Two Slashes

It seems that computer users today fall into an almost cookie-cutter fashion. Firefox for web browsing; Winamp, Windows Media Player, or (rarely, but common enough that I mention it) VLC for media playback; uTorrent for P2P, and some AIM client (any of the official client, Trillian, or Pidgin in that order). Of course, while this makes it a lot easier knowing that all of these have a relatively large userbase, this only covers the basic and common tasks people perform every day with their computers. Common being the key word here.

While I’ve seen one or two attempts, I don’t think anyone’s ever actually pulled off recommending some of the lesser-known software; however, niches need to be filled, and someone’s got to do it. The only caveat is that nobody ever actually does. When have you opened your favorite downloads site and actually trawled through hundreds of useless or irrelevant applications to find some backseat freebie nobody’s ever heard of, because it was useful to you? Chances are, you’re probably muttering “never” at your monitor right now.

Sure enough, there are sites like Giveaway of the Day that offer up this rare niche software with surprising regularity; the problem is that they require you to bring your product to them, rather than searching for it and indexing it themselves. (Understandably, this makes more sense given their business model for shareware software, but all the same this means that they don’t actually dig.) Where are those hidden freebies, those things that could be useful to someone, but are never found because they’re the last result on Google, or nobody’s ever thought to go searching for it in the first place?

Given the sheer number of people on the planet at this point (let’s limit that to people ‘with access to a computer’for the purposes of my example), there’s no problem that hasn’t been encountered at some point that a piece of software couldn’t aid in overcoming. Whether it’s some meaningless, trivial, repetitive task that needed to be done over and over, or some specialized project, chances are someone out there has experienced the same thing, and perhaps they or someone they know was savvy enough to come up with a solution. So it only follows that there are solutions for everything out there; the problem is that these solutions are often buried too deep to be found by more than a select few people.

Forgive me for saying this, but someone needs to get off their backside and come up with a site that shines the spotlight on some of these hidden gems…