As long-time readers of my blog will know, I'm a fan of bundles as a marketing mechanism. They help expose apps to a wider audience, and encourage people who normally might not buy an app to give it a go, by getting a great deal for several apps at once.

So when a new bundle comes along, chances are I'll agree to participate. The latest such bundle is from Appilicious, and is called the "Webilicious Design Bundle".

As the name would suggest, this bundle has a focus on web design. It's a little different than many others, in that it includes non-software products amongst the software, including design themes and 6 months hosting at my favorite web host, Site5.

As for my contribution, I'm including the full Standard license of Simon, my flagship app to monitor websites and servers for changes or failures. The Standard license normally sells for $59.95, and the entire bundle costs only $49.99, so if you want Simon, you're saving $10 and effectively getting all those other goodies thrown in for free. What a great deal!

Simon is a powerful app, and soon will be even more powerful — I'm putting the finishing touches on version 2.6, which adds a powerful new filter feature, and lots more. See the recent Simon-related blog posts for more information.

Click here to take advantage of this great bundle, before it expires!

As mentioned in my Simon 2.6 progress report a few days ago, this version includes another big change.

In prior versions, the Simon Monitor window included a Notifications log, which listed when notifiers are used. This is quite useful, but could be more useful by listing other interesting things.

I've been thinking about adding more logging for quite a while, but the new filter feature really brought home for me the need for it, since I wanted some way to see what each filter is outputting. Especially useful for filters using powerful regular expressions and such.

So version 2.6 now replaces the Notifications log with a more comprehensive Activity log. It still lists notifications, but now also lists several other kinds of actions on tests. For example, it lists when a test is edited, paused, offline, started checking, stopped or completed. Plus it lists the output and status of the service and each filter.

The report variables have also been updated to reflect the new Activity log. The old variables will continue to work, but there is now an Activity block, and new Type, Status and Details variables.

Here's a screenshot of the log area of the Simon Monitor window, showing the new Activity log. In the top five lines, you can see Simon starting checking the "Filter test 2" test, the status and output of the Web service, the output of the two filters, and the successful completion of the test:

Want to try it yourself? Just ask!

Time for another Simon 2.6 progress report!

We're getting very close to being ready for a beta release. I just need to update the User Guide, which may be moving into a help book (but will remain online too), and tidy up a few areas. If you want to try the latest alpha release, and help me test these new features, please contact me for the download URL (sorry, only available to licensed users for now).

Since the last update, I've added three new filter plugins: Format, Number and Override. These will all be very useful in analyzing the output of services and other filters.

Here are the release notes on these new features:

• Added a Format filter plug-in. This enables the combination of values from the service and filters, via an insert variable menu, along with your own text. Handy to append the output of multiple filters, wrap something in quote marks, and other uses.
• Added a Number filter plug-in. This expects the input text to be a valid number, so is typically used after a Find or Block filter to narrow down the text. It converts the text to a number, optionally ignoring specified characters, and with a customizable decimal separator so you can match the format of the text. Then it compares that number against either a fixed number, or the number from the previous check, plus or minus some delta. It can compare using "is", "is not", "is greater than", "is less than", "is in range" or "is not in range". It then results in either a change or failure, as desired. So you can use this to detect if a disk is getting full, a price has changed by a specified threshold, a file count has changed, or many other uses.
• Added an Override filter plug-in. You can use this to alter the status of a test from Unchanged, Changed, Failure, or from a success status (the first two), or any status, into a different status, including automatically detecting if a change occurred. You can also alter the output text or error message, including using variables (similar to the Format plug-in).

