By allowing you to import Illustrator or Photoshop artwork and turn them into interactive Flash, Catalyst jumpstarts any Flex project. I can't overstate how accessible and easy to use I found Flash Catalyst.

Microsoft Silverlight 3 is catching up to the capabilities of Adobe Flash, Flex, and AIR in all the areas where Silverlight was behind. Silverlight 3 applications can run in or out of the browser, online or offline, with much improved audio, video, and 3-D graphics.

Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1 is a very promising upgrade to the premier IDE for .Net development. It improves the UI, IntelliSense, and Designers; supports parallel programming; and improves support for test-driven development. It's still missing support for ASP.Net MVC and smart devices.

A potentially useful and cost-saving tool, if you're a programmer it's worth grabbing the 30-day trial of JavaRebel.

Mr Site Takeaway Website Version Two is feature-rich, but the level of customisation is restricted because the templates themselves cannot be changed. Mr Site Takeaway Website is good value for money, since you get a domain name, one year of hosting, and an easy to use Web site creator for a reasonable price.

If you're in need of an IDE that can flexibly bridge multiple languages, support distributed teams with ease, and ultimately improve code quality and streamline development cycles, you'll want to take a close look at Komodo 5.

Moonfruit claims that over two million sites have been built using SiteMaker, and it’s easy to see why. The interface is intuitive and very pleasant to use. While expert users will find the range of options rather limited, despite the various widgets that are included in paid packages, this will not bother the vast majority of people who simply need to get a good-looking site online quickly. This is a recommended service for inexperienced designers.

For free software, Talend Open Studio offers a great deal to anyone looking for a powerful data integration. Despite some limitations, Open Studio 3.0 scales gracefully to meet enterprise integration demands and is an attractive alternative to hugely-expensive software or bespoke development

AptEdit is very much a programmer's tool, especially for those programmers who regularly work with a variety of text files in several environments, as opposed to those with a dedicated development environment specialised for their language of choice. It's a bit beyond "whim" purchase, but the 30-day trial should be more than enough to let coders determine if it's the tool for them.

This is a major development in Flash’s evolution. There are some great new features and kinks have been worked out. However, it’s frustrating that Adobe has felt the need to try to make Flash feel more consistent with the other Creative Studio applications.

Overall, BBEdit 9 is an essential update for existing users, but, regretfully, there’s little truly remarkable here to stop Web designers and coders with itchy feet defecting to the likes of TextMate and Coda.

DX Studio 3 sits somewhere between a game-design engine and an ‘interactive experience’ design tool such as Adobe’s much more expensive Director — but for interactive designers this software is more than capable of producing a multitude of types of high-level interactive media for even the most demanding of clients.

Caspio Bridge's crisp, business-like GUI brings Microsoft Access-like simplicity to building Web databases online. Caspio shines with tight integration with Microsoft Office applications and a clean pricing model. The SQL structure imposed on tables will be welcome to some, but restrictive to others. And while applications are built without coding, many old programmer tricks are still necessary. Table names, for instance, require underscores instead of spaces. The biggest limitation is there's no easy way to add arbitrary logic to Caspio's back end.

XSitePro 2.0 is one of the best applications we’ve seen for aiding novices in creating professional-looking websites. But that needs to be borne in mind: this is not really a program for professionals themselves. Although it can create such things as scripts for search pages, XSitePro 2.0 handles page generation for you rather than being a tool for complex dynamic sites.