Wednesday, November 19, 2008

Software à la carte

One of the things that strike me about Apple’s Mac OS X is the quantity and quality of open source and shareware software. Communities and small companies are able to develop great apps for free or that one can buy for something between 10 and 50 dollars.

The last small wonder that I found was
, an application which does something incredibly simple: it puts together in a common interface all the social networks and groups to which one belongs. It enables us to see in the same window our friends’ activity on
,
or
(among others) and we can also ad to the mix anything which has a RSS feed.

A curious thing about it is that the developing team actually
to keep its customers up to date on what they’re doing. Further, they use
to interact with their clients to debug, explain what’s happening and choose what to develop next. You can watch and participate, live, as a programme you use evolves. Isn’t this, really, ‘software à la carte’?

Picture 2

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