The new season brings new plans, fresh projects, and great new ideas. Whether you’re mapping out your next novel, finishing your dissertation, planning a product, or writing memories for your grandkids, these great tools will help. As is our custom in this season, we’re hosting a gathering of software artisans who are working to transform research and writing for a new era. We’ve all finished our latest updates, we’re working together to save you lots of money. Get the tools you need at a terrific price, for a very limited time.
Your inspiration doesn’t come from a factory. Neither does artisanal software. For a limited time, we’re all offering you a great price on great software, right at the workshop door. No ridiculous bundles, no silly gimmicks. Great software, great support, great (but sustainable) prices.
Artisanal software doesn’t come from fly-by-night marketers. We work hard to make sure our tools work together, because that makes everything better. We work hard to support great new technologies and great new ideas, while avoiding buzzspeak-compliant management trends.
These are terrific tools for thinking, writing, organizing, and delivering your ideas. Sure, you can manage with less – but why would you want to? Each of these tools is carefully crafted and maintained by a small, dedicated team with vision and determination. Each is constantly honed and improved – since Tinderbox 1.0, we’ve had well over a hundred full releases for Tinderbox alone.
We don’t make you jump through hoops. No need to dig up your serial numbers or clip boxtops. These are all full versions with complete support and upgrade privileges. No contests or hullabaloo, no discounts too good to be true. Just great prices for great software, right at the vineyard gate. Use the coupon code SummerFest2025.
Rich Siegel Founder & CEO, Bare Bones Software, Inc., emphasizes the importance of fine tools:
Creators know that having quality tools and reference materials make the creative process faster, more productive, and more gratifying, so the investment is well worth it.
Tinderbox designer Mark Bernstein finds his colleagues a constant source of inspiration:
You don’t discover inspired design in focus groups. Artisanal software is filled with ideas, ambition, and a passion to make things right. Using all these tools together lets our team build better software while engaging the rest of the research community.
Eric Böhnisch-Volkmann from DEVONtechnologies likes to create, and his customers do, too:
“Information technology is taking over more and more aspects of our lives and software has become the central element. But with the expansion of the software business came also concentration on fewer and much larger players. But you don’t set up individual workflows, do fine-tuned research, or solve non-standard problems with some standard software. The SummerFest apps are all from small, independent software makers that understand how you work and what your challenges are. They have a clear focus on what writers, researchers, and knowledge workers need and it shows in their products.”
Pierre Bernard from Houdah Software reflects on the limited but crucial role of software tools:
The tool does not make the craftsman, but choosing the right tool is part of the craft. We are all blessed with an operating system that comes with the tools you needed to get started, but there comes a point where we'd rather use a chisel than keep chipping away with a pocket knife. SummerFest is your opportunity to trade up to tools designed for your craft.
The tool for notes.
Tinderbox stores and organizes your notes, plans, and ideas. A professional tool that helps you analyze and understand your information as it grows and changes, Tinderbox is a powerful but personal content assistant that helps you share your notes through the cloud and on the Web.
Scrivener 3 for macOS and Windows is a powerful content-generation tool for writers that allows you to concentrate on composing and structuring long and difficult documents. While it gives you complete control of the formatting, its focus is on helping you get to the end of that awkward first draft.
25% off on Thinking With Tinderbox, Mark Bernstein’s new book about what it means to think with a computer.
“Thinking With Tinderbox explores how we might use machines to help us think more clearly, learn more quickly, and understand more thoroughly.... This volume describes some of the ideas behind Tinderbox and builds on my earlier book, The Tinderbox Way. That book discussed how Tinderbox came to be designed as it is, and its status as an opinionated system, an artisanal tool that sometimes expresses implicit opinions about notes and their discontents. Here, I focus more tightly on thinking, on how a machine, a mere mechanism, might augment human intellect.”
From chapters on “Thinking with Things: a Defense of Text" to ”Generosity & Abundance”, Thinking With Tinderbox explores the ideas behind modern software and the trick of keeping software young, flexible, and responsive. 312 page eBook, available as pdf or ePub.
25% off on Scapple, an easy-to-use tool for getting ideas down as quickly as possible and making connections between them.
If you’ve ever scribbled down ideas all over a piece of paper and drawn lines between related thoughts, then you already know what Scapple does.
Find files. Fast!
Stop wasting time hunting for files. HoudahSpot brings together all your files in seconds—no matter where they're hiding.
Go beyond basic search:
HoudahSpot leverages macOS's Spotlight index for lightning-fast results, but adds the professional search tools you need: customizable results displays, powerful filters, and an intuitive interface that keeps everything within reach.
HoudahSpot is both a powerful file search utility and productivity tool. Perfect for researchers, creative professionals, and anyone drowning in files.
