This year marks the 4th annual NANY Challenge: The NANY 2010 Challenge!

The aim of the NANY Challenge is to release a new programme, utility, game, etc on January 1st; you first have to have pledged your commitment to release the application in the Pledge Thread: Read the full instructions if you're interested in participating: we're always happy to meet like-minded coders who are keen to celebrate and have fun with new Freeware / Donationware. There's also an Idea Thread and Offers of Assistance to help you with your entry.

The NANY event is a community celebration, not a competition and therefore there can be no winner; apart from the obvious rewards for the software using community, everyone who participates in NANY, either as a software author or volunteer, will receive a stunning DonationCoder mug or T-Shirt with a brand new and very collectible NANY 2010 image designed by the artist Nick Pearson (See NANY 2010 Prize Graphics).

NANY 2010 Challenge Details (as of December 13^th)

• 25 Pledges
• 12 Teasers
• 4 Entries

Teasers
Many of our coders have posted infuriating posts that we've called Teasers; check out these to whet your appetite for what's coming up:

• UQ
• fenixContacts
• Crush DocMerger
• Multiboot ISO Maker
• The Garden Social Club
• FarrWebMetaSearch
• FARR Plugin ProcessInfo
• Twigatelle
• Leap of Faith
• What's My Share?
• DupFind
• Artwinauto BlitzType

Early Releases
There have even been 4 very early Releases that can be downloaded right now:

• Anuran (1.0.12): A rotating, automatic-prompting personal text log.
• ClipTrap (1.0.0): Aggregate text copied to the clipboard
• Multiboot ISO Maker (Alpha 7): Multiboot ISO Maker (freeware) is an unrestrained graphical front end for mkisofs for Windows and a multiboot ISO creator
• Page Countster: A network printer management tool

1. Newsletter Editorial

Greetings everyone, and welcome to another edition of the DC newsletter.  It's 19 degrees where I am in Champaign, Illinois, the wind is howling outside, and 2010 is fast approaching.  And once again it's time for everyone's favorite event on DonationCoder: N.A.N.Y. (New Apps for the New Year).

The N.A.N.Y. event is where we invite, cajole, blackmail, bribe and just generally beg all of the programmers who pass through the site to pledge to release some new piece of free software on January 1st.

The idea is simple, and everyone is welcome to participate regardless of their skill level.  There are no winners, but everyone gets a prize -- a very handsome DonationCoder mug commemorating the event.

Last year's NANY event saw over 30 applications submitted (including some really spectacular ones!) and was written up all over the web.  And your favorite characters from last year are back again this year to help make it another success -- especially DC member Perry Mowbray (himself a coder) who has so generously taken on the task of coordinating everything.  Let's make him proud and show him that we appreciate his efforts by creating some cool new software.

If you're a programmer, stop by now and pledge to participate.  Especially if you're a long-time DC regular: We *NEED* you to participate!  But even if you've never posted to our forum before -- we'd love to see some new faces along with the regulars, and this is your perfect excuse to jump in and say hello.

And if you're not a coder, stop by and give some feedback to those who are, as they post teasers about the projects they've chosen to work on.  If you're a blogger or have a website, there are some badge graphics you can put on your web page to let your readers know about the event.  There's also a thread where you can post ideas for coders who are having trouble coming up with a project idea to work on.

You'll find more information about NANY in the threads below, along with photos of the awesome coffee mugs we'll be sending to participants, but let's review the basic guidelines for participants here:

• Pledge that you are participating on our forum well before the New Year -- post a teaser about what you plan to create.
• Release the application on or before 31st December 2009 (we'll be posting a roundup article about all the entries on Dec 31st).
• Any type of application is acceptable: Windows, Linux, Mac, Web, iPhone, Android, Script, Plugin, etc.
• It must be free (or donationware) for personal use.
• It needs to be something that hasn't been released publicly before November 2009 (updates to existing programs don't qualify).
• You keep all the rights to and control of your software, this is just an event to encourage coders to release new free tools.

2. NANY 2010 (New Apps for the New Year)

The NANY event is one of the very best things we do on the site.  If you know any coders, please give them a nudge and ask them to come by and give us a little bit of their time.  We know sometimes it's hard for coders to come up with good ideas, so we started a special thread just for people to post project ideas for others to consider working on; don't be shy posting your ideas.  And if you're a programmer, why not stop by the Pledge thread now and pledge to release something new by December 31.  Help us make it something special -- we promise to make it fun!

• NANY 2010 - Instructions
• NANY 2010 - Pledge to Participate Here
• NANY 2010 - Program Idea Suggestion Thread
• NANY 2010 - Offers of Assistance
• NANY 2010 - Prize Graphics - with a cameo from my favorite web comic!
• NANY 2010 - Web Badges
• NANY 2009 - A Look Back

There's more:

DC member ChalkTrauma says:

This is just a collection of command line apps that I developed over the years that lanux128 gave me the idea to release. This is the first bunch I have cleaned up and documented, I expect to keep adding to this collection as time permits. Right now I have 11 in the pack. I've done my best to test them, but I'm sure there are bugs here and there.  Hopefully someone will find them useful.  I don't know how much time I'll have to work on them so I probably won't have many cycles for feature requests unless it is something trivial, but I'll always fix bugs. You can find them here:

http://dreamcycle.net/dstoolbox

share and enjoy 

Interesting read on BetaNews today:

Paywall is suddenly a hot topic as free content turns many longstanding businesses -- news among -- to apparent ruin. News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch is mad as hell, and he's not going to take this anymore. This week Murdoch repeated his call for paid services during a U.S. Federal Trade Commission public workshop. "We need to do a better job of persuading consumers that high-quality, reliable news and information does not come free," he said. "Good journalism is an expensive commodity."

But how is the value of the digital content, whether news or some other commodity, determined when so much of it is free? Bill Buxton, principal researcher for Microsoft Research, briefly addressed this topic during an October talk at the Business Innovation Factory. "When the cost of goods approaches zero, the effective price inevitably for that product goes to zero," he said. "We've seen it in music, and the music pirates -- maybe they were bad, maybe they weren't -- were not causing it; they were just accelerating it. Every single other entity that goes digital has zero cost of goods. So, whatever's happened in music is going to happen in literature, news, cinema, theater and so on."

The prevalent theory is to fund all this stuff with advertising. "But if everything is going digital, going onto the Net, where is the money for advertising going to come from?"..

http://www.betanews....kes-money/1259882572

This should be really easy but i can't find anything - or remember anything - but can anyone recommend a system tray util that will display network activity? please.

I'm sure i had something years ago that did - no idea what it was now - maybe it was zone alarm.

Any ideas, preferably free (oh, it's for vista)?

I stumbled on this site because they had a nice post on my Find and Run Robot program, and may be the only people on the planet to have discovered the FARR videos that i posted on youtube (you can see the complete video set here).  But there are plenty of nice posts on the site to make it worthy of regular reading..

This website was created with the intention of presenting the best free software available all over the web. We are firm believers of the fact that there is a free software out there for almost anything that a paid software can do. Armed with this belief, we search the web for best free software, and include it here... We are husband and wife, both with degrees in software. I am Ishan (”the husband”), and Jaya is my better half. Apart from working on this website, both of us have good full time jobs as well...This website was created because of our passion about blogging in general. We chose topic of free software because this is what we love, and consider ourselves to be small experts in this field.

http://www.ilovefreesoftware.com/