XfireTM is a free tool that automatically keeps track of when and where gamers are playing PC games online and lets their friends join them easily. It works regardless of game type, server browser, or gaming service that a player is using.

Xfire eliminates the hassles of running multiple programs like IRC, instant messengers, or in-game friends lists to keep track of when and where a gamer's friends are playing. It supports the best and the latest online PC games including server and non server-based first person shooters, real-time strategy, and role playing games.

If you fancy designing a new website for yourself, then turn back now, Twisted Brush has not been developed to give clean crisp graphics, and will frustrate you unless you use it for what it was designed for, art. Having established that this is a program for drawing, it follows that the most natural way to sketch anything and in turn to use this software effectively is with a pen and a drawing tablet.

When the program starts, you’re assaulted by the quick-start guide that is designed to gently introduce you to the features. In reality it’s a bunch of screenshots crammed with info bubbles that contain un-detailed information and no links to find out more. That said, how many people stop to read welcome screens anyway?

A lot of effort was put into making TwistedBrush a realistic substitute for actual painting and when you start working with the various brushes you see just how well they interact with the colors to create a convincing portrait. Undoubtedly the greatest strength of this program is the vast selection of brush types and styles that are available to use. From simple fine pens, to wet oil brushes, to progressive 3D designs, you’ll find them all. The beauty of each brush is that they can be used quickly and easily, with stunning effects.

You will also find support for all the major image file formats, including TIFF, PSD, JPG, GIF, and PNG and there is an option to create a script, either to record the steps taken in the painting process, to insert a message, or to insert random dabs of paint, something that doesn’t quite seem to add to the functionality (although any Dadaists out there may disagree about that).

While getting to grips with the program, it seemed that there was one feature that had been unforgettably forgotten, the select tool. After using Photoshop for so long, this seems like a key tool in any imaging software that the TwistedBrush developers have overlooked. Alternatively it could be the very omission of the select tool that sets this program apart with the production process being more of an evolution rather than a construction.

TwistedBrush is a quality painting application that, judging from its interface and features, is aimed at anyone with a drawing tablet. There are tons of great brushes to experiment with but for anyone relying on the lowly mouse and the lack of a selection tool, it may become very frustrating, very quickly.

This software is used to back up data and to synchronize PCs, servers, and notebooks. The settings are stored in multiple profiles, and the software comes with support for FTP servers, ZIP compression, data encryption, and a scheduler for automated backups.

On Windows NT/2000/XP, the scheduler can run as a service - without users having to log on. This file synchronization tool features the ability to freely select files and folders across the whole folder hierarchy in tree-views and it has support for e-mail notification, profile categories, and various filters.

Limewire, one of the world’s most popular peer-to-peer filesharing applications, has received a lawsuit from the RIAA, who are demanding $115 million in damages, claiming the application promotes the infringement of copyright. Similar applications like Grokster and Kazaa have been forced to go legal and there is speculation as to just how long Limewire will resist until they have to buckle and pay up. The existence of the popular P2P application is not under threat, but if you haven’t given it a try yet, here’s just what makes it a standout program.

In terms of file sharing, Limewire is the cream of the crop, offering the essential peer-to- peer tools in what is probably the friendliest interface of applications in its class. Beginners will appreciate the search bar, which allows you to select the type of file you’re looking for, video, image, audio, program or file. Limewire has a “what’s new” button to check out what popular files users have recently exchanged. We also enjoyed the direct connect option. If you know the IP address of one of your friends, type it in the box and Limewire will browse that user’s files. This is a quick way of sharing files with someone else and can come in handy when working on a project and exchanging documents. The only little snag we have with direct connect is that it doesn’t let you enter the username, much simpler than looking for your friend’s IP address.

Downloading with Limewire is very intuitive. After you’ve searched and found the file you are looking for, double-click on it to start the downloading process. The speed of your download depends firstly on the quality of your connection (broadband is a minimum), if you’ve correctly opened your router’s ports and whether you’re downloading a popular file or not. We would like to point out the effort that Limewire takes to make itself accessible to beginners. Not only does a tip pop up every time you launch the application, the help option also leads you to Limewire’s support centre, FAQs and a forum to get in contact with other users.

The lawsuit carried out by the RIAA is all the more surprising because of the measures Limewire takes to keep you in the realms of legality. If you decide to download Limewire from its website, you will first have to agree you will not use it for copyright infringement. When you’re configuring the application, you can set content filters, to avoid downloading files that copyright owners do not want you to share. To avoid embarrassing situations, make sure you tick the “block adult content” box, which will filter out any pornographic files from your searches.

The best way of checking the quality of the audio or video you’re downloading is via Limewire’s mini player. It’s fairly basic and to par with the players you find in similar filesharing applications, but we appreciated the way it was integrated in the application.