Panorama X combines the best elements of database and spreadsheet technology into a single package, making it an unparalleled tool for working with and analyzing any kind of information. Like a spreadsheet, Panorama X is RAM based for speed and flexibility, but with all of the data processing power of a full-blown database application and more. Panorama provides incredible performance when sorting, searching, performing analysis, and even when doing complete data restructuring. Even if a database already contains tens of thousand of records, Panorama X can quickly conquer tasks like shifting misaligned data, splitting or merging fields, correcting mis-formatted or improperly capitalized data, search and replace, phonetic searches or even searching with a formula or regular expression. It's like a Swiss Army knife for your data!
Key features:
Hookmark helps you get more out of your favorite artisanal software. You can copy links to just about anything. Even get deep links to specific locations in PDF files and videos. Hookmark automatically bookmarks your copied links (not just web links). It optionally syncs web bookmarks to Instapaper, GoodLinks and Pinboard (if you are subscribed to them). Hookmark’s contextual window shows you two-way links to your notes, PDFs, emails, tasks, and other resources in your favorite software.
Nisus Writer Pro is a powerful word processor with all the writing tools you need, thoughtfully packed into a tidy package.
Create, edit, and polish your prose to craft beautiful documents with ease. Our intuitive interface exposes a rich set of features that never get in your way. Taking notes in class, writing your novel, or structuring a complex document— Nisus Writer Pro can handle it all.
Nisus Writer was built from the ground-up exclusively for the Mac with native support for Apple Silicon, Dark Mode, document autosave and versioning, and iCloud. Compatible with macOS 10.11 through Ventura
Reference management entails the collection, annotation, curation, and citation of published information. This is exactly what Bookends does, and it does it like no other software.
Bookends performs Internet searches to retrieve references and associated pdfs or web pages, and can immediately find and import references for which you already have the pdf. Versatile groups (static, smart, hierarchical, and virtual), Term Lists (keywords, authors, etc.), reference cross-linking, notecards, PDF file tags, PDF annotations that can be viewed/edited in notecards, on-the-fly creation of reference data tag clouds, and instantaneous live searches help organize and find information in your personal collection.
Coupon applies to new sales only.
Boost your productivity with Peakto. View, search, and organize all your photos and videos from a single interface—even if they’re stored across multiple drives and catalogs. Designed for solo creators and teams, Peakto’s private AI finds the shot, clip, or dialogue you need—so you can create and deliver faster.
Avalanche allows you to convert catalogs from one software to another while preserving the modifications and annotations you have made to your photos. Avalanche's AI converts data from one software to another to be as faithful as possible to the original catalogs.
FindMySnap’s local AI finds your photos in seconds—and lets you create stunning collages just by typing what you want. Fast, private, yours.
Easy Data Transform is your data multi-tool, allowing you to quickly and easily transform your data into the form you need it. Construct simple or complex data flows step-by-step using drag and drop. See the results of each transform immediately. Everything is visual and there is no syntax to remember. It is ideal for cleaning dirty data, transforming from one data format into another, deduping mailing lists, creating reports or any number of other data tasks.
Key features:
Photos Workbench is a companion to Apple Photos. It helps you organize, rate, and compare your photos — turning your Photos library into a well-organized, searchable collection.
Stop losing precious memories in an unorganized library — discover how Photos Workbench transforms your photo management workflow.
EagleFiler makes organizing and managing your information easy. It lets you archive and search Web pages, mail, PDF files, images, audio/video files, and more. Edit RTF, plain text, and Markdown files using a familiar three-pane interface. Organize files of all types into folders and annotate them with tags and notes, or leave everything in one folder and pin-point the information you need using the live search or a smart folder. Since EagleFiler stores its library in Finder format, you can use it in concert with the other tools in your Mac ecosystem.
What can you do with EagleFiler? EagleFiler is a digital filing cabinet, an information organizer, and a note-taking app. You can use it to archive and search large amounts of e-mail, write a journal, track the files for a project, save local copies of Web pages, store financial statements, run a paperless office, or plan a trip. Use EagleFiler as a bookmark manager, a recipe database, a snippet collector, a document manager, or an issue tracker. Organize scientific research papers or legal records, assemble a scrapbook, or keep a notebook for a college course. It’s the most flexible tool on your Mac.
Trickster keeps track of recent files and applications you’ve been using on your Mac and gives you easy and fast access to them. Stop searching. Start finding.
NEW:
ImageFramer Pro is the most versatile solution for adding borders to your photos on the Mac, from artistic borders to photorealistic frames. Quickly frame photographs, digital art, Etsy shop listings, family snapshots—any image you can get onto your Mac. Choose from thousands of photorealistic or artistic frames and mats, layered in endless combinations. Add text and image overlays, including watermarks to digitally sign your original artwork. You can even batch process multiple photos or use it with Adobe Lightroom Classic or Apple Photos.
Who uses ImageFramer? Professional artists, photographers, bloggers, scrapbookers, craft enthusiasts, and anyone who just wants better looking family photos.
