I make no bones about the fact that I'm a fan of Malwarebytes. It's easily the best free malware removal app in my toolkit, and it's the first program I turn to when cleaning up an infected system. The Malwarebytes team has worked incredibly hard since their application burst onto the scene, and countless technicians and PC users appreciate the phenomenal work they've done.

Now, for the past few weeks I've been reading numerous blog posts about how IOBit is giving away their security software for free. The offer was timed to coincide with the launch of Windows 7, and has popped up in my Google Reader several times since.

How do the two relate?

A few weeks ago, Malwarebytes staffers came across an interesting post on the IOBit forums. The post detailed a keygen for Malwarebytes and reported it using the same name MBAM reports. The crew dug further and found more evidence of copycat detections.

To confirm their suspicions, a fake signature implanted in the Malwarebytes database.

"The final confirmation of IOBit's theft occurred when we added fake definitions to our database for a fake rogue application we called Rogue.AVCleanSweepPro. This "malware" does not actually exist: we made it up. We even manufactured fake files to match the fake definitions. Within two weeks IOBit was detecting these fake files under almost exactly these fake names."

If this is proven to be true, I certainly hope that Malwarebytes is successful in prosecuting IOBit. For another company to use a tactic as underhanded as this - let's face it, it's outright theft - to build a product and label it as their own is appalling.

IOBit are, of course, defending themselves in their forums. They respond:

"We have never used the database of any other companies. And hope Malwarebytes stop spreading malicious rumors for hyping itself[...]A legal letter will be released later, which will prove that there is no problem with Intellectual Property Rights.

For the sake of avoiding dispute and possible problems, we have deleted all disputed items in our database temporarily, and have updated IObit Security 360's database."

Nevertheless, IOBit's reputation is taking a beating now on WebOfTrust - Malwarebytes supporters have been all too happy to head over and vote down IOBit's trust, privacy, and vendor reliability ratings.

Finding a web designer is a terrifying proposition for many people. How do you find someone qualified? It's not like there's a directory out there that lets you quickly browse and compare examples of work from various web designers to narrow down your set of choices quickly, and can help you get in touch with the one you choose.

Well, actually, now there is. And if that sounds like a good idea, consider that last week 37signals released a new site called Haystack. 37signals is a well-known web development company that is responsible for the incredibly popular online project management software Basecamp, as well as a few other web properties you might know: Campfire, Basecamp, and Highrise, to name a few.

The thing is, 37signals wasn't always an online service provider; at one time they were a web design firm creating client sites, so they know the difficulty web designers go through to attract clients. 37signals also takes pains to understand the difficulties users face, and have applied that approach to building a directory to help clients easily find web designers (and web designers easily find clients).

Early reports seem to be positive, with designers reporting they are signing new clients in short order. So if you're looking to advertise your design abilities, or if you're looking for a designer, give Haystack a look.

Clicky is a new web analytics package that is looking to give the current king of web analytics, Google Analytics, a run for its money. Like any site tracking service, you create an account, insert some code into your pages (or if you are using one of the popular blogging platforms, simply install the relevant plugin), and watch as Clicky gathers statistics for your site in real-time.

The service sets itself apart by being very well designed and easy to read, but also by including extra related features, like the ability to include your FeedBurner statistics, tracking Twitter statistics, and providing an integrated link shortening service based on its related domain name clicky.me.

The free version of Clicky is ad-supported, but a Pro version is also available.

A few of Clicky's more obscure features need a Pro account to use. For example, with a pro account you can set up Twitter searches for your brand name or URL, and then see how many mentions you are getting.

Mac users that have been spoiled by text editors like TextMate often find themselves frustrated when moving to a Windows machine. While there are lots of text editors for the Windows platform, it's hard to find one with the clean design sensibilities that TextMate offers.

Well, there's a new editor in town, and its name is Sublime Text. I don't mean to equate it too much to TextMate since they are very definitely different products; it's more the feel of using the products that drives the comparison.

Sublime Text prioritizes a slick user interface and features under the hood that make it a power-user's tool. For example, it sports the ability to give you a Minimap, which for developers gives you a 10,000 foot view of your code.

The best text editing tools seem to be powerful enough for programmers to use, yet incredibly useful for writers of prose. Sublime Text is no exception.

Unfortunately, Sublime Text is a commercial app - you have to pay for the quality, and it doesn't come cheap. A single user license will run you $59US. An evaluation version is also available.

The story of how NewsGator attempted to corner the market on consumer RSS has taken another strange turn. In an interview with Steven Hodson published on Hodson's Shooting at Bubbles site, Bradbury admits that he is no longer employed by NewsGator, but has retained the full rights to his popular FeedDemon RSS reader. NewsGator continues to offer FeedDemon, and the application is still NewsGator-branded, but the clear implication here is that NewsGator no longer owns the rights to the most popular native Windows RSS feed reader.

It's no secret that NewsGator almost single-minded focus on capturing the lucrative enterprise market allowed its efforts in the consumer space to falter, ultimately leading to NewsGator shutting down their once-popular NewsGator Online feed reader, having conceded the online feed reader battle to Google's upstart Google Reader, which has iterated faster, and performing better than NewsGator's online reader for a few years.

