And my pick of the list is the Spyware Removal, as we all know spyware tends to hack your browser so it is a good to fix internet browser

If you know of an application that has been updated but is not in the list let me know about it in the comments so that I can add it to the list and monitor it from then on.

µTorrent 1.8 Build 9599 Beta - another beta of the lightweight Bittorrent client.

7-Zip (32-bit) 4.58 Alpha 8 - a popular file archiver.

Azureus 3.0.5.2 Beta - popular Bittorrent client coded in Java.

Defraggler 1.01.068 Beta - defrag your hard drives or specific files on them.

eMule 0.49a Beta 1 - another popular P2P application.

foobar2000 0.9.5.2 Beta 2 - advanced audio player for Windows.

Google Earth 4.3.7191 Beta - geographic information.

JavaRa 1.04 Beta - checks for old Java versions, removes them, updates Java.

K-Lite Mega Codec Pack 3.9.0 - another popular codec package.

MediaInfo 0.7.6.3 - displays information about multimedia files like codecs needed to play them.

MediaMonkey 3.0.3.1159 RC2 - plays and organizes music.

Mp3tag 2.40d Beta - a powerful mp3 tagger.

Notepad++ 4.8.5 - advanced Notepad replacement.

Notepad2 2.1.19 - another Notepad replacement.

Paint.NET 3.30 - best free image editor together with GIMP.

Process Explorer 11.13 - displays detailed information about each process.

Process Monitor 1.31 - process monitoring tool.

SMPlayer 0.6.0 RC4 - my video player of choice, frontend for Mplayer

Spyware Terminator 2.2.0.411 - great anti-spyware software.

VirtuaWin 4.0.1 Beta 1 - create virtual desktops in Windows.

Visions 0.3.3.1128 Beta - unique picture viewer and editor.

Vista Codec Package 4.6.3 - a codec package for Windows Vista.

vLite 1.1.6 RC - prepare a special Windows Vista installation DVD.

YPOPs! 0.9.6 Alpha 1 - free pop3 access to Yahoo Mail.

For a little more than a week, a team of the company’s Silicon Valley software engineers has been examining the iPhone software development kit (SDK for short), a set of tools Apple (AAPL) released this month that let outsiders build software for the iPhone and the iPod touch. Microsoft (MSFT) executives aren’t sure yet whether they’ll find worthwhile opportunities to sell iPhone software – but they seem eager to find out.

“It’s really important for us to understand what we can bring to the iPhone,” Tom Gibbons, corporate vice president of Microsoft’s Specialized Devices and Applications Group, told Fortune on Monday. “To the extent that Mac Office customers have functionality that they need in that environment, we’re actually in the process of trying to understand that now.”

Though it’s typical to think of Apple and Microsoft as pure software rivals, their relationship is actually more complicated. For more than a decade, Microsoft has maintained a group of engineers whose sole job is to develop software for Apple’s Macintosh operating systems. Most of the engineers in Microsoft’s Mac Business Unit are based in Mountain View, Calif., a few miles from Apple’s headquarters. (They also happen to be quite close to the headquarters of archrival Google (GOOG)

The Mac unit’s work certainly isn’t charity – it delivers millions of dollars in profit for the company with its Mac version of the Office productivity suite. Microsoft doesn’t break out exact numbers, but we can extrapolate: Gibbons said the Mac Business Unit provides about a third of the revenue for the Specialized Devices and Applications Group, which also includes Windows Embedded, Microsoft Hardware, the Automotive Business Unit and Microsoft Surface Computing; the whole group did more than $1 billion in sales last year. So it’s reasonable to guess that the Mac unit provided about $350 million – and since Gibbons said the Mac group was one of the group’s more profitable units, it’s possible that Microsoft made somewhere in the neighborhood of $200 million in profit from Mac software.

Which brings us to the iPhone. With the Mac Business Unit, Microsoft has long prided itself on having one of the largest groups of Mac developers outside of Apple. With that expertise in Mac software, and knowledge of the Microsoft Exchange protocols the iPhone will use for business e-mail, the chances are good that Microsoft will be able to develop extra iPhone goodies.

“We do have experience with that environment, and that gives us confidence to be able to do something,” Gibbons said. “The key question is, what is the value that we need to bring? We’re still getting comfortable with the SDK, right? It’s just come out. So we had a guess as to what feasibility would be like, now we’ll really get our head wrapped around that.”

The Mac Business Unit isn’t the only Microsoft group eyeing the iPhone as an opportunity. Voice recognition unit TellMe, which Microsoft purchased a year ago, also sees potential in the device. Of course, TellMe now spends much of its time developing for Microsoft’s own Windows Mobile operating system. But as long as the iPhone SDK will allow software to take advantage of voice recording and location-based information, said general manager Mike McCue, TellMe will be all over it.

“If the SDK supports these things,” McCue told Fortune in February, “we’re absolutely going to get a version out there as soon as we can, get TellMe out there on the iPhone.”

The iPhone software update that opens the door to such third-party software is due at the end of June; that’s also when owners of the iPhone and iPod touch will be able to purchase the new programs. Until then, you can bet that developers everywhere – even at Microsoft – are hard at work.

I do think that Apple overstepped the mark here. But that’s not to say that it’s all rosy. I mean, if we retain an Easter theme here, Microsoft is the Barrabas of current monopolists. Microsoft was not shy in pushing Outlook Express or Internet Explorer on you when you wanted one or the other but not both and there’s certainly the impression that Microsoft updates whatever the hell it wants on Windows with the vague threats that these are ‘recommended’ updates (and therefore on your own head be it should you decide not to update). And remember the whole court case that Microsoft lost? That was about using your monopoly in one market to extend into others. Has anyone seen any evidence that Microsoft is actually doing this any less? That’s the difference between ‘monopoly’ and ”illegal abuse of monopoly’. Monopoly is just having a large share of the market. Abuse of Monopoly is when you hurt the market.

Sure - proponents of IE and Firefox are going to be pissed. Safari/Webkit is standards compliant and fast enough to give both of them a run for their money.

The issue is as much one if trust as anything and, experience shows that trusting Microsoft is going to end up biting you as a consumer. In fact, working with them as a partner is also likely get you your head handed to you for dinner. Don’t believe me? Ask Spyglass? Or any PlaysForSure licensee.

The fact that Windows Update is ‘opt in’ is immaterial when the repercussions for not ‘opting in’ are possible compromising of your system. This is Windows after all, the 600lb lice-infested gorilla that it is.

“At any time, you can visit Windows Update, click the Change Settings link, and get to this dialog box. Here, you can specify whether and how updates are downloaded and installed. You can also opt out of Microsoft Update.”

And then what? What novice user is going to opt-out of Windows update? They’re going to take what they’re fed.

Disclosure and ‘opt in’ are meaningless to the end user. Apple is not doing the right thing here but the thing they are doing, by pushing Safari, is less onerous than Microsoft has been in the past.

What can Microsoft teach Apple about software updates?

I think they’ve learned everything perfectly.

Adobe Reader
Apple QuickTime Player
Macromedia Flash Player
Microsoft Windows Media Player
Real Networks RealPlayer
Sun Java Virtual Machine

After you install this update, you cannot interact with ActiveX controls from certain Web pages until these controls are enabled. To enable an ActiveX control, manually click the control. There are also techniques that Web developers can use to update their Web pages.

When you install this update, the Plugin.ocx binary is completely removed from Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP. The Plugin.ocx binary is a private component of Internet Explorer without any public interfaces. Plugin.ocx is used to host Netscape plug-ins as ActiveX controls. The functionality of Plugin.ocx was disabled in 2003 in Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP for security reasons. This update removes the nonfunctional Plugin.ocx code completely.

As part of this Internet Explorer update, Microsoft will release updates to the current versions of Windows XP and of Windows Server 2003. All client operating systems will be updated. These client operating systems include the following:

Currently, Microsoft has not released updates for earlier versions of Internet Explorer, Windows Server 2003, or Windows XP. However, Microsoft may release updates for these earlier versions in the future. More information about release schedules will be posted in this blog when the information becomes available.

Maintenance renegotiation. Though many software vendors state that their maintenances charges are fair and just, it is hard for many buyers to take such statements at face value. For example, many software vendors have gross margins for maintenance above 85 percent—the main driver of profitability for the vast majority of software sellers.

There also has been an increasingly vocal and negative voice by CIOs as to the value of maintenance. While many vendors state that maintenance payments are not negotiated, their claims are as hollow as that of any company stating that they must sell at “list” price. Significant discounts are garnered by savvy buyers.

Inventory and portfolio management. As in manufacturing, inventory control and management is one way to keep IT maintenance costs down. Shelfware continues to be a large challenge in companies. Realizing there is a lot of potential waste to be found in software assets, buyers are starting to actively manage their solution suites.

The ultimate challenge for companies is their inability to track the number of licenses they have contracted, as well as how such licenses actually are used—and tie that back to maintenance charges. A new generation of asset management companies is emerging to help buyers better manage and track IT assets. Think of them as ERP for IT.

Using third-party maintenance providers. While the current SAP-Oracle lawsuit will temporarily dampen enthusiasm for third-party maintenance providers, this area is well-positioned to grow. Until recently, software buyers have had little opportunity to purchase maintenance from third parties, thereby relying on the selling software vendor to provide such services, or managing the software themselves—if permitted by the terms of contract.

Companies including Rimini Street, NetCustomer, and TomorrowNow offer services that permit customers to maintain their current solution sets at a lower maintenance price point—50 percent or more off standard list price.

Upgrade slowdowns. After many years of painful and expensive projects, buyers are slowing the pace of enterprise software upgrades. Often such delays prove beneficial. By extending the life of a release that is working well and serving the needs of users, corporate IT groups can spend upgrade revenue on initiatives that have a greater impact on corporate profitability. In response, software vendors have been forced by buyers to offer longer-term support for older software releases.

In the 1990s, vendors typically supported releases for three to four years. Today support time frames have doubled or tripled to accommodate the needs of buyers, as well as to ensure a steady stream of maintenance payments.

By using a combination of these four techniques, CIOs can cut wasteful maintenance spending while maintaining the integrity of their enterprise software packages. During a time of slight budget increases and increased desire for innovative IT solutions, it is a strategy that is finding favor with many corporate technology groups.

Source: Manufacturing Business Technology

Optimize Memory strives to increase your system performance by performing four critical functions:

• Defragmenting your physical RAM

  By defragmenting your physical RAM, the layout of your virtual memory more closely matches the layout of your physical memory. This increases your memory cache hit rate and improves locality of reference for data, thereby increasing the efficiency of the L1 and L2 caches present on your processor or motherboard.

• Increasing the amount of RAM available

  Optimize Memory attempts to reclaim RAM from the operating system and applications, so that when the application you are currently using needs memory, it is readily available. This avoids costly swap file access and paging, decreases load time and improves application performance.

• Recovering memory leaks

  By recovering memory that was allocated and forgotten (leaked) by the operating system and poorly behaved applications, Optimize Memory can increase the amount of both physical and virtual memory available for use.

• Flushing unused libraries and DLLs

  Many applications and portions of the operating system load libraries that are infrequently used or not used at all; to improve performance, Optimize Memory safely flushes these DLLs and libraries out to the system paging file, freeing up the RAM normally used by them. While in this state, they are immediately and transparently reloaded if needed.

ScreenShot

How to Use

• Simply click on the "Free Memory" button to make more RAM available.

Autoruns' Hide Signed Microsoft Entries option helps you to zoom in on third-party auto-starting images that have been added to your system and it has support for looking at the auto-starting images configured for other accounts configured on a system. Also included in the download package is a command-line equivalent that can output in CSV format, Autorunsc.

You'll probably be surprised at how many executables are launched automatically!

Autoruns works on all versions of Windows including 64-bit versions.

Screenshot

Usage

See the November 2004 issue of Windows IT Pro Magazine for Mark's article that covers advanced usage of Autoruns . If you have questions or problems visit the Sysinternals Autoruns Forum.

Simply run Autoruns and it shows you the currently configured auto-start applications as well as the full list of Registry and file system locations available for auto-start configuration. Autostart locations displayed by Autoruns include logon entries, Explorer add-ons, Internet Explorer add-ons including Browser Helper Objects (BHOs), Appinit DLLs, image hijacks, boot execute images, Winlogon notification DLLs, Windows Services and Winsock Layered Service Providers. Switch tabs to view autostarts from different categories.

To view the properties of an executable configured to run automatically, select it and use the Properties menu item or toolbar button. If Process Explorer is running and there is an active process executing the selected executable then the Process Explorer menu item in the Entry menu will open the process properties dialog box for the process executing the selected image.

Navigate to the Registry or file system location displayed or the configuration of an auto-start item by selecting the item and using the Jump menu item or toolbar button.

To disable an auto-start entry uncheck its check box. To delete an auto-start configuration entry use the Delete menu item or toolbar button.

Select entries in the User menu to view auto-starting images for different user accounts.

More information on display options and additional information is available in the on-line help.

Autorunsc is the command-line version of Autoruns. Its usage syntax is:

Usage: autorunsc [-a] | [-c] [-b] [-d] [-e] [-h] [-i] [-l] [-m] [-n] [-p] [-r][-s] [-v] [-w] [user]

-a

Show all entries.

-b

Boot execute.

-c

Print output as CSV.