Here's a screenshot of the filter portion of the Edit Test window, showing a Find filter using a regular expression to output the RSS feed URL of a web page — which you may recognize from a previous update. Here, I've added a Format filter after the find, which outputs the test name before the output of the Find filter, and wraps that in quotes:

Here's one of the built-in Number-based filters, showing its Edit Filter window. This will result in a failure with a custom error message if the input number is more than 95 — useful when looking at a percentage, e.g. disk usage. You can of course add additional filters (or customize this one in the Edit Test window) to handle other cases:

Another Edit Filter screenshot, this time showing a built-in Override filter. This can be used to change a failure into a success. The output text will be the error message, so it'll result in a change status if the error changes:

Lastly, here are three filters in the Edit Test window, based on the Block, Number and Override plugins. This test looks at Apple's store page for a specific product, and uses the Block filter to extract the price, the Number filter to result in a change if the price is different than the previous check by at least $5 (plus or minus), and the Override (if a failure occurred) to alter the failure to unchanged status, and alter the output to indicate that the price couldn't be determined:

I hope that gives a hint at the power and flexibility of the new filters features — and remember that they also support scripts, so you can create new filters to do pretty much anything.

The latest alpha release also includes another big change, which I'll discuss in a few days.

Want to try it yourself? Just ask!

I've have been rather quiet of late, haven't I? I thought I'd post a status update, as preview of my traditional end-of-year summary.

I spent the first half of 2010 working on Tweeps, a free app for iPad, iPhone and iPod touch to easily manage Twitter accounts. It was an interesting experience; I had written two previous apps for iPhones (SmileDial and Valentines), but Tweeps was a much bigger project, and my first iPad app. It includes a lot of handy technology that I'll put to use in future iOS apps.

After releasing a few bug-fix updates of my various Mac apps, I got to work on version 2.6 of Simon, my flagship product to monitor websites and servers for changes and failures. This is a significant update, and I've blogged about it a number of times recently, showing sneak peeks of some of the new features. Work on it progresses nicely. Recently Daniel was able to update the Twitter plugin to work with the new OAuth authentication scheme required with Twitter. I'm hoping to have Simon 2.6 ready for beta testing around mid-October, with a general release around mid-November. (And in the meantime, contact me if you want to try a sneak peek release — available to licensed users only.)

An interesting thing that occurred a little while ago was the sale of my first Mac OS X app. Narrator, my app to read out stories in multiple voices, was acquired by Mariner Software. That was quite an interesting experience; I'd never sold off an app before. But I still feel it was the best thing for everybody: I wasn't giving Narrator the love it deserved, and it's a great fit with Mariner's other apps. Based on that experience, I'll definitely consider offers on other of my apps, when appropriate.

After Simon 2.6 is out, assuming I have time, I'm going to close out the year with version 1.4 of Caboodle, my lean clean snippet machine. This update will include some much-requested new features, like a default font preference, encryption of child entries with the parent, and more. If Simon takes longer than anticipated, this might get pushed to next year, but I'm hoping I can get it done this year.

Next year I want my top priority to be finishing off version 2.0 of Time Out, my very handy break reminder tool. I had wanted to finish it last year, but it got postponed by Tweeps and Simon updates. It remains an important and exciting update, though, so I'm really looking forward to it. I'm sure it'll be worth the wait. And as previously mentioned, everyone who makes a donation for Time Out now will be automatically eligible for the full-featured paid edition at no additional cost — so you can set your own price for it now! This offer expires when version 2 is released. Thank you to everyone who has already donated; the volume of donations is really encouraging.

So that's where things stand now, and for the next few months. I have big plans for several of my apps after that, but I don't want to talk about future plans too much, since everything is always subject to change. What's important to me is that everything I release is of the best quality, not that I meet arbitrary deadlines. That's just the way I roll.

As mentioned in previous blog posts, I'm working on version 2.6 of Simon, my flagship Mac app to monitor websites and servers for changes and failures.

A few brave/lucky people have tried the previous alpha release, and didn't find any problems with it, which is always reassuring. Now I have another alpha available. It is only available to licensed users currently; it'll be opened up to everyone once in beta. If you want to try it, and help me test these new features, please contact me for the download URL.

I spent the past week working on a new filter plugin. It turned out to be one of the most powerful (and code-intensive) features of Simon, second only to the Script plugin.

I was originally planning on having separate "Keyword" and "Regular Expression" plugins, but decided that it'd make more sense to combine them into one, since they have a lot of commonality. So the new plugin is called simply "Find", and it supports both.

