The European software promotion, Give Good Food to your Mac, has been extended by one week and will now run until the end of Saturday, December 15.

There are a couple of reasons for this. Firstly, there were a few problems when the promotion started, due to the load on the site’s dedicated server and its impact on integration with PayPal. Those problems were quickly rectified by moving to a cluster of servers and some other measures, but it took Aquafadas longer to set up a non-PayPal credit card payment system.

It turns out that PayPal’s reputation varies from country to country. While many people regard PayPal as a much safer option, because your credit card details are never revealed, buyers from some countries refuse to use the service outright.

Secondly, it’s only in the last few days that the underlying ambitions of the site have begun to be been realised. These aims have not been made clear in a lot of places and that’s because they are uninteresting to anyone but developers, but I think they’re worth mentioning here.

The intention was for the bigger European developers to help the smaller ones gain more attention. According to Claudia from Aquafadas, indie Mac developers don’t get nearly as much exposure in Europe as they do in the US, despite creating some pretty cool stuff. Hence the Euro-centric event. Aquafadas are taking a small percentage to cover their costs, the majority of each sale goes directly to the developers.

In trying to organise this event, Aquafadas noticed the second problem here, in that many European developers didn’t know each other or were unaware that the developer of an app was European, and as such didn’t know how to help each other. The omission of a number of European developers from the promotion was caused by this problem. Claudia found many of the developers involved by trawling sites like Apple’s Downloads. I’ve passed on the names of quite a few British and European developers that I know, and I’m sure others have done the same.

Aquafadas understand what I have written about here before, that the vast majority of Mac users are not involved in the online Mac community of news sites and blogs. To reach these people, more conventional means are required. It’s only during the last week or so that the site has been featured in European magazines and national press, so extending the promotion will mean that readers of those publications will have the chance to try it out.

And if you haven’t checked it out yet, it’s worth a look. There’s some great stuff there, including Pixelmator, CSSEdit and Aquafadas’s brand new BannerZest, which I think is pretty cool. The way the discount works, it’s actually difficult to spend too much money. You often find the total goes down when you add a new app.

A few people have asked how they can import their browser bookmarks as folders and files into Together. Together doesn’t have direct support for this yet, but there is a pretty easy workaround.

If you’re using Safari:

• Show your bookmarks in Safari (Bookmarks > Show All Bookmarks from the menu).
• Drag the bookmark folders you want to import to the Finder.
• Drag the folders from the Finder to Together.

You can also drag bookmarks (but not folders of bookmarks) from Safari directly to Together.

Note that when dragging folders from Safari to the Finder, it might take a moment for each folder to be created and you won’t see a copy progress bar.

If you don’t use Safari, you can export the bookmarks from just about any browser (and del.icio.us) as an HTML file and import this into Safari. Safari will create a folder named “imported [date and time]” which you can then drag to the Finder, as described above.

Together’s use of Quick Look previews are really handy, allowing you to see preview documents you wouldn’t normally be able to see without opening another application or using the Finder.

As you may know, any delevoper can create a Quick Look generator for their file format, or in the case of this one, for a generic format not covered by Leopard’s built-in generators.

A developer, known as xdd, and a designer, Taiyo, created a Quick Look generator for ZIP files, which will also work in Together.

This is the great thing about Together now – any file you can preview with Quick Look, you can also view in Together. I think it is the only non-Apple app to show previews in its own interface right now.

Note: The ability to automatically import files added to Together’s library folders was added in Together 2.1 – See Together 2.1 – New Ways to Import for more information.

I’ve had a few requests for watched folders in Together, the idea being that you can save a file in a folder and it is automatically imported into Together.

This approach will also work well for scanned documents and the good news is you don’t have to wait for me to clear my email deluge and get back to some development, you can do this with a little Automator. Here’s how:

Any file opened in Together will automatically be added to the library, so all you need is a simple Automator workflow, with one action in it, like this:

Here’s one you can download: OpenInTogether.zip (26KB)

To use it:

• Uncompress the file and open it in Automator.
• Choose File > Save As Plug-in from the menu.
• From the “Plug-in for” pop-up choose “Folder Actions”
• From the “Attached to Folder” pop-up, choose the folder to watch.
• Click Save.

After that, any files saved or moved into that watched folder will then be imported into Together.

A group of European Mac developers have teamed up to bring Mac users a tasty new experience called Give Good Food to your Mac.

Running from today until December 8, Mac users can download and taste more than 25 great Mac applications and enjoy discounts ranging from 30% to 70%.

As this is haute cuisine, you can choose the exact ingredients. The more apps you buy, the bigger the discount on the full price of the apps. So, buying 3 apps you can save 30%, 5 apps 40%, 7 apps 50%, up to the maximum discount of 70% on 10 or more applications.

This promotion includes a stunning collection of high-quality applications from Aquafadas, Belight, Boinx, Cheetah3D, Coladia, Creaceed, Equinux, Iospirit, Jumsoft, Kletel, MacRabbit, Objective Decision, Ovolab, Pixelmator, ProjectWizards, Realmac Software, Softpress and your very own Reinvented Software.

The kitchen will remain open until the 8th of December, and on that note I’d better sign off before cooking up (haha!) any more food-related puns.

Bon appetite!

(Sorry)