I have a confession to make.  I’m a Mac bundle addict.  Yup.  Whenever MacHeist or MacUpdate has a new bundle for sale I feel like I’ve one the lottery.  Okay, maybe not a huge lottery, but at least the payoff is guaranteed.  I think I’ve only passed on a bundle once, and that was because I already had all the programs included in it.  Sadly, there’s no support group for my addiction.

I’m not sure how many of my readers are Mac users, but that’s not going to stop me from telling you about the bundle MacUpdate has going right now.   13 apps for $49.99. That’s 11 apps plus 2 more if you’re one of the first 15,000 buyers.  Yay!  One of those apps, Parallels, is $79 by itself.

I was a big Parallels fan when I first made the switch from Mac to PC, because I wasn’t ready to give up all my Windows apps.  Eventually I stopped using it altogether…until yesterday when I had a sudden urge to play an old PC game.  My first thought was that I should upgrade Parallels to the latest version, but then I decided 3.0 was good enough for the amount of times I’ll actually use it.  So I was happy to see 4.0 included in the bundle released today.  (It’s like they read my mind!)

So, if you’re curious about what else is contained in the bundle, here’s a pretty, flashy image you can click on:

I was playing around with Scribbles some more.  This time I worked from a photo of Al.  I spent a little more time on the shading with this one.  It’s hard to see some of the detail in the image below, so you can click on it to see a somewhat larger version.

Okay, I’m having a little too much fun with this program.  I’ll try to talk about something a little more exciting in my next post…like what Al has in store for me.  Tomorrow is my birthday.  Check that…I just noticed it’s after midnight.  Today is my birthday then.  Al’s taking me somewhere to celebrate, but he’s given me no clue other than that it will involve an overnight stay.

I recently acquired a bunch of Mac software from MacHeist 3.  For those of you know don’t know, every year MacHeist lets you earn a bunch of free software by completing “missions” – fun, online quests they set up.  At the end of the Heist, they release of bundle of spectacular software which can be purchased at a ridiculously low price.  The mission part is over, but the bundle is still available if you’re interested.

One of the free apps was called Scribbles.  I’m no great artist or anything, but I do enjoy doodling on my white board from time to time.  So I was pretty excited to get an application like Scribbles.  One of the things you can do while drawing with it is set the window to be transparent.  It allowed me to open up a photo on my computer, open Scribbles over the photo, and trace the outline of the photo.  Then I played with the different brushes to try to make the hair look like hair and the skin look like skin.

Should I quit my day job?  No, absolutely not.  But I think it doesn’t look too bad.  Here’s the original picture and the one I did using Scribbles.