It’s a sad fact of our hardware-obsessed society that software is rarely an attractive topic for either readers or writers. But hardware is nothing without software to go with it, and a surprising amount of software companies pitch stuff to us, hoping we’ll write about it.

Yesterday and today we’ve actually had two companies come into the office to see us with some genuinely new features to their software packages. The problem with most software these days is that developments are merely incremental. Radical change rarely happens and security suites is one area where this happens even less often than most.

It’s not the fault of the developers particularly. It’s that the apps are good enough in the first place but a new version has to appear because that’s what is expected. Everybody has to make money.

Stream to your iPhone or iPod touch

Yesterday CyberLink arrived to demonstrate its new wares. We’ll brush aside PowerDVD 8 – it’s a prime example of the incremental development I’ve just talked about with a web-based database of movie information and graphical overlays.

But more interestingly, there’s also full Blu-ray support. The spec sheet says HD DVD, but the company’s spokesperson Manal Ma says the decision to drop support for the latter was taken “only a couple of days ago”.

But then there was Media Show 4. Yes, another ‘manage your media’ app. However, this actually looks the part, bringing together your photos and videos and creating the best-looking slideshows we’ve ever seen. There’s also effortless uploading to Flickr and YouTube. And, what’s more, it’ll only set you back £30.

Today we had a visit from Roxio, which demoed its Toast 9 app for the Mac. Toast has been about a lot more than mere burning for some time now.

Blu-ray support is included but so is a cool new Streamer app, which can transfer video from your Mac over your internet connection and onto your iPhone or iPod touch using nothing more than your Safari browser. This is really very cool and we’ll give it a proper run through when our copy arrives next week.