If there’s one thing that we’re still expecting from the Limewire team, it’s that it finally decides to jump on the BitTorrent bandwagon. Torrents are the way forward when it comes to peer to peer file sharing because of the speed, the security and freshness of downloads. Large files like movies or complete seasons of TV series are much easier to download via BitTorrent. We were also annoyed by the “buy the PRO version” window that popped up every time we started Limewire.

For its wealth of possibilities and huge base of users, (more than 4 million simultaneously on the Gnutella network) we encourage you to give Limewire a test drive. Because of the controversial nature of the application, you should always make sure that you aren’t using Limewire for illegal activities like copyright infringement. However don’t be scared off by the legality issue. Limewire, like most P2P applications is one of the most exciting possibilities that the internet gives us. It would be a shame not to give it a try. You should also check out Frostwire, the not-for-profit project of the Limewire development team.

When Softonic programmers are tired of working and need a break, they usually play a quick game at the table-football the company has installed in the coffee room. But now that I've found this game, they won't have to leave their desks to play their favorite pastime!

Master Kick is a fun arcade football game that's already been available for a while on different portable devices (Palm, Pocket PC). It's not exactly like other football sims you may have seen before: actually, it's a table-football (or foosball) game, meaning you play with football players attached to bar that you can move up and down to play the ball around the game field.

I don't know if it was because I'm hopeless at table-football, or because the game's AI is too high, but I found scoring goals quite difficult even in the easiest playing mode. On the upside, the game in itself is quite elaborate, with a varied selection of fields and even some crowd cheering sound effects in the background. You can play either a quick match or a complete league, and also try different team layouts. The only thing I missed was the possibility to play against another human opponent.

Master Kick is a fun table-football game, more like an arcade than a simulator. Pity it doesn't have a multiplayer option!

I've never thought about the possibility of people stealing information from my PC with an USB memory stick. Luckily enough, the developers of MyUSBOnly have taken it into account and created this security application that will protect you from USB theft.

Specially addressed to professional users with computers full of important work documents, MyUSBOnly creates a white list of allowed USB sticks and blocks any other USB storage devices connected to your system.

Apart from that, MyUSBOnly logs USB activity and can be scheduled to warn you via email every time an unauthorized USB is connected, although this tool didn't work properly for us.

Prospector Lite is an advanced search tool and auction sniper for eBay, that makes it easy to track and find bargains that you are interested in. You can create detailed search queries, using keywords, exclusions, and other filters, even with support fro regular expressions. The searches can be saved and organized into custom categories, so that you can easily refer to them later, using the latest eBay results.

Benefits of Prospector Lite:

• Save and organize an unlimited number of searches
• Latest Listings feature lets you see the items listed between your search updates
• Customizable toolbar for short-term shopping and research
• Extra search tools for casual browsing and discovery
• Get help from the competition
• See the search results as you like
• Automatic searches with email notification
• Add notes and highlighting
• Hide items from future views
• Comparison shop across your favorite sites

If you want to send someone your PowerPoint presentation, distribute it via the internet or through a CD-ROM, the best way to ensure that everyone can view your presentation (not only those who has the needed version of PowerPoint installed on their computers) is to convert to to a self-running slide show using PowerPoint Slide Show Converter.

Generation of a slide show screen saver from your PowerPoint presentation is also possible. PowerPoint Slide Show Converter itself requires Microsoft PowerPoint 2000, XP or 2003, but the self-running slide shows created with it do not require Microsoft PowerPoint. The conversion is a one-way process, the source .ppt file cannot be restored from the converted .exe file, so PowerPoint Slide Show Converter is also useful to protect PowerPoint presentations from unauthorized editing.

Jetico Personal Firewall software provides you with security against hackers who try to access your PC when you are connected to the Internet. Having inherited the Open architecture principles from BestCrypt, the Jetico Personal Firewall allows you to construct a strong yet accurate security policy and provides clear control over your network connections.

Three-layer protection:

Low-level (Network packet filter)

This checks the validity of network packets and parameters such as source & destination addresses, protocol, etc. Using this process, Jetico Personal Firewall can make your computer invisible to a non-trusted network. By selecting the Optimal Protection Policy, your computer becomes "stealthy". Any security probing tests (for example, ShieldsUp! tests) by internet hackers will report that your computer does not exist.

Application-level (Network events filter)

This checks and enables you to monitor network/internet connection requests made by applications. If you are not sure why an application wishes to send or receive data from the Internet you can limit or block the activity.

User-level (Process activity filter)

This notifies you of and prevents dirty tricks by Trojans and other malicious programs. (A Trojan can inject its own code into programmes on your computer and send data about you to a third party. e.g. a Trojan in Internet Explorer could transmit details of your browsing preferences.)

