A little over a year ago, I posted that I was taking a hiatus from MDM Deals to think about its future, chiefly what happens to a site dedicated to great deals on fantastic apps…when most of the fantastic apps have switched over to subscription models and no longer have great deals.
Initially I thought the answer could be a membership program in which I find deals for you, negotiate deals with developers, and recommend apps. Then immense technical challenges came, I changed my job, another baby came along, and I realized that I couldn’t give it the time that a membership program needed.
Thus, this post is to announce what most of you already know and have guessed: the end of MDM Deals. For another year or so, the website and content will stick around (so long as technical programs don’t crop up!) and you can still reach me at deals @ mdmdeals.com.
It’s been a great run! Over the 6 years of MDM Deals I curated over 80,000 deals which were viewed over 484,000 times (on this site alone–that doesn’t track visits at all the other channels).
I’ll still be on the internet, of course! You can reach me on Twitter @MarkDMill — and I started a new blog for some new writing that you can check out, The Prepared Expat.
MDM Deals is ad-free this week thanks to OmniPlayer, a versatile and powerful media player with advanced custom features. Enter the giveaway to unlock the VIP version for free!.
With specialized and custom features like picture-in-picture, variable speed, custom video filters, & more, OmniPlayer is your all in one media player..
MDM Deals fans can enter a giveaway to get OmniPlayer’s lifetime VIP unlock 100% free! Read on to learn lore about this versatile and powerful media player with advanced features.
OmniPlayer has a host of features missing from default media players, like built-in picture-in-picture, 0.25-4x speed playback, and shape of custom controls. Download it free today!.
Have you ever gone a week without watching a video? Yeah, I didn’t think so. So keep reading to make it an better experience with this week’s sponsor, OmniPlayer: a versatile media player that can handle virtually any video/audio format in a clean, modern design with flexible and powerful features. Not only is this MDM Deals ad-free this week, thanks to OmniPlayer, but the developer is even giving away 5 lifetime VIP unlock codes! Read on to learn how to get your unlock code.
Most of the media we consume in a given week is through the default players–video at Youtube, music in Apple Music, video via whatever opens up when you click it, etc.–but rarely are those defaults fine-tuned for the best media experience. OmniPlayer seeks to change all that, providing you a superior user experience than the default and supporting virtually every media format out there so it can be your one-stop shop for everything. Here’s just a few OmniPlayer features that stand out:
Dead-simple picture-in-picture (PIP), even for YouTube or Vimeo. That’s right. Even as YouTube drags its feet on supporting this across all browsers, OmniPlayer has it built in. From YouTube, just click the “Open in OmniPlayer” extension, select PIP, and watch away in the background.
Custom playback speed, video color, equalizer, and more! Watch YouTube, Vimeo, and more at your choice of speeds 0.25x-4x; adjust the audio equalizer to presets or your custom settings; change the color saturation or brightness; and much much more.
Capture screenshots and create GIFs. Most players have that annoying DRM protection that prevents you from screenshotting, but Omniplayer has the built-in ability to screenshot your video–and even turn a scene into a GIF!
Even more! Like preview images on the progress bar, ad-free YouTube (for those creators you support on Patreon), casting of media to Chromecast and other devices, recording your playback progress, and more!
Best yet, OmniPlayer is free to download and use, with an optional VIP option to unlock some of the advanced features mentioned above. It’s $9.99 to unlock for life, $3.99/month, or $6.99/year — but enter the drawing and you could be one of 5 MDM Deals fans who get the lifetime VIP 100% free!
Improve your media playback experience with OmniPlayer–download it for free on the Mac App Store today! My thanks to OmniPlayer for sponsoring MDM Deals this week.
Only days left for MDM Deals fans get this focus-built zip/unzip utility unlocked completely free. Download it & unlock the VIP for life for free today.
Oka Archiver is a purpose-built zip & unzip utility with features you won’t find in Apple’s stock app, like password protection for zips & unzips & a password book for remembering them.
