit a web page to see how customers have used the CameraBag technology.

CameraBag is US$19.00 and can be ordered direct from the developer.