Tech Debug

You may have noticed that my last 3 posts were about free software. I like free stuff. Everyone likes free stuff. Why talk about free stuff? A friend told me that the reason he enjoys using Open Source (and usually free) apps is he can customise them. He finds it frustrating that when you pay $1K per seat for an application like Mercury (now owned by HP) that sometimes it just wont do what you need.

I use eReader on my Palm, but only for free documents and not often enough to warrant paying for it. Now that is no longer required. As I noticed at the downloadsquad, eReader Pro for Palm and Windows mobile devices is now being offered for free. If you would like your own copy for Palm (or windows mobile) you can download it from the ereader website.

I received and email from the MacHeist directorate today. The controversy has been solved by YazSoft offering a free upgrade to Speed Download 5 for MacHeist customers, but only for a very limited time – March 13 2008 until March 27 2008. It is nice that I got the email, albeit 5 days after the offer was extended. This list of changes that come with SD5 are available online. So if you purchased Speed Download 4 with MacHeist II, and choose to upgrade, then proceed to yazsoft’s website in a quick and orderly fashion to get the upgrade offer.

David Watanabe announced the most recent upgrade to Newsfire RSS as now free for all users. In David’s own words, he explains what the buzz about news aggregation is, and why Newsfire is a must for ALL mac users: For those new to this, NewsFire is a news reader for blogs, news sites, and anything else that publishes an ‘RSS’ syndication feed. It watches for news so you don’t have to.

Disco is one of the smartest looking and basic (yet powerful) CD/DVD burning solutions for your Mac. Yesterday it was updated with a maintenance release to V1.0.3, which includes quite a number of fixes for crashing that may have occurred. It has been almost 1 year since the last update so this is welcomed. Incidentally, the developer is offering this software for USD$19.95 (and there is a very good USD->AUD exchange rate) for a limited time.