Consulting Journal: Resources - Giveaway of the Day

Resources: Giveaway of the Day

by David Blakey

A website that can be useful.

[Monday 4 January 2010]

I recommend that you look at the Giveaway of the Day website regularly. I try to look at it every day.

Each weekday, at www.giveawayoftheday.com, a software developer offers an application. Visitors can download and install commercial software without paying a licence fee.

How it works

The developers who place their software on the site, which I shall call GOTD for brevity, are usually conducting beta testing. GOTD provides a developer with a wide range of beta testers who provide robust feedback on their software. In return the testers get a licensed copy of that version of the software.

Some of the testers are home users, looking for free products. Some are commercial users, looking for products that they can later purchase and install. Others appear to be professional software testers, providing their feedback for free.

How it can be useful

The GOTD site can be useful to consultants in a number of ways.

Software for you

First, and most obvious, is that it can provide you with free software that you can try during the course of your work and decide if it is the right product for you and your business. Most of the software on GOTD is completely unlocked, so that you can save your data in files and retrieve it at any time; some test versions of software do not allow that. I can remember the free version of a mind-mapping tool that did not allow me to save my work and then retrieve it later, so my testing of it did not truly represent how I would have used it in my business.

You should remember that you will only have a licence for the version offered on GOTD. It may not be the full version and it may not be the final version. You will not be entitled to later upgrades and probably not to full support. I am not suggesting that you should think of GOTD as a source of software for your to use, but rather as a source of software for you to test. Like any other commercial software, it is always worthwhile for consultants to purchase the full, top-end version, with ongoing support, for their own business.

Software for your clients

The GOTD site can be useful for providing information about available software. You can download and test software to see if it would work for your clients. Then, at some future time, you may be able to suggest that software if it meets a client's needs. If your work involves your suggesting software to your clients, you probably already have a set of lists of software for specific applications, such as mind-mapping. GOTD can be a way of adding good software to your lists.

User expectations

The comments made by the testers can be useful in showing what the expectations are that users have of specific software applications. You will have to read through all the comments, of course, and you will find many that are not useful, but you will occasionally find a comment that describes a feature that a software application should have. That might be useful some day.

Limitations

The most obvious limitation is that you will not be downloading software that you can keep. The registry process only works on the day that the software is offered on GOTD, so you cannot use it later to install the software on other computers. You will not be able to install it again on your current computer. If you perform a complete rebuild your computer by re-installing the operating system, you will lose all your GOTD software licences.

The second limitation is that the applications on GOTD are all downloadable software that you install on your own computer. GOTD does not currently offer any web-based applications. Many consultants are involved in specifiying, acquiring and even developing web-based and browser-based applications that are offered as software as a service or cloud applications.

GOTD can still be useful. It occasionally offers software development tools, although probably at a lower level than cloud developers need. It also provides insights into the look and feel of computer-based applications that web-based developers can either accept or reject for their own applications. While it may not be often that a web-based applications will have the look and feel of a computer-based application, there might be some odd feature that would look good.

Conclusion

As with any resource, you should first decide what you want to use it for. If that reason is strong enough for you to spend time each day looking at GOTD, then you should add it to your bookmarks.

[ List articles on Resources ] [ View printable version ]