Showcase your art with lifelike frames for a professional look, find the perfect frame by comparing multiple designs, or just have fun with your image library.
NEW: Comprehensive Undo/Redo support, UI improvements, Shortcuts action to apply ImageFramer design and massive updates to Image and Text Overlay functionality, including rotation, opacity and shadows.
Hyper Plan combines the simplicity of sticking colored notes to the wall with the flexibility of software. Arrange your tasks in an easy to understand form. See at a glance what needs doing next. Typical uses include: agile project planning, production planning, sales pipeline tracking, storyboarding and resource scheduling. If you have ever planned something by sticking notes to a wall, then you pretty much know how to use it already.
Key features:
BBEdit is the leading professional-strength text and code editor for the Mac. Crafted to serve the needs of writers, web authors, software developers, and everyone else who deals with text, this award-winning product provides a vast number of helpful features for editing, searching, and manipulation of text. BBEdit enjoys legendary status for reliable, high-performance text transformation.
BBEdit 15 introduces AI worksheets, a Minimap palette, Text Merge, expandable Cheat Sheets, and enhancements to the projects and text factories features, as part of a vast array of improvements intended to make working with projects and text documents more efficient and more productive.
BBEdit 15 brings its unique "worksheet" interface to the world of generative AI: the new AI Worksheet feature facilitates interacting with chosen AIs from within BBEdit itself for those with a suitable account and API key (available from OpenAI and other providers).
"We're gratified to see the response to BBEdit 15," said Rich Siegel, founder and CEO of Bare Bones Software, Inc. "Based on the feedback our customers are sending, they're particularly enthusiastic about the ChatGPT worksheets. However, that's just one of the of the many popular changes in BBEdit 15; the consistent note is that everyone's enjoying the productivity improvements. We're delighted to hear how our customers are putting these changes to work."
BBEdit 15 is fully compatible with macOS 15 Sequoia and Apple Silicon-powered Macs.
![Yojimbo](./elements/Yojimbo_Library-Dark.png")
Yojimbo empowers Mac users to effortlessly and securely manage the onslaught of information encountered every day, even across multiple computers. Yojimbo stores rich text notes, passwords, bookmarks, serial numbers, PDFs, and images.
Gathering information is easy through familiar Mac interface gestures, Yojimbo's own Quick Input Panel and Save PDF to Yojimbo commands, and it can encrypt stored data. Yojimbo's tagging system empowers simple personal organization, and information retrieval is instantaneous through its built-in search or Spotlight.
Yojimbo uses Apple's iCloud service to sync data among multiple Macs, supports high-fidelity capture of web pages to PDF, offers an improved appearance under Dark Mode, and contains many more appearance and usability adjustments.
Yojimbo 4.6 is fully compatible with macOS 15 Sequoia and Apple Silicon-powered Macs.
Mellel is designed from the ground up to be the ultimate tool for writing, editing, and delivering scholarly, scientific, and technical manuscripts. Mellel is powerful, reliable, and fast, the ideal companion for producing beautiful and consistent documents.
We got the basics right —a native Mac app with rock-solid stability, effortless handling of long and complex documents, all the layout and formatting levers you'll need (and then some), top-notch multilingual support, and features that work as advertised.
But this is just the beginning. Mellel's extensive style system allows you to save and recall formatting for everything from character attributes to pages, notes, and tables. Auto-titles and the outline make structured writing a breeze. Notes (footnotes & endnotes) allow you to incorporate multiple note streams in your documents. And Mellel's industry-best reference manager integration with Bookends relieves you of the make-work of of managing citations, footnotes, and bibliographies.
Mellel's amazing citation and bibliography support just got better with the introduction of multiple bibliographies. With Mellel 6.4 and Bookends 15.1.7 you can produce a single bibliography for the entire document, a bibliography for every chapter, or both. Mellel 6.4 also offers a revised citations list, improved control over bibliography styling and much more.
Save time by adding powerful spam filtering to your Mac e-mail client. SpamSieve gives you back your inbox, using Bayesian spam filtering to provide amazing accuracy that’s constantly improving. SpamSieve learns and adapts to your mail, so it’s able to block nearly all the junk—without putting good messages in the Junk mailbox. (It can even rescue good messages that your mail server’s junk filter put into Junk.) It’s quick and easy to control SpamSieve from within Apple Mail, Outlook, Airmail, MailMate, MailMaven, GyazMail, and more.
The latest version of SpamSieve is easier to set up and more accurate than ever. Filtering is automatic based on the messages that you train, and you also have full control to customize it with powerful blocklist and allowlist rules. SpamSieve running on your Mac can keep the spam off your iPhone/iPad, and you can even review the spam and train it from iOS.
The 5Cs School offers Tinderbox action code libraries, templates and courses to help you think and publish with Tinderbox, including:
