My screen saver effect used to be Snowsaver: nice flurries slowly falling behind your screen and all. But, due to the current weather conditions, I felt it was no longer appropriate.

I saw RedPill, a Matrix code theme screen saver, on VT and decided to give it a try. Indeed, it look great and it’s dans l’air du temps

It turns out they are made by the same guy… Talk about artistic compatibility

This was supposed to brings me to my main topic (yeah, it does not work as well as expected… the joys of live programming): I love software made by small developers.

Since I have a job now, I’m actually registering shareware like NetNewsWire, my news aggregator, and Kung-Log, the software I use to post this (ok, I didn’t actually register, but I did send Adriaan something off his Amazon wish list). Why do I like them so much? Well, for example, in the current version of Kung-Log, you can now use « and ». Previously they were not encoded properly. Apparently no one pointed that out before I did. Turnaround from initial email to new version with problem fixed and new features? Less than 2 days.

Oh, and I’ve found little badges for both too:

I’m tempted to put them at the bottom of the right column. But I think they’ll move there the day something convinces me it would be worth your bandwidth.

I’ll think about it though: there is an argument to be made for pushing the free advertising, since it may mean more brand awareness of the product, more registered users, more developer time on the app and ultimately more features at no (or almost no) cost for me . I did feel more of a moral incentive to talk positively about great-yet-unregistered-software than great and registered products though, as I feel that by registering I’ve fully paid my due.

Now if I could get paid for endorsing a product… In the meantime, I’ll just keep talking about tools I appreciate.