What Software Products Are Hot?

Hot software changes all the time. Software popularity reflects the desires of the user driven software marketplace and is subject to change frequently and often the hottest trends change rapidly as well. Identifying what software is hot can help a developer pick projects that are leading the market in terms of downloads and purchases. To get hot on the trail to making popular software, we’ll begin with a run down of some of the hottest categories of software.

Category of software system

Currently emergency restoration software is hot. People want to be able to boot a bricked out system, and this category of software is likely to remain hot for quite some time, especially given the nature of major OS software to constantly be in a state of releasing the next hot release. Additionally, there will always be interested tinkerers wanting to try out hot new bootcd software just to see what special features they have when compared to the major operating systems.

Another hot software category is security and antispyware software. The debate over spyware has become quite hot, with some security firms talking about switching to a list of safe-to-run white lists instead of constantly updating ever expanding blacklists.

Following this trail may take some time, but is this major category of software is going to be hot for a good long time as the result of increased reliance on the internet and the persistent infiltration of more and more variants of spyware software. It’s not hot that IT firms now spend over 20% of their budgets on average combating blackhats’ hottest hacks.

Linux is starting to get hot. Over the last few years speculators keep waiting a big shift to *nix based operating systems. Unfortunately, the cherry hasn’t ripened for Torvald’s camp quite yet, although almost 1% of computers now run Linux as the operating system. OSX, the Apple operating system based on the *nix based BSD is also gaining more and more market share. Hot products are being released for these operating systems and tend to port fairly well on similar architectures.

Digital audio and media software programs are scorching hot. With literally millions of users now relying on sites such as Myspace and Facebook to publish their latest video clips of their family picnic out in the hot sun, developers are quickly realizing there’s a hot market for software tools to compress, manipulate, convert, and edit digital camera raw footage.

P2P clients and torrent technology software is still hot. Although the market for file transfer software has began to cool recently for these products with increased pressure from large organizations such as the MPAA, RIAA, European nearshoring software developers and their universal counterparts, the ability to distribute files over a vast assortment of computers or find and obtain content easily makes products in file-transfer categories hot.

API's for users

Facebook widget software is amazingly hot also. Users of this extremely popular site know there are millions of accounts. Some experts place valuations of Facebook having a worth in excess of ten billion dollars. Recently, Facebook opened up part of it’s APIs for users to contribute code to the Facebook experience, and already tens of thousands of software programs are becoming available.

What’s hot, is these software programs can bind in features like PayPal or advertisements and have been used by programmers to do hot things like charging a 1$ draft to PayPal in exchange for a graphic image of a butterfly or present being placed on a friends page.

Although what software is hot and what’s not changes, the categories of software listed above have been hot for quite some time. Any developer who elects to follow pop culture trends in software can at least know that there is an interest in the fruits of their labor once they pack up the software source code and set it free into the wild.