I try not to shill products or special deals in my posts, but this one's too good to keep to myself: If you've got a Mac user on your Christmas list — or if you just want to freshen your own OS X software library — you should check out the bundle currently being offered at MacUpdate's promotional site, www.mupromo.com (and no, I'm not getting any referral money for this).

For $49.95, they've packaged together eight real and useful programs that might otherwise cost more than $500 if bought separately. Sure, I'll probably never use the Marine Aquarium screensaver, but it will make someone else happy — and I've already got my money's worth with the discounted Forklift and Yep utilities. The other programs, which include the top-rated RapidWeaver, MemoryMiner, XSlimmer, Swift Publisher and XMIND 2008 PRO, are just great gravy that I can now explore with a full license.

So why am I bothering to tell everyone else? Because if enough people buy the bundle, MacUpdate promises to throw in a couple of additional programs for free. And I could really use iStabilize myself…