Here are the release notes on this new feature:

• Added a Find filter plug-in. This is as easy or powerful as you want: it supports both simple text matching and regular expression searches.
• The Find filter plug-in can find one occurrence, find a specific occurrence (like for the Block plug-in), find all occurrences (outputting them separated by your choice of delimiter), or find & replace those possiblities, outputting something else for the match(es) -- especially useful with regular expression searches.
• For simple text matching mode, the Find plug-in supports finding Contains, Starts With, Whole Words, and Ends With. For regular expression mode, it has a helpful menu of regular expression operators to help build expressions, including a dynamically-updating list of capture group markers for replacements.
• Find-based filters can even result in a failure if the text was or wasn't found, if desired -- useful to detect text that mustn't or must be there.

Here's a screenshot of the filter portion of the Edit Test window, demonstrating some of the power of regular expression-based filtering, to output the RSS feed URL of a web page. Notice that it outputs just the contents of the first capture group (the portion between parentheses), rather than entire match:

And a simple text match in the Edit Filter window:

The little drop-down menu with the magnifying glass icon hides a lot of power; use it to choose the find or find & replace mode, text matching or regular expressions, and other options. In regex mode it lists lots of regex operators as a handy guide; just choose one to insert it into the find or replace field (as appropriate):

Lastly, as another example, here's the filter portion of the Edit Filter window showing one of the built-in regular expression-based filters, that uses Find All to list all URLs in the input as a comma-separated list (and result in a failure if there aren't any):

Want to try it yourself? Just ask!

As discussed in my previous blog post, Simon version 2.6 is coming along nicely.

I am now ready to let a few brave souls try it. See that previous blog post for a list of the changes in this version.

If you'd like to start using an alpha release of Simon 2.6, and help me test the new filter feature and other changes, please contact me, and I'll give you the sooper sekret download URL for this version. Note: only licensed Simon customers can run alpha releases.

Although I've tested it, and it seems bug-free based on my testing, there may be bugs that I haven't found. So I want to limit the number of people using it for now. Once it's had some successful alpha testing, I'll open it up to more people, and once it's feature-complete, I'll do public beta releases.

I'll ask alpha testers to take an extra precaution: you should make a copy of your Simon data (located at "~/Library/Application Support/Dejal/Simon", where "~" means your home folder), just in case. If you want to revert back to version 2.5.7, the data should remain compatible, though any filter changes won't be reflected in that version.

The current Simon 2.6 alpha comes with two filters by default: "Block" and "Change". Both use the "Block" filter plugin; the difference is simply that "Block" includes the Start and End fields in the Edit Test window, like Smart Change Detection, and "Change" doesn't. Both will detect a change.

When you upgrade, existing Smart Change Detection settings should be automatically converted to the corresponding filter settings. Tests with change detection disabled will have no filter; tests with change detection enabled but blank fields will have one "Change" filter; tests with Start and/or End text entered will have one "Block" filter.

No Script-based filters or other filter plugins are included in this release, but they will be added in future updates. I'd really appreciate it if you wanted to write some Script-based filters that I could bundle with the app.

I hope that the alpha testers will try the various new features of Simon 2.6, and let me know of any problems or areas for improvement.

If you're a licensed Simon user and want to try Simon 2.6, please contact me for the download URL.

Since people have been asking and are eagerly awaiting the forthcoming Simon 2.6 release, I thought I'd give a progress report.

Simon 2.6 is coming along nicely. Software development takes time, and the filter feature is quite complex, but the infrastructure is finished, and the Block plugin (which implements the existing Smart Change Detection and more) is done, plus Script plugin support is implemented and being tested now. I then want to add a couple more plugins, though I might do an alpha release once Script is finished.

Here's a teaser screenshot of some filters used in the Edit Test window; notice specifying the input text for each, and advanced options on the second filter (the third one doesn't actually have any additional effect; the Block filter detects changes too):

And the Edit Filter window showing a Script-based filter, which will look familiar to existing Simon users, since it's quite similar to Edit Service etc:

As useful and powerful as the new filter feature is, it isn't the only change in 2.6 by a long shot.