It's unfortunate that NewsGator has given up on this market. While it's certainly true that Google has a powerful and successful product on its hands, there is certainly room in the RSS space for more than one dedicated company. What this means for FeedDemon's Mac equivalent, NetNewsWire remains to be seen, but since NewsGator's current push for more enterprise business relies on the talents of Brent Simmons, NetNewsWire will likely remain a NewsGator property for the foreseeable future.

Whether that is good news or not is anyone's guess.

UPDATE: The previous headline of this post turned out to be incorrect, as Nick Bradbury points out in the comments. The relationship between FeedDemon, NewsGator and Bradbury is a bit confusing, but what he said in the interview was this: "I'm no longer employed by NewsGator. FeedDemon remains a NewsGator-branded product, but I'm 100% in charge of it now, and I'm once again an indie developer. FeedDemon is my sole focus – and my sole source of income." So, NewsGator owns FeedDemon, Bradbury works on FeedDemon, but Bradbury does not work FOR NewsGator any longer.

Bradbury also pointed us to a post by NewsGator's Greg Reinacker, explaining more about where things stand.

Microsoft is killing off its small business accounting product, Office Accounting. The company will no longer distribute Office Accounting Professional or the free version, Office Accounting Express after November 16, 2009.

According to Microsoft's FAQ, the company as determined that free templates that work with Excel are a better option for small businesses than the Office Accounting application. That's kind of true, in that you can customize Excel templates any way you like. But Office Accounting provided a full featured suite of accounting tools that would be pretty difficult to replicate by building or tweaking your own spreadsheets. Really, Microsoft has determined that it's not worth continue developing this product for one reason or another, and I suspect more people will switch to using QuickBooks or another competing package of accounting software than will choose to use Excel.

Microsoft will continue to offer 5 years of support for Office Accounting, and users will still be able to bill customers using PayPal, although eBay and credit profile information from Equifax won't be available after December 15, 2009.

The move comes less than half a year after Microsoft discontinued its personal finance application, Microsoft Money.

[via ZDNet]

Until April 30th 2010 -- six whole months! -- Adobe Lightroom 3 is available for public beta testing.

In the last week there's been a lot of news regarding Lightroom 3's advanced feature, and now here's your chance to actually give it a whirl!

Lightroom is great for every kind of photographer -- casual, avid snapper or professional. It's not a full-featured editing suite like Photoshop, but it does have most functionality that photographers (note: not 'digital artists') might require -- but if you're the kind of artist or photographer that likes to airbrush his works into submission, Lightroom isn't for you. It is a 'digital darkroom and presentation' tool -- so from downloading photos, to sorting through them and producing pretty presentations/contact sheets, Lightroom's the program to use.

For those of you that have used it before, and are wondering why it might be a good time to upgrade (or at least try the beta), here are the new or enhanced features that Adobe are touting:

• Brand new performance architecture, building for the future of growing image libraries
• State-of-the-art noise reduction to help you perfect your high ISO shots
• Watermarking tool that helps you customize and protect your images with ease
• Portable sharable slideshows with audio-designed to give you more flexibility and impact on how you choose to share your images, you can now save and export your slideshows as videos and include audio
• Flexible customizable print package creation so your print package layouts are all your own
• Film grain simulation tool for enhancing your images to look as gritty as you want
• New import handling designed to make importing streamlined and easy
• More flexible online publishing options so you can post your images online to certain online photo sharing sites directly from inside Lightroom 3 beta (may require third-party plug-ins)*

And if those bullets got your juices flowing, here's the download link again: Adobe Lightroom 3 Public Beta

I noticed this function a while ago when I upgraded to Photoshop CS4 -- I never dared use it, but I did notice it!

Now there's a handy little video from Adobe that shows you exactly how to enable the free screen sharing available to you in their latest suite of tools.

You're probably thinking: Neat! But what can I actually do with it? The first thing that comes to my mind is for businesses that are using an external graphic designer -- want to see their current progress on some work? Want to make sure they're sticking to the draft? Use the screen sharing!

You could also use it for collaboration -- there is chat and video conferencing functionality included. You could suggest changes and watch them occur in real time. I can just see it now... 'No, no, move it a bit to the left. That's it! Up a bit! How about if you make it luminous pink? And the font slightly more interesting... how about Comic Sans?'

So you got your party hat on and want to buy Windows 7 but don't feel like shelling out $119.99 - $319.99 for the various editions upgrade or full version? Well, we made life a little easier for you and your wallet. Below is a shopping site roundup of Win 7 deals and discounts. Check it out and see what deals you are eligible for.

Student - Microsoft is selling the student edition for $29.99 but you have to be enrolled in a college or university as they require a vailid college or university email. If you don't have one of those, you can scan in your student ID, proof of course payment (yes, I'm serious) or class list. Sheesh.

