1. Newsletter Editorial

Greetings.  It's been about a month since we posted the results of our NANY 2012 event; if you haven't checked out the videos of all of the new free apps yet, you'll find a link in section 4 below -- I encourage you to give them a look.

Things have been a bit quiet on DC since then, except for the day we joined ranks with Wikipedia and went offline for 24 hours to protest and help kill the proposed SOPA legislation that would harm Internet freedom (see section 8 below), and except for a major new software release: Screenshot Captor 3.

I hope you will forgive me taking some space in the newsletter editorial to talk a bit about this release.  I want to say thank you to all the Screenshot Captor users and testers, and especially the donators, who have made it possible for me to keep working on the program for all these years.  Version 2 came out on September 3rd, 2005.  That's six years and over 100 updates ago.

If you've not tried Screenshot Captor yet, this might be the perfect time to do so.  And if you're already a user of Screenshot Captor but haven't yet made a donation -- I'm hoping you will take this opportunity to do so -- it would mean a lot to me.  Even better would be to take some time and use our DonationCredits system to distribute your donation to different members on our site whose work you want to support.

Lastly, I want to dedicate this Screenshot Captor Version 3 release to Gizmo's Tech Support Alert website, which gave Screenshot Captor its Best in Class award for screenshot tools.  Gizmo has always been super supportive of this site, and I can't express how honored I feel to have Screenshot Captor receive that award.  It motivated me to double my efforts to improve the program.  See below for links to more reviews as well as some videos showing off the new features.

Oh yes -- and happy Valentine's day!

Interesting article on the future business market for mobile sites vs mobile apps:

As of this writing, there's no contest: ship mobile apps if you can afford it. Our usability studies with mobile devices clearly show that users perform better with apps than with mobile sites. (Mobile sites have higher measured usability than desktop sites when used on a phone, but mobile apps score even higher.)...
In the future, the cost-benefit tradeoff for apps vs. mobile sites will change... Now for the $64,000 question — or, more accurately for most companies, the million-dollar question: When will the recommended strategy change? In other words, when will the changeover in favor of mobile sites be strong enough for you to abandon mobile apps?..

http://www.useit.com...bile-sites-apps.html

This is a very cool article on the science of why certain songs give you chills and goosebumps, using a recent song, Adele's "Someone Like You" as a perfect example.  You can watch a full video of the song here and I'd be surprised if it doesn't affect you:

http://www.youtube.c.../watch?v=hLQl3WQQoQ0

Then read about why it has that affect:

Twenty years ago, the British psychologist John Sloboda conducted a simple experiment. He asked music lovers to identify passages of songs that reliably set off a physical reaction, such as tears or goose bumps. Participants identified 20 tear-triggering passages, and when Dr. Sloboda analyzed their properties, a trend emerged: 18 contained a musical device called an "appoggiatura"...

http://online.wsj.co...213010291701378.html

DC member Justice writes to tell us about his new commercial software offering:

"I'm very proud to launch my BARD software today!

BARD is a tool to organise your audio / sample library with minimal hassle. I made it in response to the posts about organising your library on the nuskoolbreaks forum. Music producers and other audio enthusiasts can use it to preview samples and instantly file them in a folder of choice. Everything in BARD has been crafted to help you get back in control over the thousands of sounds you have lying about in a variety of places.

Get BARD now and enjoy all the powerful features for less than the price of a night out. Or try out BARD Lite without limits and nags for free."

Website: http://getbard.com

Ghacks, one of our favorite freeware sites, has posted their list of top new Windows programs for 2011:

This is the third part of the Ghacks best of 2011 series. In this top list, I’m going to look at the best software for the Microsoft Windows operating system that we have reviewed in 2011 here at Ghacks. We posted a total of 937 Windows related stories in 2011, of which the majority were software related.

http://www.ghacks.ne...ws-software-of-2011/