Here are the current release notes, as a sneak peek of the goodies coming in this new version. More stuff will be added before the first beta release, too:

Filters:

• Added a new Filters feature, replacing the old Smart Change Detection feature in the Edit Test window. The Block filter performs the same function as that old feature, plus several other filters are supported to do other analysis of test output, and you can write custom scripts to create additional filters.
• Added a Filters window listing the available filters, and enabling adding, editing or deleting them.
• Added an Edit Filter window to add and edit filters, much the same as the Edit Notifer etc windows. It includes options to configure how the filter is used, plug-in-specific controls, and auto-pause settings.
• Added a Block filter plug-in to support the old Smart Change Detection functionality. It extracts a block of text between specified start and end text.
• The Block filter also supports new options to search from the start or the end of the input text, and search for a specific occurrence of the text, e.g. start from the 3rd occurrence from the end of the text.
• Extended the Script plug-in to work as a filter, too. This enables you to create your own custom filters using AppleScript, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, or unix shell scripts.
• Added a checkbox to the Script filter editor to control whether to merge or override the result of the script with the status of the service and any previous filters.
• Added a VariablesCSV variable, that outputs a comma-separated list of all other variable names. Potentially useful when debugging your scripts.

Services and Notifiers:

• Enhanced the Web (HTTP) service plug-in to include checkboxes in the Cookies table: checked cookies automatically update their values (as before). Cookies with blank values are now also supported; they are not sent. New cookies are recorded automatically. So you can prevent a cookie from being recorded by listing it with an unchecked box, e.g. to send the same value every time. Session cookies are now recorded as unchecked with blank values (so are not sent or updated).
• Reworded the TestStatusPhrase variable to eliminate the word "just", since the event may have occurred a while ago, if it is an ongoing failure.
• The new VariablesCSV variable is available for services and notifiers, too.

Other:

• Added a File > Save Log... command to enable saving the current log information to a tab-delimited text file. It saves just the selected lines if there are at least two selected, otherwise all lines. (You can already copy selected lines, too.)
• Separated the Pause and Resume commands in the menu and toolbars, so it is easier to pause or resume all tests when there is a mixture of paused and active tests.
• The Pause interval is now remembered as a default for next time, even across launches of Simon.
• Added optional support for Wi-Fi hotspots. When enabled, Simon tries to fetch a known value when it is first launched or after the Mac wakes from sleep, and goes into a "hotspot" mode if it receives something unexpected -- probably a hotspot login page. This will avoid having false failures when you have an internet connection but need to log in to the hotspot. This feature is disabled by default, but can be enabled via a new General preference if you have Simon on a laptop.
• Sorting on the Status column in the Monitor window now sorts so checking is at the top, followed by failure, changes, recovery, and paused at the bottom (with time-sensitive statuses in chronological order).
• Improved handling of sorting all table columns.
• Many other behind-the-scenes improvements made possible by dropping Tiger support.
• Now requires a minimum of Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard).

• Keyword: looking for a single bit of text.
• Regular expression: using regex to match text.
• Number: detect if a numeric value is greater or less than a reference value or the previous value, optionally by a threshold amount.
• Link Validator: check for broken links on a web page.
• Concatenate: combine the results of two filters.
• Result Override: change the status (failure, unchanged, changed) into another status.

Some of those might be deferred till a future release, depending on how long they take. But with the Script filter, you'll be able to create your own filters as easily as you can create service and notifier scripts.

I hope you're as excited by Simon 2.6 as I am! It'll be a great release. Follow @dejal on Twitter, like the Dejal Facebook page, or read this blog for more news on development progress and the forthcoming alpha and beta releases.

I'm pleased to announce that Dejal Simon, my flagship server monitoring app, is now featured in two bundles: the existing TheMacBundles collection, and an innovative new VoteBundle.

VoteBundle started out with 20 apps, and 40,000 Mac users cast 200,000 votes for which apps they most wanted in the bundle. The most popular 10 apps remain, including Simon.

