Handpicked Software

Software companies used to be loathe to let the general public get a sneak peek at software in development. But today, in honor of Macworld—and in some cases, perhaps, in an effort to steal a little thunder from tomorrow’s keynote—a handful of companies are pushing betas of new products to the public. Consider Adobe’s Lightroom (their response to Aperture), Pixound’s Jam Studio (which let’s you “play” pictures or videos by converting RGB values into music), Karelia Software’s Sandvox (an iWeb competitor?), and Marketcircle’s Daylite 3 (”So Good, we just had to skip a version number!”).

I’ve been a beta tester on a number of applications and getting my hands on beta software usually involved jumping through hoops, promising not to blab about it, committing to spend hours and hours testing and submitting feedback, and sometimes coughing up some cash (Tiger Preview), usually in the hope of scoring a free copy upon release.

While Adobe won’t comp you a copy of Lightroom for taking the beta for a spin, enough people are likely to get hooked on the beta that they’ll contribute useful feedback, creating a better product, generating buzz, and developing a taste for the shipping version. And Karelia will practically pay you to try their beta, knocking a buck off the cost of Sandvox when it ships if you refer a friend to the beta program, up to a maximum of 50% of the cost.

Public betas make good sense. But is it my imagination, or is this a new trend?