By encouraging algorithmic thinking in its users, Scratch lets you design characters that can dance, sing and interact with one another, among other neat actions. Scratch is essentially a graphical programming language where coding is much easier than in traditional programming languages. Creating a script involves snapping together graphical blocks in a way you might put together a puzzle.

In addition, you can also create images that move and choose animated responses to movements of your mouse. Adding in music clips or other sound effects is also possible and relatively simple. While Scratch does take a little while to master, it's more because there are so many different features in it than any real difficulty with the program itself.

After you've finished a project on Scratch, you can share it on Scratch's website. You can also embed your project into other websites like Facebook.

Scratch is a neat way to encourage kids to think critically and make unique programs on their PC.

Download Scratch 1.4 in Softonic

Download TheFreeDictionary Desktop Assistant 1.6.173.0 in Softonic

This application helps you to design any type of relational charts, concept maps and other types of diagrams. It works in a very intuitive way: double click on the screen to create a new element and right-click on it to customize its appearance.

CMapTools exports charts to a variety of formats (XMl, PDF, HTML...) and also enables to share them on the Internet, although we found the connection to CMap servers a bit slow.

Download CmapTools 5.05.01 in Softonic

Nowadays, kids (and adults of course) have high tech 3D computer models such as BoneLab which help bring the body to life and help you memorise more easily parts of the body like the tibia, fibia and... erm... brain. BoneLab allows you to browse all bones in three dimensions. The models are all high quality and support free rotation and zoom so you view them at just about any angle.

It should be noted that BoneLab is not really suitable for kids because it's quite a technical application full of detailed and complex descriptions of the human body. For medical professionals and students it's a dream however as BoneLab features links to Wikipedia for complex anatomical terms.

There's little to criticise in BoneLab as it does an excellent job of making learning about the human body that bit more fun. Perhaps some videos would have been nice though.

Download BoneLab 1.4.0.5 in Softonic

Wikipedia is a user-edited website that contains literally millions of pages about virtually any subject under the sun. Now you can access the site directly through the Wikipedia Metro app to search for whatever topics suit your current whims.

The Wikipedia app's interface is just about as simple as the website itself. You can search by topic via a search bar, or else click through highlighted links in the text that you're already reading on a current subject. Wikipedia's Metro app uses the same basic color scheme as the website, meaning articles are easy to browse and read.

In addition, you can pin articles for later reading, as well as share articles to other Metro applications. Wikipedia also has support for articles in different languages.

Wikipedia has nice integration with Metro, as well as all the great information you want about any topic of your choosing.

Download Wikipedia for Windows 8 1.0.0.22 in Softonic

Overview

You won't find showers or sunny spells among the forecasts made by Earth Alerts - it's strictly a tsunami, earthquake and wildfire kind of kind of program.

How it works

Once you download Earth Alerts, start your examination of nature's less clement behavior by entering the locations that interest you, bearing in mind that although Earth Alerts supports global events, it is tailored to the US. Once you have chosen your location and enabled auto-update, you can monitor all of the major events.

Features

Earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanoes, cyclones, wildfires and landslides are all covered by Earth Alerts, with information taken from a variety of organizations that specialize in natural hazards, weather and geography. You can focus on each area separately, looking at maps, radar images, Google Earth results and even news stories relating to whatever is currently happening.

Earth Alerts provides plenty of settings options, from tweaking the frequency of updates to requesting email and SMS notification of any changes. You can add multiple locations and specify the specific locales and minimum severity of the events you want notification of.

Earth Alerts is a very interesting program and will be particularly attractive to people living or interested in the US. On the negative side, Earth Alerts' maps and graphs are not interactive and the old-fashioned interface casts a negative shadow on the program’s technological claims.

Earth Alerts is perfect for the disaster-obsessed, but lacks the polish needed to make it a truly great program.

Download Earth Alerts 2013.1.140 in Softonic

AutoCAD is a multi-purpose program that's fantastic for making precise 2D and 3D buildings, models and more in the industry standard CAD design. Unfortunately, it's also quite expensive, which might make it difficult for students or other people on a budget to purchase.

That's where LibreCAD comes in. A free, opensource tool that lets you create and edit 2D models, LibreCAD is a legitimate alternative to the more expensive AutoCAD. Support and documentation on how to use the program is also available user-made and available for free on the developer's website.

LibreCAD provides users with a palette and a variety of retouching tools that will let you both create and edit 2D designs. For more hands-on users, LibreCAD's availability as an opensource program allows you to customize it to your liking without any cost except for time on your part.