Dejal Simon is the essential site monitoring tool for Mac OS X. It checks servers for changes or failures, and notifies you via e-mail, sound, speech, Twitter, or other means. You can use it to track updated sites, and to alert you when an important server goes down or recovers.

Both bundles include the full Simon Standard license — normally $59.95!

You can see more of the application on the Simon pages.

Version 2.6 is currently in development, and a beta will be out soon. It includes a powerful new Filter feature, enabling much more flexible analysis of test output, plus cookie management and many more enhancements. Version 2.6 will be a free update for all licensed Simon users.

Each bundle also includes several other fine apps. TheMacBundles includes 12 apps for only $49.95, and VoteBundle includes 10 apps for only $39. A bargain! Especially since you're getting a Standard license for Simon — for less than it normally costs by itself. Why not buy both bundles, and get 21 great apps for just $88.50?!

Visit TheMacBundles.com and VoteBundle.com to learn more about each, or to take advantage of one or both of these great deals.

The people behind the popular Mac Bundle Box promotions have launched an innovative new bundle concept: the VoteBundle.

Three Dejal products are in the running: Simon, my tool to monitor websites and servers for changes or failures; Narrator, my fun app to read out stories in multiple voices (soon to move to Mariner Software); and BlogAssist, my handy tool to make marking up HTML easier. As I write this, Simon is doing quite well, though could certainly use more votes, while the other two are trailing. If you like these apps, please vote them up!

Here's an intro video (not iOS compatible, unfortunately):

VoteBundle 1 - www.VoteBundle.com from Christian Owens on Vimeo.

Welcome to VoteBundle the very first community driven, democratic Mac software bundle. Cast your votes now, www.VoteBundle.com

I'm pleased to announce that Dejal Simon, my flagship server monitoring app, is featured in the TheMacBundles collection.

Dejal Simon is the essential site monitoring tool for Mac OS X. It checks servers for changes or failures, and notifies you via e-mail, sound, speech, Twitter, or other means. You can use it to track updated sites, and to alert you when an important server goes down or recovers.

The bundle includes the full Simon Standard license — normally $59.95!

You can see more of the application on the Simon pages.

Version 2.6 is currently in development, and a beta will be out soon. It includes a powerful new Filter feature, enabling much more flexible analysis of test output, plus cookie management and many more enhancements. Version 2.6 will be a free update for all licensed Simon users.

This bundle also includes 11 other fine apps, for only $49.95. A bargain! Especially since you're getting a Standard license for Simon — for less than it normally costs by itself.

Visit TheMacBundles.com to learn more, or to take advantage of this great deal.

Simon, my flagship Mac app to monitor websites and servers for changes or failures, has been updated to version 2.5.7. It includes just a couple of changes, but is a recommended update for everyone:

• Fixed a bug in the Port plug-in where it would misbehave if the text to receive or send started with a "-" character. This could affect many people, as the default Incoming Email (POP) service uses this when the server doesn't accept the login.
• Fixed an issue where a notification could fail if the TestChangeCount, TestFailureCount or TestRecoveryCount variables are used.

Please note: version 2.6, currently scheduled for release in July, will require Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) as a minimum OS. So (unless there are any further bug-fix releases) this will be the last version that supports Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger).

Download Simon 2.5.7 now!

Simon, my essential server monitoring tool, has been updated to version 2.5.6. This update is recommended for everybody, and includes:

• Changed the reports to trim off the filename for the OutputLocation report variable when using the file:// protocol, to avoid breaking reports like the iPhone template.
• The License window is now brought to the front when the application is activated, if it is open, to avoid it being mistakenly hidden behind the Montor window (e.g. if it is automatically hidden).
• Fixed an issue with counting the number of active tests, where it was mistakenly counting "waiting" tests as active, even if they're normally paused.
• Added a hidden preference to output debug information about the internet connection (for use with the automatic offline mode). It can be activated by entering "defaults write com.dejal.simon2 InternetConnectionDebugMode YES" in Terminal.

Download Simon 2.5.6 now!

Sometimes I'm just too clever for my own good. Or more likely, not clever enough.