In my tests, Oka Unarchiver zipped and unzipped files about 25% faster than Apple’s built into utility. There’s a bunch of other improvements like this you’d expect from a purpose-built utility.
Built from the ground up to be a better zip/unzip utility than Apple’s built-in utility, Oka Unarchiver is completely free to download & unlock for a limited time, just for MDM Deals fans. Read more & how you can get it.
Oka Archiver, a powerful smart zip/unzip tool [sponsor]
My thanks to Oka Unarchiver for sponsoring this week of ad-free MDM Deals. Oka Unarchiver is a fast, comprehensive, simple, and powerful zip/unzip tool..
Using the affiliate link below may earn me a small commission at no cost to you. Thanks in advance for supporting my work! More.
Ever receive a ZIP file? RAR? LZIP or CPIO? Probably the first, maybe the second (ever hear of the others?) — or have you ever had to send compressed data to someone (maybe because of those annoying mailbox limits imposed by most email providers)? If you’re ever compressing or decompressing files (zipping & unzipping), you’ll definitely want to check out this week’s sponsor of ad-free MDM Deals, Oka Unarchiver. MDM Deals fans can download and unlock it completely free for a limited time, so read on to learn more!
Get Oka Unarchiver completely free for a limited time!
Now I know that macOS comes with a built-in zip/unzip tool and so you may be inclined to stop reading–don’t. Instead, ask yourself: could a developer obsessed about compression/decompression tools make one that’s better than Apple’s? Of course (just like developers make better calendars, better email, better notes, etc.) — and Oka Unarchiver is exactly what you’d expect when a developer sets out to make a great tool.
It is super fast. To test Oka Unarchiver, I threw a nearly 7 GB folder at it containing 9,844 items (mix of folders, docs, pics, and *lots* of audio recordings). How long did the built-in macOS tool take to zip it? Nearly 5 minutes, but Oka Unarchiver handled it in less than 3 1/2 minutes–over 26% faster than Apple’s basic tool.
How about unzipping? Taking that same file (now zipped), the macOS system took one minute and 17 seconds to unzip it while Oka Unarchiver handled it in less than a minute–in fact, 24% faster.
So already it’s faster than Apple’s utility, but the developer has gone further to ensure it can handle basically any compressed file you throw at it. It supports decompressing ZIP, ZIP, RAR, 7Z, TAR, GZIP, BZIP2, x7, LZIP, ACE, ISO, CAB, PAX, JAR, AR, CPIO, and more! It compresses to the most popular formats: ZIP and 7Z.
Then there’s a load of features that you’d expect in a dedicated compression tool that don’t exist in the macOS utility, like previews of files even before they’re unzipped (nice!), batch processing (just drag and drop, press start, and done), password-protecting files you compress, unzipping password-protected files, and even remembering the passwords used to unzip files so they’re always accessible even if the passwords are long-forgotten.
Just download Oka Unarchiver on the Mac App Store, click “VIP” in the upper right corner, and choose the lifetime unlock option which is free until October 14th. Act fast so you don’t miss out!
My special thanks to Oka Unarchiver for sponsoring MDM Deals this week!
The survey results are and I’ve been hard at work changing things in light of the results. Today I’m excited to announce the most significant change to MDM Deals to date–a change so big, in fact, that even the tagline of the website has changed. Ready? Drumroll please…
MDM Deals: Discover great deals on fantastic apps and books
Yup, that’s right: movies are gone and books are here. Read on to learn about 3 big changes to MDM Deals:
Bye bye movies
The survey results made abundantly clear that you weren’t so interested in movies. In fact, 80% of you said that you’d be happier without movies, so they’re gone. For the 5% of you who said you’d buy me a coffee for removing books, well…here ya go:
Hello, books
A significant majority of you said that you’d be interested in deals on ebooks–and so I’m excited to start curating ebooks this week! Ebooks will appear tonight on MDMDeals.com and I’ll be rolling them out to all 20+ channels over the course of the week. As always, I’ll do my best as I do to provide filtering options so you can ignore ebook deals if you like. Four other things to note as we get going:
I picked the arbitrary price point of $7.99 to begin curation. There may be occasions where I list books on sale for more than $7.99, but most will be $7.99 or less. I’d love your feedback on if that’s the right price point.
