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.

We haven't found any downside to installing Visual Studio 2008 SP1, other than the time; it took me several hours to download and install it over a relatively good broadband connection: if we had to do it again, we'd kick it off just before we went home for the day. Note that the updated MSDN documentation requires a separate download and installation. Once installed, the SP1 changes are, in our experience, all good. Unless you have add-ons or SDKs that still require Visual Studio 2005 (the .Net Micro Framework comes to mind), we don't see any reason for a Microsoft shop not to completely switch over to Visual Studio 2008 SP1.

A blinding debut release, Adobe AIR 1.0 lowers the skills requirements and costs for desktop deployment by leveraging a cross-platform runtime (from a single code base) and familiar Web technologies. Developers can take advantage of streamlined interfaces and a persistent local data store to give rich Web apps a native look and feel — including offline functionality.

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.

With a powerful debugger, drag-and-drop components to get you started and excellent tutorial support, the Visual Studio Express editions are a real boon for budding programmers. They're not packages for professionals, but as a free introduction to Windows programming no other tools come close.

It is almost unfair to review the Google App Engine when it is just a beta operation, but Google has a habit of leaving some tools in beta form for a long time. There are a number of places where the documentation and the code suggest that Google will add more functionality pretty soon. The basic framework and the database are both quite nice, although limited. We can imagine Google adding better automatic features for generating the CRUD (Create, Update, Delete) routines common in these applications. Integration with Google's Wallet might also be quite useful, although it's bound to be complicated by the banking system. Some people have already experimented with mapping the Google Web Toolkit to the system, even though that's written in Java and translated into JavaScript. Google might also provide some good tools that allow the different hosted applications to share user information, in essence allowing a user to move their preferences and some of their data to other applications. This kind of inter-application linking could be pretty cool. Time will tell what Google delivers. In the meantime, this is a good sandbox for playing with simple database applications. There's a very good reason why the beta version has a waiting list.

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

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.

The Android SDK is a wonderful example of what can be done with open source applications and tools. When the SDK's parts work, they work reasonably well. However, at this point, would-be Android developers must be willing to assist in debugging the development platform itself; it's still pretty rough. Android's single best characteristic is prime mover Google. Whether that is enough weight to ensure Android's success remains to be seen.

Palm Mojo SDK 1.1 feels unfinished, but has enormous potential. Palm's new webOS places classic JavaScript, HTML, and CSS in the driver's seat for the apps for the Palm Pre. Borrowing the tools from browsers makes it easy for talented JavaScript programmers (but not Web designers) and opens the possibility for many ideas from the Web to flow smoothly to Palm Pre users.

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.

The average human being who has no Web design experience but who can use Microsoft Word will find working with Easy WebContent a breeze. It's well worth the price to avoid the learning curve of expensive products that offer more than you need.

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.

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.