If you've always wanted to add a check box, radio button or combo box, to your PDF documents and felt frustrated because you couldn't find any easy to use tool to help you, well look no further, this is the application for you.

It's a Microsoft Word plug-in and it requires an updated version of Office i.e. your word processor must be updated with the latest Service Pack. Having said that, the CenoPDF bar and menu are very clear to use and the tools you can add on your Word document are well symbolized with self-clarifying icons. It is of course based on the principle of 'what you see is what you get' (WYSIWYG) so if you are not happy with the size or the location of one box, you can easily move it and resize it. An option menu for each function lets you decide all the settings you might need to personalize. Finally, you can export your document as PDF and see immediately the final result.

CenoPDF is useful to add special buttons to your PDF documents such as list box, text box and check box, but why does the program have to disable the auto-saving function in Word, which is indeed a work-saving tool!

010 Editor is a professional-grade hex editor designed to quickly and easily edit any binary file or drive. Combining an easy-to-use interface with a whole range of hex editing tools, 010 Editor is a valuable tool for anyone working with binary files.

Main features:

• View and edit any file on your hard drive (unlimited file size)
• Unique Binary Templates technology allows you to understand any binary file format
• Find and fix problems with hard drives, floppy drives, memory keys, flash drives, CD-ROMs, processes, etc.
• Analyze and edit binary data with powerful tools including Find, Replace, Find in Files, Binary Comparisons, Checksum/Hash Algorithms, Histograms, etc.
• Powerful scripting engine allows automation of many tasks (language is very similar to C)
• Import and export your binary data in a number of different formats

A1 Website Download allows you to download entire websites and browse them offline later. The application feautures a highly-configurable crawler allowing you to decide which file types to download, which directories to crawl etc. The crawler can also perform login and maintain sessions and cookies.

Using simultaneous connections entire websites can be downloaded very quickly. Links can be checked and converted to HTTP or local disk file system. Take websites with you on the road utilizing USB/CD/DVD or any portable media. It is possible to use a task scheduler to automate download of websites at times convenient to you.

WebSite-Watcher allows you to monitor your favorite websites for updates and changes with the minimum amount of time and online costs. Now you can monitor your competition without having to lift a finger. When changes in a website are detected, WebSite-Watcher saves the last two versions to your hard disk and highlights all changes in the text.

Key features:

• Monitors websites with a minimum of time and online costs
• Monitors websites behind logins
• Monitors and converts RSS feeds to a readable format
• Highlights changes in pages that have been modified
• Highlights specified words in a website

Blender offers a complete range of tools to thoroughly develop 3D animations and design. Its revolutionary, non-overlapping and non-blocking UI delivers unsurpassed workflow. The powerful built-in database system allows instances, scene management, and dynamic linking multiple project files. Anti-aliased fonts feature international translation support.

The modeling aspects of the program are various. A range of 3D object types including polygon meshes, NURBS surfaces, bezier and B-spline curves, metaballs, vector fonts (TrueType, PostScript, OpenType) are available. 'Smooth proxy' style catmull-clark subdivision surfaces with optimal iso-lines display and sharpness editing and mesh modeling based on vertex, edge and/or face selection give you many possibilities. Editing functions such as extrude, bevel, cut, spin, screw, warp, subdivide, noise, smooth complete the modelling aspects.

Animation and rendering include armature (skeleton) deformation with forward/inverse kinematics, auto skinning and interactive 3D paint for vertex weighting. Oversampling, motion blur, post-production effects, fields, non-square pixels are just a few other of the choices you have.

Realtime 3D/game creation, a graphical editor defines interactive behavior without programming. Collision detection and dynamics simulation are included. The program features Python scripting API for sophisticated control and AI, fully defined advanced game logic. It supports all OpenGLTM lighting modes, including transparencies, animated and reflection-mapped textures.

You can save all scene data in a single .blend file. .blend format supports compression, digital signatures, encryption, forwards/backwards compatibility and can be used as a library to link to from other .blend files. The program reads and writes TGA, JPG, PNG, Iris, SGI Movie, IFF, AVI and Quicktime GIF, TIFF, PSD, MOV (Windows and Mac OS X). Native import and export for DXF, Inventor and VRML files, with python scripts are available for many other 3D formats. You can also create stand-alone executables containing interactive 3D content or play back with the 3D web browser plugin.

Imagine spending the whole weekend taking lovely pictures of landscapes... only to arrive home and see that the skyline in some of them is completely tilted.

Don't worry, there's an easy way to fix it. Simply use Rotation Pilot and restore the horizon to its original position while keeping the same image quality as the original photo.