-d

Appinit DLLs.

-e

Explorer addons.

-h

Image hijacks.

-i

Internet Explorer addons.

-l

Logon startups (this is the default).

-m

Hide signed Microsoft entries.

-n

Winsock protocol providers.

-p

Printer monitor drivers.

-r

LSA providers.

-s

Autostart services and non-disabled drivers.

-t

Scheduled tasks.

-v

Verify digital signatures.

-w

Winlogon entries.

Ruby On Rails

Rails is an open-source web application framework that is geared towards developer happiness and sustainable productivity. This is currently our preferred framework and we have been using it for the past couple of years.

Textmate

Textmate is a text editor for Mac OS X. I found this editor a few years ago. Soon after that, I started seeing it used in a lot of screencasts that showcased various web development technologies. It appears like a simple editor, but it packs a lot of useful features under the hood.

Skedit

Skedit is another text editor for Mac OS X. We'd argue that Skedit is more designer friendly than Textmate because some of it's default features sets such as special characters helpers and remote file capability. Skedit makes writing clean markup a breeze for a web designer.

Adobe Creative Suite

A standard suite of software for any designer, we use Adobe Creative Suite for everything from design mockups to slicing up graphics for the web.

SnapNDrag

A very simple piece of software for Mac OS X that allows you to take screen captures and simply drag them from the software to another piece of software (such as Adobe Photoshop). This is great when you are considering a UI change and you want to take a quick screenshot, pull it into Photoshop, and make a quick mock-up.

Parallels

Parallels is an essential tool for allowing cross platform/browser development. We use this as we are testing our web applications in various web browsers and platforms.

Firebug

Firebug is a plug-in for Firefox that has many web development tools. The main use that I have for it is the inspect feature. This allows me to inspect the HTML at any time including after AJAX calls have taken place.

Basecamp

We use Basecamp to communicate and collaborate on all of our projects. It allows us to set up a schedule with milestones and keep our messages and to-dos all in one spot.

Lighthouse

Lighthouse was developed by our friends at Active Reload. It's a reasonably priced web based hosted tool for dealing with bug/issue tracking in software projects.

Subversion

Subversion is an open-source revision control system. I'm not really sure how we developed websites without using subversion in the past. What I do know is that I do not want to go back. Not only does subversion keep track of our revisions and protects us while multiple people are working on the same things, but it is also the reason that I hardly ever open up an FTP client. Sorry Transmit, I still love you.

Warehouse

Warehouse was also developed by Active Reload. It is a web based tool that lets you browse through your subversion repositories. Unlike Lighthouse, you can install this software on a server of your choice.

Terminal

Terminal is my second most used application. I use it while working in my local environment as well as interfacing with our servers. I have always liked Linux over Windows, but I felt that some of the user experience was a bit lacking. When OSX came around with its BSD foundation a lot of us web developers started making the switch. It has great user experience, but you can open up the terminal and feel at home.

Incubator

I found this great piece of software about 3 years ago when it was known as pyramid. We use it for all sorts of various tasks that require organizing thoughts.

SQLEditor

I have been lightly searching for a simple Entity Relationship Diagram (ERD) tool that was native to OSX for the past few years. This is a tool that I found when I started this project. It certainly fits what I am looking for.

MySQL

MySQL is an open-source database that we use for most of our web applications. Another great package that we occasionally use is Postgre SQL

MySQL Query Browser

MySQL Query Browser is a GUI application to help you take a quick glance at your queries. With features that allow you to save and bookmark queries, as well as built-in documentation on the available features of MySQL, this tool makes developing and working with schemas an easy process.

Linux

Linux has been my preferred server operating system for nearly a decade or as long as I've been developing web applications. All of the tools that I use are at home on this platform.

Mongrel & Mongrel Cluster

Mongrel is a fast HTTP server for Ruby applications. Mongrel Cluster is a GemPlugin that wraps the mongrel HTTP server and simplifies the deployment of web applications using a cluster of Mongrel servers. Mongrel Cluster will conveniently configure and control several Mongrel servers, or groups of Mongrel servers, which are then load balanced using a reverse proxy solution.

Nginx

Nginx is a lightweight HTTP server that we use as a reverse proxy for our Mongrel Cluster. It also serves up our static and cached files.

Monit

Monit is a utility for managing and monitoring, processes, files, directories and devices on a UNIX system. Monit conducts automatic maintenance and repair and can execute meaningful causal actions in error situations. We mostly use monit to keep track of our Mongrel processes. If one fails or starts using too much ram, it will automatically restart it.