Curation
While there’s only a few million apps on the App Store, there are hundreds of millions of books. That makes deal curation all the more important, it also means my ebook curation will reflect my interests more than my app curation does. For example:
I have no interest or expertise in Romance novels, so you’ll never see those
I love history and biographies, and because my history interests are more about US and China, you’ll see more of that
I’ll do my absolute best to curate to a general audience, so your feedback is super helpful, but you’ll definitely see my interests and personality reflected in ebook curation–for good and bad :-).
Book genres
My present plan is to curate ebooks in the following genres. In alphabetical order:
Biography & memoir
Business & personal finance
Fiction (more rare, mostly best sellers & classics)
History
Lifestyle & home (more rare, but Marie Kondo deserves to be curated)
Mystery & thrillers (more rare, but Tom Clancy deserves appearances)
Non-fiction
Parenting (more rare)
Professional & technical (more rare)
Reference
Religion & spirituality (more rare)
Sci-Fi & fantasy
Science & nature
At present, I intend to NOT curate the following genres:
Cookbooks
Fiction (apart from best-selling or classic works)
Graphic novels
Health, body, & mind
Politics*
Romance
Sports & recreation
Travel & adventure
Wine & food
*I’m interested in politics, but I don’t want to politicize MDM Deals by curating to my interests, nor will I attempt to keep choices “well-balanced,” so I’ll just ignore the category. I will, however, curate biographies of political leaders across the spectrum because we can all learn from the lives of people like Reagan, Clinton, Bush, & Obama.
I really appreciate your feedback on the survey; it has been most helpful identifying ways that MDM Deals can do better going forward. As I have time to grow MDM Deals, here’s my initial priorities for 2020:
Develop ebooks into a full-fledged part of MDM Deals
The launch of something I’m calling Dealworthies, which I can’t wait to tell you about.
Adding paid custom price drop alerts so you can choose to be alerted when a specific item goes on sale
As always, your support of the site is very much appreciated! I run this all in my spare time and give up significant time each day to find and publish the deals for you. If you appreciate what I do, would you buy me a coffee or join my Patreon?
My thanks to Decline sticker pack for sponsoring MDM Deals this week. Featuring 25 gorgeous handcrafted stickers, decline invitations in style. Read more and how you can win a pack for free
This week’s sponsor and giveaway is courtesy of my friend, Timothy Buck and his wife Alyssa, who have just released Decline, an absolutely gorgeous pack of hand-lettered iMessage stickers. You, like me, may not be a big iMessage sticker fan because so many of them are cheesy or dumb images that are too cutesy, too hard to remember where it was, or just plain dumb. But because Decline is none of those things–it is beautiful and has a clear use case–it now lives in my iMessage sticker draw.
Decline is all about saying no, in a wide spectrum of ways–coyly, unambiguously, politely, wittily, snarkily–but all of them beautifully. Check out the hand lettered designs (courtesy of Alyssa and her art studio):
I can’t prove this, but I’m pretty sure folks will be less offended when I say no if I say it so beautifully. What I do know is that Decline is way more useful to me than all of the other stickers I’ve used. Most of the time, they’re ugly–and when they’re not, I can’t remember what sticker is where. But Decline is different because it is precisely clear when to use the sticker and where it is. If I need to say no, I use Decline. Simple as that.
My great thanks to Decline for sponsoring MDM Deals this week–and for offering a giveaway of the sticker pack! To enter the giveaway, take this short survey on how I can improve MDM Deals. You might win a copy of Decline or even an App Store gift card! Take the survey to enter!
Say no, beautifully. Download Decline from the App Store today.
Just a couple days left to win some of the $60 I’m giving away
He’ll me out by taking this 9-question survey on how to improve MDM Deals—it takes an average of 4 minutes and you could win some of the $60 in gift certificates & promo codes I am giving away
Discover great deals on fantastic apps & more 
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