My apps have a handy license lookup feature, where you can enter your name and licensed email address and click a Find button to look up your license if you ever need to re-enter it, without having to store the serial number somewhere. But it's long had problems handling diacritical characters (e.g. "é") on the server side, so in Simon 2.5.4 I made a change to solve that. However, that change inadvertently broke another aspect of the license lookup.

So, here's version 2.5.5. I really dislike having to do a bug fix to fix a bug fix, both because releasing is a fair bit of work, and I know that people don't like having to download an update too soon after another one. But in this case it's unavoidable.

The problem didn't affect many people, but it's the kind of problem that must be fixed even if only a few people are affected — can't have licensed users unable to enter their licenses!

Anyway, many apologies to those affected, either experiencing the problem themselves or having the hassle of downloading another update so soon. You can skip this update if you like; if you've already added your license, there's no need to update. If you're still evaluating, you could skip it too, though will probably need to upgrade if you are on 2.5.4 when you do purchase.

Download Simon 2.5.5 now!

Happy Thanksgiving everyone! Please note that Dejal support will probably be delayed over the next couple of days due to Thanksgiving events, but I will catch up with all queries as soon as possible after that.

Simon, my website and server monitoring tool, is available for discounted prices from a few places for just a little longer.

• TheMacBundles includes a Standard license for Simon (normally $59.95) as part of the bundle — which only costs $49.95, so they're effectively paying you $10 and giving you 10 other handy apps for free! But this bundle expires in just a few days, so hurry!
• Simon Standard is available by itself from MacUpdate Promo's extended deals for just $44.96 (25% off) for a limited time.
• Simon Basic is also available from MacUpdate Promo for $22.46 (25% off, retail $29.95).
• Simon Enterprise is similarly available from MacUpdate Promo for $146.25 (25% off, retail $195.00).
• Not to be left out, existing Simon customers can upgrade from Basic to Standard or Standard to Enterprise for much less via the Dejal Store coupon "MUPUPGRADE", only till the end of the month.

Hurry, don't miss out on these great deals! This range of specials has never occurred before, and may never be repeated!

Simon, my website and server monitoring tool, has been updated to version 2.5.4. This is a minor bug-fix update, but recommended for everybody.

• Fixed an issue with the Calendar plug-in that caused a conflict with the SMS plug-in on Snow Leopard.
• Fixed a bug in the license regeneration feature that could cause minor back-end issues when diacritical characters are used.

Download Simon 2.5.4 now!

I'm pleased to announce that Dejal Simon, my flagship server monitoring app, is featured in the fifth TheMacBundles collection. Plus, for a limited time, Dejal BlogAssist, my handy HTML markup tool, is also included as a bonus app.

Dejal Simon is the essential site monitoring tool for Mac OS X. It checks servers for changes or failures, and notifies you via e-mail, sound, speech, Twitter, or other means. You can use it to track updated sites, and to alert you when an important server goes down or recovers.

The bundle includes the full Simon Standard license — normally $59.95!

BlogAssist is a handy tool to help weblog and website editing by making HTML markup easier. comes with several useful operations, including web and e-mail links, bold/italics/strikethrough/etc, LiveJournal tags, and more. But you aren't limited to those — you can add, change, or remove them via the Operations Preferences.

You can see more of them on the Simon and BlogAssist pages.

This bundle also includes 10 other fine apps, for only $49.95. A bargain! Especially since you're getting a Standard license for Simon — for less than it normally costs by itself.

The included apps are:

• iPhoto Library Manager
• MYStuff
• MyTunesRSS
• PDFClerk Pro
• Simon
• Spyder
• WebPrint Plus
• Yum
• Yummy FTP

Plus bonuses:

• A-Dock X
• BlogAssist
• FolderGlance

12 apps for just $49.95 — a saving of over 85%!

Visit TheMacBundles.com to learn more, or to take advantage of this great deal.

Announcing maintenance updates for Dejal Simon, my essential server monitoring tool, Time Out, my break reminder tool, Caboodle, my lean clean snippet machine, and BlogAssist, my handy HTML markup assistant.