This is how it works: load the picture and draw a line with your mouse along the horizon (the tilted one, not the one you'd like to have). The program will automatically rotate the picture to the desired position. If there's any cropping or smoothing needed, you can also enable those options and let Rotation Pilot do the job, though the cropping will obviously affect the borders of the original photo. The program also includes rotating, resizing and mirroring options for further photo edition.

With Rotation Pilot you can easily fix visual slopes and tilted horizons in your digital photos.

If you miss those good ol' arcade titles you used to play in your Nintendo Entertainment System, whine no more: NES is back on your favorite web browser!

FireNes is a Firefox add-on that lets you play more than 2,500 NES titles of all times, covering all sorts of interests and styles. Games appear listed in alphabetic order on a sidebar to the left of your screen (if you don't see it, open it with Tools > FireNes), from which this list you can choose the one you want to play and run it with a double click. The sidebar also includes two other tabs (Top and Favorites) to manage games in a different way. It would have been great to have some kind of search tool to quickly locate certain games though.

When launched, games appear on a small-sized window that runs independently from Firefox. Controls are limited to arrow keys, Enter, Ctrl, Z and X, though sometimes the game does take a while to react to them. Also, I noticed that some games are a bit buggy, but you can always let the author know by filling in a small form. In any case, FireNes features such a huge collection of games that you'll surely find that one title you were hooked on a few years ago.

With FireNes you can use Firefox for more than browsing webpages: play more than 2,5000 NES games and remember gaming prehistory!

WildRename is a file renaming tool that enables you to rename multiple files at the same time, therefore saving you loads of time and typing.

The program features a nicely designed interface, something I really appreciated as this kind of programs usually feature quite confusing menus. There are several renaming options, including the most basic ones (adding or removing characters) and also some advanced options such as changing case or replacing text strings by some completely new words.

I specially liked the possibility to simulate changes, so that you get a preview of how the new file names are going to look like before applying any definitive change to them. However this previewing option would be much more useful and effective if you could see it in real time and didn't have to actually process files.

Other interesting features in WildRename are the possibility to perform several renaming task on a row, save those tasks as a renaming job that you can use later on and also embed WildRename as a new command in the SendTo menu in Windows Explorer's context menu.

WildRename is a full-featured file renaming tool that will help you rename tons of files in just a few clicks.

Watch over 853 television channels all over the world with TeleStreamer. The application streams all online video content that TV channels make available on the web. For each country then, you'll probably get satellite channels rather than the national ones, but you still have a really large choice, with many news channels in nearly all the languages in the world. It’s also a good way to have a general idea about how TV formats are elsewhere; bear in mind though that maybe you will not have access to the most popular programs.

The GUI is very simple and clear. There is a list of nationalities with TV channels associated and you just have to double click on the one you want to watch. Not all the programs will work, but this may also depend on the availability of the content provider’s server. When you manage to connect to a channel though, the sound and the video quality are fairly good and you can either watch the program in windowed mode or, by double-clicking on it, enjoy the full screen mode.

Unfortunately, it’s not possible to pause the stream, as the program doesn’t store data on your hard disk. It is a big limitation considering that it’s a very easy function to have on PCs and it’s the real plus in rapport to traditional broadcasted TV.

Although you can’t have any control when watching a program, TeleStreamer allows you to watch 853 channels all over the world, both to practice your language skills and to see what’s going on in Africa, Iraq or Suriname, if you know where that is.

There are many anti-virus, anti-spyware and anti-dialer software products but only a few of them can claim to provide effective protection from all types of Malware. The main reason for this is the eternal cat and mouse game played for decades between Malware programmers and the security industry.

Normal security software is limited by the fact that it can only recognize Malware for which the manufacturer has already created a signature - assuming that the manufacture even has a copy of the Malware available for analysis.

Emsi Software has now turned the tables and no longer trails behind the Malware authors. a-squared Anti-Malware does not identify damaging software purely on the basis of signatures, but also looks at how it behaves. This means that you will be protected from the hundreds of new Trojans, Worms, Dialers, Rootkits and Spyware that appear every day.

ImTOO Ripper Pack Platinum is a handy pack of utilities to rip, encode and make the most out of your CD and DVD collection.

The pack consists of super ripping and converting tools, namely ImTOO DVD Ripper Platinum, ImTOO DVD Creator, ImTOO MPEG Encoder, ImTOO Audio Encoder and ImTOO CD Ripper. When installing the suite, you can select which ones you want to have on your system and which ones should be left out. However I missed having some kind of common launcher to access them all.

Some of the tools included in the pack seem to be quite easy to use, while some others look a bit more technical and require a bit of knowledge. In any case, whether you need to encode a file, rip a CD or convert audio from one format to another, you'll find the tool you're looking for.

ImTOO Ripper Pack Platinum includes a collection of five ripping and encoding tools, both for audio and video.