Save Hundreds: Friday Freebie Bargain Vault.

No Friday is complete without a list of bargains for the weekend—shareware discounts.

This week is one of the best ever with a dozen Mac utilities available for special discounts. Many are on the Mac360 Favorites List. All will save you big money.

I’m not talking $10 off here and there for utilities that are dubious in value. There’s a way to save hundreds.

Earlier in December MacHeist announced a special promo for a select bundle of Mac utilities—9 award winning Mac tools for $49 (80-percent off list).

The list plays like a Who’s Who of Mac software developers, with a percentage of the discount proceeds going to the charity of your choice.

For example, alphabetically, there’s Delicious Library, normally a $40 application, part of the 9 Mac tools for only $49 total. The same for FotoMagico, one of our all-time favorites which is usually $79, but included in the MacHeist promotion.

There’s ShapeShifter and DevonThink Personal, as well as Disco. Also on the list is another favorite, RapidWeaver, one of the best Mac apps ever for building web sites.

Two others include the excellent NewsFire RSS reader, and another new favorite for text editing on your Mac, TextMate.

The MacHeist deal is rather straightforward but an odd promotion.

You get the bundle of 9 Mac apps for $49. It’s a special promotion for Mac developers, but a portion of the proceeds will go to a charity of your choice (from a list of charities—I checked, and the Alexis Kayhill Mommyhood Charity isn’t on the list).

If the charity amount reaches $100,000 then you also get a license for the TextMate application. See?

That’s an odd feature of what amounts to a good promotion for buyers.

There’s some discussion on Daring Fireball as to whether it’s a good promotion for Mac developers or not. The price is hard to beat, though.

For the geekier among Mac360 readers, Ron has secured a 20-percent discount on the popular Navicat MySQL utility.

The folks at Circus Ponies have a special offer for their popular NoteBook application. Developer Jayson Adams gives the details.

Of course, it’s the boxed version available at Apple Stores, CompUSA and other places; not the download version. Still, every little bit helps.

Finally, there’s bargains galore at the Mac360 Store. For most items, you should be able to get delivery before Christmas. Remember, shopping at the Mac360 Store is the same as shopping at Amazon, and Mac360 gets a small cut so we keep the leader of the pack, Ms. Barbara Marie Hambi, healthy, happy, and dining out often.

Finally, here’s a fun item to keep you busy for a minute or two. Are you good at finding differences between two photos? If so, Click Here. Look closely at the two photographs to see if you can find the differences between each. Look closely. The instructions are in German, but it says something like look closely or find the differences.

Have you run into a Mac bargain recently? Share it with other Mac360 readers in the Comments section below.

Off Topic Note: Are you ready for a new web site that’s all about Apple? AppleHits covers the Mac, iPhone, iPod, and everything else that’s a hit at Apple. Click here for AppleHits. I’ve updated the Mac360 Store with over 100 new categories—More Macs, more iPods, more Mac books, more software. Click Here and select any category for more detail, or use the handy search function. Whenever you buy from Amazon through the Mac360 Store you help support Mac360. Which Mac do you plan to buy next? It’s rumored that Apple will release updated MacBooks soon, perhaps with a design similar to the hot selling MacBook Air. Will you buy a Mac soon or wait awhile? Click Here to take the Mac360 Buyer’s Poll.