Giveaway of the Day, revisited.

A short while ago, I posted about [tag]Giveaway of the Day[/tag], a site that gives away an application on each day of the week.

I was very gung-ho about it, and even had their feeds on my sidebar to show visitors the goods.

I removed their feeds a while back, when their site’s outage was taking out my blog (bad plugin design, I guess), and I was considering whether I would place their feed back here. The reason I was considering this, instead of automatically doing it is, there hasn’t been much of a variety in software submitted, and very little was making me say “wow!” on their releases.

On the software side, a lot of the apps they were releasing had freeware, or open source alternatives that I use on a normal basis. For example, today’s giveaway (Premium Booster) is stuff that I can duplicate with Piriform’s CCleaner, which is free (though that’d be something worth donating a little cash to).
Some of the software was plainly useless (Elprime Clock Pro comes to mind — Windows has a system tray that has a clock in it. Most alternative shells have at least one good analog clock widget, for those who absolutely need one), and to see that the software has a price tag is somewhat disturbing.

On the games side, unfortunately, the majority of the released games have either been some variation on matching bubbles (I love puzzle games, and Sky Bubbles Deluxe was happiness. The rest of the games in this same vein were mediocre), shooting bubbles (There has been at least one Bubble Bobble clone, and at least one Puzzle Bobble clone), and almost no engrossing RPGs to draw in the geekier crowds.
While it’s good for the children (They get something fun to play nearly every day, and can rarely tell the difference in games), it’s not so good for the adults who still play games.

Watching the commentary on each piece of software there is getting a little annoying, though. It’s always a “This sucks! I can do this for free!”,without any sort of meat to the comment.

Right now, it is my hope that Giveaway of the Day starts to grow again, and gets titles that are worth their weight in the price asked for them normally. The lack of variety in applications is making the site stale, and unappealing enough to warrant me not talking about it frequently.

Things I’d love to see for free, even for a day:
Khaled Mardam-Bey’s [tag]mIRC[/tag]
RitLabs’ [tag]TheBat![/tag]

Both are software that I’d love to see appear on the list.
I’d also welcome similar applications, but the point is, it’s nice to offer software that people become dependent on. It’s easier to hook the willing into buying the software willingly for replacement purposes.