Last time the way I did that was to secretly put up a 90% off coupon code so that I wouldn't drain your wallet.
So if you have a google account and you want my games for 99 cents, lemme know and I'll get you the code when the integration is ready to show off. Needless to say, I'll only need one or two people to help me with that.
Here's my take on a couple of new pieces of software, having tried 'em both.
Windows Vista Beta - not ready for prime-time. I installed it on a non-mission-critical machine, and it was just about six kinds of clunky. A lot of the little bits of eye-candy they added (like the disappearing expand-contract-the-tree triangles in Explorer) only served to make the product more difficult to use. Whenever I wanted to do damn near anything, I had to go through lots of confirmation boxes. I know that I'll get used to it (especially when the book comes out that shows you all the registry hacks necessary to shut off the annoying bits), but I just had a tough time with it.
The Vista window-frames are pretty, but I'm not sold just because of that. I can get about 75% of the Vista UI niceness via Crystal XP, the Trillian Vista Skin (as it's the only app where I can't say "make yourself look like everything else on the screen"), and Desktop Sidebar. I could get all the Vista niceness and more (specifically windows that wriggle and twist and such) with Object Desktop, but I really don't need that much shininess and animation. First thing I did when I set up my Mac Mini was make the danged icon-dock stop annoyingly zooming itself whenever I was near it :)
New Office Beta - a very nice surprise. There's nothing earth-shattering, but the new toolbar-stuff is much better organized than it used to be. I was surprised at how fast I got used to the new ways of doing things. They managed to make things work a little better without making me feel like I couldn't get anything done (see above for an example of the opposite). The only question-mark I have over my head is why they chose to go with the new tab-bar on some apps (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) and not on others (Outlook, Project, Access). Although Outlook does have the new tab-bar on the "compose email" window, which really beats the pants off the old Outlook "compose email" window.
Only annoyance was that I had to fart around with the Outlook settings before I could get my old email database to work.
Speaking of Office Beta, I'd heard that FrontPage was getting killed. . .sorta. It was getting re-deployed and would become part of other products or something like that. Actually it just got rebranded as "SharePoint Designer", whatever that means. It's pretty-much the same app except that it's borrowed stuff from Dreamweaver, specifically DW's little tabbed panels and DW's heavy enforcement of styles. It still has two chief advantages over DW, specifically that it's much snappier and it has in-line spell-checking (i.e. it puts a little red squiggle under words it can't find, which I like). I'm sure that folks will still look down their noses at it as an attempt to continue to shoehorn FrontPage into the market, but it is pretty good. I'd consider using it for my web-stuff, but I don't wanna re-learn their way of doing the complicated DW stuff, like templates.
Also, PHP is a second-class citizen with FrontPage for obvious reasons. DW didn't care. The only real difference it made was that DW had a built-in PHP reference, and I don't imagine anything MS is gonna be getting that anytime soon.
On a final note, Watching that whole Steve Jobs "Vista 2.0" thing this year was rather sad. Apart from the little live-backup thing, there's really nothing in the new OSX that's even mildly interesting. To watch him go on and on about how they're superior to Windows because they bundle in. . .brace yourself. . .an email client with HTML-based document templates and. . .brace yourself harder. . .support for virtual screens that you can switch between just felt forced and lame.
What's next?
"We're now Vista 3.0 because we're including a sound-recording app and a game where you have to find hidden mines. . .that really explode in a cool and shiny way!"
Apart from the file backup thingy, there really wasn't anything that couldn't have been dropped into a service-pack update. Ain't worth $129.
Speaking of Apple, I won an iPod Shuffle at my local Tom Thumb grocery last weekend for their "Grand Reopening". To be honest, though, it's got the same capacity and isn't as nice as my little Samsung MP3 player (which has a color screen with cute icons), so it's probably gonna get ebayed.
Theres even something similar to Shi-Shen there, which is just as fun :).
As for FrontPage, Microsoft has an editor (Expression) in beta, which is pretty cool IMO. It's part of a 3 product series they seem to be working on. Might be worth having a look if you're into that stuff.