the ultimate online exercise system!

Software is something about which many thousands of unbalanced words are written. A given feature in a particular application may be the subject at once of rapturous praise and virulent criticism. Something that is perceived as elegant simplicity by one user is denigrated as feature-poor or inadequate by another.

And then, of course, there’s the pricing…

The gap between what might be termed “enterprise” pricing and “consumer” pricing is still, even now, in this era of open-source profligacy, a sore issue – but then again, anybody who has worked for local government or a large corporate knows that price perceptions in these organisations are usually very different from those of the average reasonably savvy computer user.

Paved with good intentions…

Sadly, as they evolve, many software development companies appear to travel along a fairly conventional curve. When they first start – at the bottom of the curve – they sell modest (but often very well designed) products for modest prices to consumers and small businesses. But then they are “discovered” by business users (the uptake is usually by individual power users, who have a way of installing newly discovered applications and utilities on their laptops that drives any self-respecting IT manager round the bend). At this point, a kind of hubris is likely to seize developers, and they start to escalate their prices at a rate that bears no direct relationship to any new benefits or features they may have introduced in their latest releases (or indeed, reflects the many new bugs that have undoubtedly sneaked in as well).

This is immensely irritating for those users who started them on their way by buying into the whole idea in the first place – users who have often expressed their enthusiasm very vociferously in an effort to win the company recognition and support. Nothing is worse, in terms of buyer perception, than no longer being able to afford a product that you feel – justifiably or not – you helped to grow at an early stage in its development. This organic relationship between users and developers is one of the more peculiar features of the software landscape.

Ever-optimistic software suckers

Of course, the true software junkie finds that such frustrations are regularly offset by the discovery of a truly wonderful application that is completely free! Open-source developments are the commonest form of this type of software, but there are many other freebies (such as EssentialPIM, for example, or FreeCommander) that are not open-source as such, but are distributed in free and paid-for versions. Over the years we have collected an impressively vast repository of such applications and utilities. Some of them we use regularly (Google Chrome and Firefox are both key applications here), others we return to often (like the wonderful if quirky DFM2HTML – used to produce The Word Gym website – or the mind-blowingly powerful Xmind).

In fact, we have discovered such impressive solutions to such unexpected needs that we have decided to write about some of them. We encourage you to submit your own ideas and solutions, so that we can help to bring them before a wider public. And maybe even help the developers to that enterprise nirvana that – while it might annoy us, the “little people” – will nevertheless allow them to reap the rich rewards they doubtless deserve…