Newsletter for September 24, 2011 - "Fighting for Feathers"

1. Newsletter Editorial

DonationCoder is not a charity, but we've always tried to be good internet citizens -- lending our support to good ideas and encouraging our members to find projects to be actively involved in.  We're a small site without financial resources, but we love talking to people about their new idea and cheering them on.

In this month's newsletter editorial I wanted to bring special attention to a few noteworthy items.

The first item concerns a battle we fought and largely won -- a battle against a particularly insidious new practice adopted by CNet's download site, to wrap all software hosted on their site with their own custom adware installer regardless of author's desires.

The second item I want to bring your attention to involves a problem we have been ranting about for years now -- the dreadful way antivirus companies handle false positives (cases where an antivirus program says that a program is infected when it isn't); due to laziness they frequently end up terrifying users based on nothing more than a guess, and are slow to correct their mistaken identifications.  In the last week longtime DC forum member and skilled windows programmer Jeremy Collake from Bitsum Technologies has begun a new effort to address this problem -- and the related (and often more damaging) problem where entire websites are rated as "dangerous" (and sometimes even blocked) because of these false positives.

There are also a number of new DC member software releases that deserve special attention this month.  DC member Tranglos as released an early beta version of his NANY 2012 entry, called Ethervane Echo, a new clipboard tool, and it's already getting lots of attention.  DC member ATH also released a new version of his WinButtons tool and a number of DC members are reporting their success in using it with a small touchscreen device.  And DC Member HamRadio released a new tool for portable document launching.

We also had a really interesting discussion on the forum with a programmer who has been working on "Fairware", an open source software-payment model similar to the one used by DonationCoder.  Lot's of really interesting talk on that thread for those who are interested in donationware and other voluntary payment models.

Lastly, I'd like to draw your attention to a new open tool called ZUploader.  I've been searching for an existing tool to integrate into my Screenshot Captor screenshot tool, which would make it easy for people to upload screenshots to different image hosting or ftp sites.  When I found ZUploader I knew my search was over.  It's a great tool that supports lots of services, like ftp, imageshack, imgur, flickr, photobucket, rapidshare, dropbox, and more.  It's a pleasure to use and I can't recommend it enough.  The author has also expressed his desire to hear feature requests, so if you can think of anything you'd like to see added to the program, don't be shy about asking.  If you are a user of Screenshot Captor -- check out the screencast I posted showing the new ZUploader integration.

You'll find all of these items and many more in this edition of the DonationCoder newsletter..