Beginning users might find it a little difficult to use initially, but the extensive tutorials made by other users and developers definitely goes a long way in helping you learn the program's ropes. The only real downside to the tool is that there's no support for 3D model creation, which might limit its usefulness, depending your own needs for a CAD-based application.

As a no-cost alternative to the far more expensive AutoCAD, LibreCAD can't be beat for creating and editing 2D designs.

Download LibreCAD 1.0.2 in Softonic

Got a question on your mind? Ask ChaCha and you'll most likely find your answer. Most common answers are answered by human beings and presented so. Searching with Google will give you a bunch of sites that may or may not contain the answer but ChaCha does its best to answer you like a human being.

The interface of ChaCha is slick. Want to search for something? Click or tap on the 'Ask A Question' button and the Windows 8 search side-bar will pop up. Start typing your question and results will appear instantly below. Click or tap on one to see the answer.

While ChaCha has a pretty incredible database of questions and answers, the information that it provides is very shallow. You will often get a few sentences and that's it. If you're looking for more info, you'll have to search outside of ChaCha for it. The Wikipedia app is a good start.

On the front page of the app, you are given a grid of articles that you can read. The topics of the articles vary from top lists to solutions for common problems. These articles are also pretty shallow and don't provide much quality reading as they only present the bare minimum. Annoying, ads are integrated into the grid of articles, disguising them.

Overall, ChaCha is a good, quick way to look up questions semantically but a proper search engine will probably provide you with more information.

Download ChaCha Metro App in Softonic

This original application will find rhyming words for anything you write on its search field – well, for almost anything. Rhymesaurus contains about 35,000 words so there are obviously a few missing, but it worked fine for me for each one I tried (even swearwords, which we all know it's one of the first things you look up in a dictionary).

Search results include rhyming words classified according to their number of syllables, as well as idioms and proverbs that can also be used in your rhyme. You can set the program to highlight the most common words.

There's not much left apart from that: no configuration options or no extra tools, apart from the possibility to save your searches.

Rhymesaurus is a quite simple yet very original application that will find rhyming words for anything you type in.

Download Rhymesaurus Free Edition 2.0 in Softonic

WikiTaxi is a useful little tool that allows you to do exactly that - download Wikipedia to your hard drive and consult it without even having to access the Internet. However there is a catch - you need a hell of a lot of spare drive space. Because Wikipedia is constantly growing, WikiTaxi uses compression to make sure that the database fits on an 8 GB memory stick - still pretty impressive.

On the plus side, Wikitaxi requires no installation. Just extract the WikiTaxi archive to any folder, and it's ready to go. The folder can be on a fixed hard drive, or a portable device like memory stick or flash card. WikiTaxi does also modify a small options *.ini file which it places right next to its own executable so it does modify your PC a little.

WikiTaxi is a brilliant innovation that makes reading Wikipedia without an internet connection a reality but it does require a lot of free disk space.

Download WikiTaxi 1.0.6 in Softonic

While the Windows Store doesn't support magazine subscriptions yet, there are plenty of magazines that have created apps to provide content to readers. Popular Science is a great publication for reading articles about science and technology.

The application itself is very simple. The main page of Popular Science provides a grid of stories. Thumbnails with art and a brief description are shown. There are several categories broken down in the front page, including 'Features,' 'Science,' and 'Technology.' Tap on an article and you'll be taken to the piece. There's a header photo but not much else when it comes to visual media.

Speaking of media, Popular Science's lack of photo and video galleries really hurt the user experience. There are some stories that would do better if there were photos or videos to break up the massive amount of text. Instead, all you get a header image and a bunch of text. The writing is high quality but Popular Science needs to include more audio/visual media.

Overall, Popular Science is a good way to quickly browse through articles from its website but offers a basic reading experience.

Download Popular Science for Windows 8 in Softonic

This app is the ultimate dictionary to understand the language spoken on the Internet and other computer-related environments. It contains a list with more than 17,000 acronyms and abbreviations used in chats, forums, programming and similar locations.

Acronym Genie includes a search utility and a basic smiley dictionary, besides another more specialized search tool that can locate acronyms based on anagrams. On the downside, I missed the possibility of editing entries or even adding new ones to the database.

Learn the meaning of nearly all abbreviations used on the Internet: chats, forums, online games and more.

Download AcronymGenie 4.3 in Softonic