News archive

Who Watches the Watchmen? 2008-02-01 19:48:11

Taking a break from all the bad news recently, we roll out a new site feature: a watch list! With a little JavaScript and cookies we've again added a little smarts to the main page, now allowing you to give special attention to certain announcements. Just put your mouse in the Watch List box and enter in the text to match any part of a new release name, version, or description. Since it's all done on your computer, there's no need to register an account with us, give us your email, pay us large sums of money, or anything! As with all interface changes, we're likely to tweak this a bit initially, so please leave feedback if you have any suggestions.

Should Softpedia Go? 2008-01-21 15:14:39

You know what we just said about the Kewlbox/Blockdot deception? How amazed would you be to find out that Wondershare is now doing the same sort of thing under the name Aimersoft? We're completely dumbfounded by the recent flood of garbage releases that have come in via Softpedia. We are at the point where we no longer consider them a worthwhile site to aggregate. Would anybody even miss them if they were gone? Please leave feedback if you have anything good or bad to say on the issue, because the next crapware incident from them is likely to be their last.

The Misses Keep Coming 2008-01-18 00:18:50

This year is really starting off with a bad software company bonanza. Remember Kewlbox, the packager of Flash games that change your Mac's system settings and track you online, from our report about six months ago? It appears they've returned as Blockdot. We would have completely missed their name change, too, if they hadn't been up to their old malware-esque tricks again. Here's a key tip to any software company trying to re-brand a bad image: stop screwing over your users. Shame on SeaWorld, Panasonic, and many other big companies that commission operations like Kewlbox/Blockdot to produce adware that is so shoddy.

Wondershare Crapware 2008-01-17 09:53:39

If you've felt you've been dumped on the last couple days by another bad company, then you're not alone. Wondershare seems to think it's OK to release what is essentially the same software over and over, but apparently feel it is worth charging another $30 because they went through the arduous task of changing "iPhone" to "iPod" in the name, and dozens of other similar variations. We're not having it, though, since all it does is clog up the tubes of our Internets. In general, we see this as an advancement of the terrible marketing technique that brought us the excessive announcements for the likes of Lite, Standard, Pro, etc. versions of one piece of software. We're so tired of it that we're just going to consider them all to be duplicates. I don't know about you, but we're certainly feeling cleaner already!

A Case Study in Bad Branding 2007-12-20 04:53:52

Would you buy software from a site that spams its domain in the name of software announcements for versions that are extremely outdated? I sure wouldn't, but for some reason that's exactly what Macfun.com has been pushing for the last couple of days. We weren't really going to make a fuss about it until we saw them do it to Dream Chronicles, which we first covered 6 months ago when we started to flag bad software. In that, it's not surprising that a shoddy promotion tactic got attached to shoddy software. At the root of it seems to be some dispute over (or change of) publisher, but until someone cares enough to tell us what's going on we're simply going to mark anything with Macfun.com in the name as bad software.