subject: Keeping up with the latest developments in computer software [print this page] Keeping up with the latest developments in computer software
There are a couple of ways that I personally keep up to date with computer software.
Slashdot. Thes e guys are great with general technology news as well as the latest development in software. Not only new software releases hand-picked and announced by their awesome board of editors, they have a great community of passionate geeks who are always ready to give you their highly biased opinion. When you've got extremes working together, what you get is a pretty good picture of what's happening.
Digg is another site that comprises of links contributed by its members who, in themselves are constantly keeping track of the latest and greatest in the tech scene. People posts links, others vote on them, and what you get in the end is the cream of the crop.
VersionTracker is a site that has taken upon itself to keep track of the latest updates for a majority of software that is out there. By checking out their homepage from time to time, you can easily keep track of the latest releases of software that you already use, and a few that you probably haven't.
Reddit.com is a news-submission site, similar to digg, and it contains a sub-reddit channel for programmers (located at http://programming.reddit.com/ ) and sometimes people will submit software announcement information there. Of course it is typically programmer-oriented software but once in a while there is general-use software submitted as well. For example, when Safari was released for Windows, it reached the front page of Reddit within a few hours.
Freshmeat.net is a website where mainly open-source software developers announce releases. The most popular projects as of today (June 26, 2007) are MPlayer, Linux, gcc, Apache, VLC Media Player, PHP, MySQL and Pidgin (formerly known as Gaim). You can subscribe to receive updates on future releases of your favourite open-source software.
If you use Linux, the best way to keep up to date is to check what is being updated when you use your package manager and then use a Google or Ask.com to find out more about the release. There is typically a ChangeLog for open-source software projects that details the differences between releases. Download VLC Player to compare and see all its features and the media playable.
