A lot of high-end software companies provide extremely good value packages for students often involving completely free giveaway editions, stripped-down versions or huge discounts on the off-the-shelf price.

Maybe you hate Microsoft for charging so much for its operating system, but at least it also has plenty of great free software giveaways (such as Windows Live). This year it has released two great deals, one for students only and the other for anyone else interested in getting into software or web development:

Visual Studio 2008 Express Editions

The Visual Studio Express editions are feature-limited but not in a way that will affect most beginners just wanting to try out development themselves. The Express editions are available for anyone to download and include four main applications, the two main stand-outs being;

Visual Basic 2008 Express

If you’ve ever wanted to have a go at learning how to develop your own Windows applications then this is the best place to start. 2008 Express includes the capabilities to create applications using the new Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and Microsoft provides plenty of free guides, tutorials, samples and extra resources.

Visual Web Developer 2008 Express

Visual Web Developer is for the design and creation of web pages and more. 2008 Express includes a lot more support and tools for using CSS, building JavaScript applications and more complex data-driven web sites.

It’s great for learning for the same reasons described above, you’ll find plenty of tutorials and assistance.

The Express editions also includes Visual C# 2008 and Visual C++ 2008 for more.

DreamSpark

DreamSpark is restricted to students currently attending a university or academic institute which has been accredited and signed up for this program. The number of universities is actually pretty comprehensive and I would guess most universities around the world have actually joined up.

You’ll have to use the student number and password you should have received from your university. Verification is simple and instant before you can download for free any of Microsoft’s software for designers and developers. These aren’t trial or feature limited in anyway and are the exact tools you can buy off the shelf for hundreds of dollars:

Visual Basic 2008 Professional Edition

Provides the features missing from the Express edition. Create software for Windows, the web and devices running Windows Mobile. You can also create applications with then new Office 2007 Ribbon UI or create addins for the Office applications like Word and Outlook.

This file is downloaded as an ISO file which you’ll need to burn to a DVD before installing. Or if you have a mount program to mount ISO files that should be fine as well.

Expression Studio 2

Expression Studio is Microsoft’s set of products designed to compete with Adobe’s developer and designer software such as Dreamweaver and PhotoShop. This installation is 500MB and includes:

I’m still only trying these products out for myself so I can’t really give you a honest opinion at this point. For the price of free though there is little to complain about. Incidentally the Expression 2 applications were all re-written in WPF. An interesting point although I’m not sure what advantage this gives, perhaps someone can help me?

XNA Game Studio 2

The strength of this application is that it enables developers to easily create games for both Windows and Xbox 360 which have support for the Windows Live and Xbox Live respective multiplayer gaming networks. This application is for hobbyists and independent developers, for fun or profit.

The student download also includes a 12 month trial subscription to XNA Creaters Club which would normally be $100 per year. You won’t get access to premium content though. Seriously, what’s with these stingy companies these days?

If you try these tools you’ll discover the software alone isn’t the best part of this, but the community, the extra resources, free assistance and tutorials and sample code and templates which will go a long way to helping people who are teaching themselves.

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Since then I’ve been following the development of Songbird with a great deal of interest and was excited when Songbird 0.7 was released a few weeks ago.

This release introduced a great new UI, more features and significant performance improvements, all very welcome additions.

With Songbird on track and cranking up the pace for a version 1 release by December I decided to contact the Songbird team for an interview about their project. Rob Lord is the founder and CEO of Songbird and took the time to answer these questions about Songbird:

Perhaps you’d like to describe the team behind Songbird. I believe a number of you have been involved in previous media projects?

Hi Laurence, thanks for the interview. Yes, our Pioneers of the Inevitable team includes key developers from media players including Winamp and the Yahoo! Music Jukebox.

What do you think about development in other media players? With 4 main choices for consumers (iTunes, WMP, Media Monkey and Winamp) and each with a pretty unique market, things seem to have slowed down in the last couple of years. Apple only releases a new version of iTunes when they have a new product to peddle and Microsoft with their newest OS.

Our perspective is that the traditional desktop media player feature list is complete, thus there has been little innovation in desktop media players for years. However, what happens when a desktop media player is connected to the Web is an unexplored and intriguing opportunity. Songbird re-architects the traditional desktop media player to go there. Songbird is an open, customizable desktop media player that is built to play the Web.

Songbird has an incredible amount of potential. Have you been getting much interest or support from significant online companies such as Amazon? Without an iTunes/iPod lock yet still supporting them I would assume companies would be jumping on an opportunity like Songbird =)

Songbird has attracted a lot of attention from consumer electronics companies, especially handset makers, and media retailers/service providers. We’ll be making announcements as the partnerships are ready to launch.

We hear everyday from device makers that they want to focus on their devices. We hear everyday from digital media retailers, subscription, radio, video, recommendation, locker and other service providers that they want to focus on their services. Yet everybody – users, developers, device makers and service providers – wants those devices and services to work together with software. But only Apple offers a credible integrated service + software + device experience. Songbird is the solution for all those who benefit from open, customizable media player software. Songbird is the open solution for service + software + device integration.