Each update includes improvements for Snow Leopard (Mac OS X 10.6) compatibility. I'm not aware of any remaining compatibility issues with these products — please let me know ASAP if you do find anything.

Note: Narrator is still partially incompatible with Snow Leopard. It all works, except it can't open documents saved in its native format (but can still open other kinds of documents). I have a Developer Technical Support incident request in with Apple's engineers to help me solve this, but I'm sure they're swamped with queries at present, so who knows how long they'll take to come up with a solution. The last word I have is that it seems to be a bug in Snow Leopard... so we might have to wait for 10.6.2 or later, but I'm hoping that a workaround can be found. [Edit: 10.6.1 doesn't fix it, either.] I'll do a free update as soon as a fix is available. Sorry for any inconvenience in the meantime!

In addition to Snow Leopard compatibility, Simon also includes some other changes:

• Updated the iPhone Report Template to improve the behavior of the back button and other aspects.
• Added a hidden preference to output debug information from the E-mail plug-in. It can be activated by entering "defaults write com.dejal.simon2 EmailDebugMode YES" in Terminal.
• Also added a hidden E-mail plug-in preference to use the recipient's SMTP server instead of the sender's, via "defaults write com.dejal.simon2 EmailUseRecipientServer YES".
• Added Japanese localization, thanks to Koichi Matsumoto.

Download now:

• Download Simon
• Download Time Out
• Download Caboodle
• Download BlogAssist

Good news: most Dejal apps work fine on Snow Leopard (Mac OS X 10.6).

One issue that you may find with Caboodle and BlogAssist is that the Services menu has been enhanced, and the items for those apps might be disabled by default. You can re-enable them via the Keyboard Shortcuts page of the Keyboard system preferences.

However, it's not all good news. Narrator seems to be broken on Snowy. Opening a document fails, whether it was saved on Leopard or Snow Leopard. The document opens, but no content is loaded. It still opens version 1 documents fine, but not version 2's, which is rather a problem.

I've spent several hours last night and this morning trying to figure out what the problem is, without any luck so far. I'll keep on it, but just wanted to warn anyone using Narrator.

Once again, Seth Dillingham is offering bundles as a fund-raiser for the Pan-Mass Challenge, which supports cancer research and treatment. A very worthy cause.

Unlike typical software bundles, where hundreds or thousands of people might get a fixed collection of apps at a discount, this one is a bit different: you can use his Bundle Builder site to make your personal ideal bundle of iPhone and/or Mac apps, and offer your own price for it.

I am happy to participate in this effort again this year. A Standard license is available for Dejal Simon, my essential server monitoring tool, along with licenses for Dejal Caboodle, my lean clean snippet machine, Dejal Narrator, my fun app to speak stories in multiple voices, and Dejal BlogAssist, my handy HTML markup tool. Plus hundreds of other great products from other developers.

Go ahead, take a look, and put together your ideal bundle of apps, and help fight cancer!

The Mac Bundle Box promotion is almost over! Last chance to get Simon Standard and 11 other apps for just $49.00!

This great bundle expires in just a couple of days, so if you've been thinking about it, wait no more!

The bundle includes a Standard license for my Simon, the essential website and server monitoring tool. Use it to watch your own sites for failures, or others' sites for changes, and get notified via Twitter, email, sounds, speech, or other means.

Simon Standard retails for $59.95. This is the first time it has ever been included in a bundle. If you're at all interested in Simon, you'll save $10 and get 11 apps for free by buying this bundle... if you hurry!

Other apps in the bundle include:

• Freeway (normally $79.99)
• Keynote Themes (normally $39.00)
• DEVONthink (normally $49.95)
• myNotes (normally $24.95)
• iCash (normally $60.00)
• DaisyDisk (normally $19.95)
• Web2Delight (normally $19.95)
• Chronicle (normally $19.95)
• xHub (normally $24.95)
• Stomp (normally $29.95)
• Exces (normally $30.00)

Visit the Mac Bundle Box site now to take advantage of this great deal. Don't delay!