We all have our favourite websites. Not the ones we read as part of our job, but the ones we scan whilst munching sandwiches at the desk or, surreptitiously, during an application build process.

I’m hooked on giveawayoftheday.com at the moment. It is a site that gives away licensed software. It features a different product every day, and you can only download a given product on the day it’s featured. There is a great variety of products, from screensavers to file archiving utilities. They vary from the gorblimey to those that work sublimely. The addictive part is not so much the free software, but the voting and the comments. Each application is voted on and reviewed by hundreds of users, and each review is then voted on. The general consensus is never far off the mark: In this case, at least, almost every opinion is interesting.

Some classics have been on the site, such as Aston Shell, Concept Draw and TNT Screen Capture. There have also been some truly original pieces of software on there, such as the one that takes the sound of you humming a tune, and turns it into Midi, but these are actually in a tiny minority. It is the run-of-the-mill ones that are more fascinating. How and why do they get written? What is the urge that impels a group of people to risk time and money writing a text editor, a calculator, or a DVD copier? It is strange that the vital creative spark seems to be missing in much of what is written. It is the software equivalent of massed ranks of musicians playing ‘Stairway to Heaven’.

If giveawayoftheday.com provides a representative glimpse of the output of the software industry, then surely it is time for a re-think. There must be room for the truly iconoclastic applications that suddenly change the rules, just as Visicalc, Quark Express, Visio, Delphi, Threadz Organizer or Ventura once did.

It got us wondering: what, today, are the most innovative, radical, .NET tools? Not so much the IDEs, but those applications that make life easier in the development process. We’d love to hear from you! Post your suggestion as a comment to this blog, and you’ll go into a draw to win an iPod Shuffle!

Cheers!

Tony.