For the majority of users looking to run a single Web shop and who want more features than the standard stores offered by many ISPs, Actinic Catalog 9.0 is an excellent piece of software. Unless you need advanced payment and authorisation procedures (in which case Actinic Business is recommended), this will do everything that you need.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Flash Pro 8's new video features are the biggest change, but the lack of knockout new tools leaves you with few reasons to upgrade.