1.   Businesses use it to enable disparate computer systems to chat with one another and to create nifty little programs for downloading from their Web sites.

2.   Switch to Jot, a nifty program from Communications Intelligence Corp.

3.   The other day, I picked up a nifty little program called Netstock, which discreetly displays stock prices on screen.

4.   Wood wrote a nifty little Java program, called eDrill, to automate the collection of data off the Web.