Seth Dillingham does the hard work. We just donate the software. Red Sweater Software is proud to have joined many other Mac software vendors in sponsoring Seth’s charitable bike-ride across Massachusetts this year. In order to help raise money for cancer research and treatment, he’s arranged with software vendors to auction off “bundles” pretty amazing software at really amazing prices.

This year’s drive is coming to an end, and Seth’s very close to his goal of $6600 in raised money for the cause! It’s time to give it a look if you haven’t already.

To cap off the event this year, Seth’s trying something new. “Make him an offer.” He’s got a list of amazing software, and he invites you to put together a bundle of your choosing and offer a reasonable (good for charity!) price.

So if you’ve been thinking of picking up some great software at a great price and for a great cause, then get your butt over to Seth’s site and make him an offer!

I confess, I was playing along when I linked to Gus Mueller’s interview with himself, foretelling the release today of his latest product, Flying Meat’s Acorn image editing application.

What is Acorn? Gus describes it as “Simple Image Editing,” but I prefer to call it “the keep me from launching Photoshop tool.”

I’ve been lucky to beta test Acorn for the past several months, and as long as I’ve been using it, it’s where I go first when I say it’s “time for Photoshop.” I can accomplish a lot of my goals with the simple editing tools combined with layer support and a bevy of fancy transformation filters.

The worst thing you can say about Acorn is that it’s “missing such and such.” Of course it is. It’s a 1.0 release. But the fact that it’s cool enough to make you desperately want “such and such” means it’s going to be an exciting road ahead for this little app.

Congratulations, Gus. It’s been a long road but you’ve reached 1.0 with panache!

I just noticed a new entry on Gus Mueller’s blog that has me very curious. He’s got an interview with a developer, supposedly releasing a new product on Monday. The interview is sort of comically blacked-out in some important areas, I guess to preserve the secrecy of the product until it launches. But little clues here and there make me pretty confident I know what they’re talking about.

The C4 conference this year was packed with amazing developers, and many of them did hail from the Pacific Northwest. One of the traditions at these conferences is to show off works in progress to other developers. It sort of goes without saying that we’ll keep our traps shut in exchange for getting a glimpse at some of the exciting new things that are in store for the world.

I recall seeing one work-in-progress in particular that sounds like it could be the one in this interview. Boy, I had no idea we’d be seeing it this soon after C4, but if it’s what I’m thinking of, a large number of Mac users are going to be very happy on Monday.

News of MarsEdit 2.0 has spread like wildfire, thanks in no small part to people like you blogging about the news and sharing it with all of your friends. Please don’t stop!

One of the side-effects of this massive news-sharing is I am getting requests from people to release a version of MarsEdit for the PC (for Windows, that is). I addressed this in the comments on Guy Kawasaki’s blog, but I thought I’d reiterate and expand on that here.

I love writing software for the Mac. If I had to write software for another platform, I probably wouldn’t be nearly as interested in doing it. Heck, I might work more on becoming a musician, or a designer, or one of the other many trades that I have an interest in. For that reason, the chances of MarsEdit for Windows are almost nil. There would have to be an incredibly sweet deal, like “this technology makes it painless to deploy your Mac app on Windows!” Not likely.

Fortunately there are some brilliant developers on the Windows side who apparently do like developing for Windows. At least I assume as much because their products are fine-tuned in a way that only happens when somebody cares about and enjoys their work. In many ways, I see these guys as Mac developers who ended up programming for Windows. Lucky for Windows users!

Believe it or not one of the leading products for blogging on Windows is from none other than Microsoft itself. Windows Live Writer is the desktop blogging component of Windows Live. Or something. I don’t know what the heck all that junk means, but I know that when you launch Windows Live Writer, you will feel transferred to a magical place, free of the usual stereotypes against Microsoft products. (Some of Microsoft’s Mac software also achieves this).

Kudos to Microsoft for achieving excellence in a field near to my heart. Joe Cheng, one of the product’s developers, also stays in touch with myself and the Atom Publishing community, sharing his opinions about the ever-evolving client development world.

BlogJet is another excellent application, and is dear to my heart because it’s developed by indie developers. And look! It has a cute globe-oriented icon. We were bound to be app-buddies. The Coding Robots, Dmitry and Vladimir, are a couple guys running a (mostly) Windows software startup near Moscow in Russia. They have a very entertaining blog where you can catch glimpses of what it’s like to run a Russian indie software business. I especially like the toilet paper dispenser that looks like a robot!

I mentioned that the Coding Robots are “mostly” Windows developers, but it turns out that at least Dmitry is also a huge Mac fan. He does most of his development on a Mac, even though the flagship product of the company is Windows-only. I expect to see more offerings for the Mac from these guys, because I’m sure by now Dmitry has caught “Cocoa Fever,” big time. In fact, Dmitry just released a public beta of his upcoming Mac OS X application, Mémoires, which is about the simplest journal-keeping application you’ll ever see, but is very elegant and easy on the eyes.

In fact, the only glaring omission I see in Mémoires is a “Send to MarsEdit” option. Add that, and we’ll be cooking!