That said, Songbird isn’t yet ready for everyone. If a user needs full feature parity with traditional desktop media players or has never installed a Firefox add-on, Songbird isn’t ready for them yet.

Songbird is based on Mozilla and not Firefox itself as I initially assumed. Can you explain what this means? Do improvements in Firefox, such as FF3 and 3.1 become part of Songbird? Does the Songbird team work with the Firefox team?

Songbird, like Firefox, is built from the Mozilla platform. So, yes, new Firefox features and enhancements are inherited by Songbird. Also our team provides testing, fixes and patches back to Mozilla.

What’s the best song you’ve ever discovered through Songbird?

So much to choose from! A Ratatat remix from the Gorilla vs. Bear music blog comes to mind.

What feature do you miss the most personally when using Songbird? CD ripping and burning?

CD Rip/Burn isn’t an issue for me because I ripped my CD collection years ago. I’m 99% pure digital now. Key for me is support for my iPhone 3G so I can leave my older iPod behind. FYI, CD Rip/Burn is on our roadmap.

What Media Software did you use before Songbird?

Winamp was for many including me the seminal MP3 player. Winamp was first to go big in the 90s with skins, plug-ins, EQ, visualizations, etc. and its community responded with thousands of extensions – the kind of vital community we see supporting Firefox today. In the last five years, I found myself recommending iTunes to others for its relative simplicity — and found myself using it for the solid service + software + device integration.

The approach for Songbird is almost a ‘make-your-own’ media player, even more so than Firefox is as a browser. By that I mean the Songbird Media player includes only the most basic functions and almost all new features, device support and codecs are all added via extensions. It’s a great idea as users can avoid having any features they’ll never use (such as iPod support when they don’t have an iPod), however will the most popular extensions eventually become part of Songbird, or are you keeping the system like it is?

You nailed our thinking. Like Firefox, Songbird will offer a baseline of what ever media player user needs and then offer customization via add-ons to your specific media player preferences. We’re experimenting with including highly requested add-ons, such as Last.FM integration, in the first-run bundle.

Does using Songbird make you more attractive to the opposite sex?

Works for me and my lady. Try playing the Groove Salad channel via SHOUTcast for best results. YMMV. ; )

Tell us your five favourite extensions.

Hard to pick as there are over 250 Songbird add-ons currently – and they are all specialized features. We’re very grateful to all the individual Songbird add-on developers that have embraced Songbird and the Songbird community.

Rather than pick favorites, here are the add-ons with the widest appeal based on downloads:

Wikipedia – artist biography of the currently playing artist.
Mashtape – a mash-up of Flickr photo, YouTube vdeos, Last.FM bios of the currently playing artist.
MediaFlow – Like iTunes Coverflow, view you music library by flipping through album art.
Last.FM Cover Fetcher – retrieve album art from Last.FM for your music library.
Last.FM Recommendations – artist recommendations from Last.FM based on currently playing artist.

Songbird have also been cool enough to provide us with a Songbird T-shirt to give away! To win this just comment below and tell us the craziest place you’re going to wear it (When you get the shirt we expect a photo proving it – and we’ll publish it! So no bare bottoms please!)

NOTE FROM THE EDITOR : MUO employees are not eligible to enter! This one’s for the readers!

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So the cheers/boos system worked like this: A feature that I liked and/or worked as claimed on the Syncplicity site was given a cheer, a feature on which I saw a potential room for improvement was given a boo. The score at the end of each bullet point represented the cumulative score which means that the total of cheers and boos up till that point. I apologize if you found it hard to comprehend. (damn the cumulative system! From next time I will not be using cumulative scores).

With that clear and out of the way I have some good news for you all:

1. First off Syncplicity now integrates with Scribd, Zoho, and Picnik which means that you can now view and edit documents using Scribd’s iPaper and Zoho’s tools. Picnik on the other hand allows you to quickly edit photos online from any web browser.

2. You can now share your files without requiring the other person (whom you are sharing with) to have a Syncplicity account.

3. The pricing for Syncplicity is out, you can find the details here. This may or may not be good news according to the way you choose to see it.

4. Last but by no means least we have a little giveaway for our readers. The Syncplicity team is offering a little extra gift to our wonderful readers. Here are the details: The first 500 users who sign up with the code MAKEUSE9 will start with 3GB (instead of 2GB) and if you decide to sign up with a subscription, you ’ll start with 45GB instead of 40GB. Alternatively you can use follow this link to skip entering the intro code.

One little mention here that in case you didn’t notice – the points that got a boo in the last article have now all been corrected and/or improved by Syncplicity (Kudos!) so now its “cheers” all the way for Syncplicity!

(By) Varun Kashyap – A programmer, tech enthusiast and a blogger who likes to write about the latest on the web, tips and trick, hacks to make you online and desktop experience richer and simpler. Check out his TechCrazy blog

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