Home Premium Upgrade - $119.99. You need to be running a genuine copy of Windows XP or Vista to be eligible for this edition. (Sorry to say Microsoft had this on sale for $49.99 up until July 11th when it was sold as a pre order for Win7). Another option would be to buy the Family 3 pack for $149.99, however, Costco is currently selling this version for $134.99.

Shirt Pocket released an update to its Mac backup software package SuperDuper! today, and though it's only a minor version number revision, it's a major speed improvement. The software company announced on their blog that, while they understated the speed increase on the official announcement (there they only claimed a 2x increase), during their in-house testing they were seeing speed increases of about 3x over how long it was previously taking to do an incremental update of a backup set.

If you're a Mac user and you're not aware of SuperDuper!, you should be. It's a backup program that creates a complete drive image of your Mac's drive, then on a schedule can keep the image up to date using incremental backups. This means that once I had created the image, I could keep my Mac's backup up to date by letting SuperDuper! update my drive image overnight. Typically this takes about an hour on my machine, and if Shirt Pocket's blog is to be believed, that number will drop down to about 20 minutes.

What's cool about this way of doing a backup is that if you are backing up to an external Firewire drive, you can actually use Target Mode when booting your Mac and boot from the external drive in the event that your primary drive fails. This means that you are only out of commission momentarily, and if you are doing daily backups, you have only lost a maximum of one day's work.

If there's one Mac app that I wish I had a Windows equivalent for, it's SuperDuper!. Aside from the goofy name with the awkward exclamation point in it, SuperDuper! is by far the best workstation backup application I've ever used, and now it comes with 66% more oomph!

SuperDuper 2.6.2 is a free upgrade for existing users. A feature-limited free version is available that can make bootable clones, but can't do incremental updates. To do that, you'll need the full version, which costs $27.95US.

It's become a common practice to defend your PC with a handful of security apps rather than relying on a single program. One lesser-known app worth investigating is WinPatrol.

Just released, WinPatrol 2010 builds on the strengths of previous versions. It's now even lighter on memory use, weighing in at about 5Mb on my Windows 7 x64 system. Scotty's also learned to play nice by tweaking internal behaviors to reduce conflicts with antivirus applications.

The new version's cookies tab now handles Firefox and Google Chrome in addition to Internet Explorer. Users of the WinPatrol Pro will also enjoy improved realtime scanning speed - 30% quicker than the free version.

Winpatrol also scores serious points for its Pro licensing plan. Not only do you pay once for the software and receive a lifetime of upgrades, but developer Bill Pytlovany believes that your license should follow you - not your computer. That means you're free to enjoy your paid WinPatrol on any and all PCs that you personally own and use. Nice!

Both the free and pro versions of WinPatrol 2010 are available for download now, as is WinPatrol To Go -- the portable version, which is also free.

Astraware - long time software developers for Windows Mobile, Palm and more recently iPhone, Symbian and Blackberry - have now entered the rapidly growing Android software market with the release of two of their top titles - Astraware Solitaire and Astraware Sudoku.

Astraware Solitaire features 12 different single player card games in the one download, with the ability to customise each game to play 'your way'. A wide choice of card backs is included, together with an optional 'clear' card face. The application also features unlockable rewards.

Astraware Sudoku includes some great features including smart hints, pencil marks, hold-and-highlight to help beginners, a downloadable 'Puzzle of the Day' from the dedicated companion website (which also includes tips on solving techniques) and a puzzle solver to help you complete those troublesome puzzles in the newspaper!

Available for immediate download from the Android Market, both games are priced at $4.99 each and feature design and controls optimised for Android while still retaining an 'Astraware feel' that will be familiar to anyone who has used Astraware products before.

When Avid announced that it would be making a consumer oriented version of Pro Tools available for under $100, I was excited. Pro Tools, if you're not familiar with it, is an industry standard audio production suite used by musicians, music studios, radio journalists, and pretty much anybody else in need of a robust solution for editing audio.

The pro audio software is available for Mac or Windows, and has always required users to purchase a computer audio interface from DigiDesign (a subsidiary of Avid). The new versions are available under the company's consumer brand, Pinnacle. You still need to purchase some hardware, and it needs to be plugged in or the software won't run. But for $100 you can get either a USB mic or a guitar input or for $130 you can pick up a 49-key keyboard. The hardware alone is almost worth the price, which makes the Pro Tools software almost a value-added feature.

But it turns out that value is a relative term. I've been testing Pro Tools Vocal Studio (with an M-Audio USB mic) for the last few days. I'm using it with a Windows XP laptop with a dual core processor, and I've found that the software is resource hog, audio playback is choppy, and you have to deal with a limited feature set.

One thing to note is that Pro Tools has long been reported to run better on Macs than PCs. Unfortunately my primary computer is a PC, so that's what I used to test this software. Your results may vary.

For $60, you could pick up a personal copy of Reaper, an audio editor which offers better stability and more features. But you wouldn't get the USB mic, keyboard, or guitar input or the experience of using the industry standard Pro Tools software. If those things don't matter to you, then you might want to skip the rest of this post and go check out Reaper. If you're still curious, I'll meet you after the page break.