Emoticons for Windows Live Messenger features everything from smiley faces to faces with hats on and some are animated for extra zest. In addition, you can be guaranteed these emoticons won't damage your messenger or system as they are an official Microsoft release.

Windows Live Messenger Emoticons has been given mainly a festive custom theme that means that most of the faces are wearing Santa hats and other weird and wonderful decorations. This means they'll obviously go out of fashion pretty quickly but for the meantime, they'll have your contacts a intrigued as to where you got them from.

Windows Live Messenger Emoticons is a great pack for anyone wanting to brighten up their messenger experience with festive fun.

Download Windows Live Messenger Emoticons 1.0.0.1 in Softonic

You can use it to share song details across IRC clients: mIRC, jIRCii, Bersirc; IM clients: Miranda, Trillian, MSN Messenger; E-mail clients: The Bat!, Outlook, Thunderbird; Web browsers, blogging tools, windows clipboard amongst just a few. You can quickly switch to the song you like via the Search/Jump dialog with regular expression support

This is a great way to get even closer to your friends online.

Download AMIP Now Playing Plugin 2.62 in Softonic

Yahoo! was one of the early pioneers of widgets, and this application is likely to intrigue anyone who hasn’t come across the technology before. The package sits on your desktop and allows you to download and install widgets from the Yahoo! site. There’s a healthy range of widgets available here (almost 4,000), each of which are installed automatically as soon as they’re downloaded. Although this helps to keep things simple, it’s frustrating that you cannot change the destination folderwhich folder the widgets are stored in here.

While it all runs from the same package, each widget is actually its own application. In previous releases of the Widget Engine, this had a tendency to tie up your system rescoursces when using multiple widgets. However, tThis issue has been better addressed in this version, and it seems much less memory-intensive than before. Having said this, it’s not a good idea to keep more than about 10 running at once, as you do start to notice it then.

In terms of the widgets themselves, it would obviously be impractical (and quite frankly, boring) for us to review all 4,000 here, but needless to say there are some very useful ones, along with some downright pointless ones. For instance, we can’t really see the benefit of having a dancing skeleton on your desktop , yet there are tools for checking stock quotes, accessing iTunes, organizing your Flickr images, checking your WiFi signal and getting the latest travel news, all directly from your desktop. Graphically, the widgets are very impressive and each of them floats over the screen without the constraints of traditional window borders, ensuring they don’t intrude on your other activities.

We like the fact that you don’t need to register a Yahoo! account in order to use widgets but Yahoo! still doesn’t allow Desktop Widgets to be included on My Yahoo! pages, overlooking something both Microsoft and Google already allow. Although the program doesn’t really add anything you won’t find in Vista’s built-in widgets system, it’s perfect for XP users who want a taste of what they can expect when they get around to upgrading to the new version of Windows.

Download Yahoo! Widgets 4.5.2 in Softonic

These are not the only customization options included in Toaster. You can choose between several configuration presets, although not all of them are as visually pleasant as the original one and sometimes they don't load correctly. Anyway, you can also customize it manually by choosing fonts, colors, skins, animation effects and many more details.

Download Toaster for Winamp 0.7.8 in Softonic

Normally if you want to add music files to the iTunes library there are only two options - you have to add them manually or let iTunes store files on your system folder. iTunes Folder Watch is constantly on the lookout for new tunes that have been added to your hard drive and then automatically adds them to your iTunes library. The program runs in the background and doesn't actually indicate when it's working or triggered but you will notice that files have been added to your iTunes library. It works basically as a background process although you can bring it into the foreground if you choose. Note that you'll need iTunes version 6 or above for iTunes Folder Watch to work correctly. In this trial version, some folder management features have been disabled and you are bugged by a nag screen to purchase an upgrade to the full version. The licence key that they give you also works with iTunes Album Browser so if you do upgrade, you're effectively getting two programs for one.

If iTunes is not managing your newly added music the way you wished it would, then you may find this program hits the spot.

Download iTunes Folder Watch 2.1.08 in Softonic

This is why you need Album List, a Winamp plugin specially designed to browse albums, not files.

You can add as many directories as you want, but take into account that the more elements on the list, the longer it will take Album list to create the list and display it properly.

In fact, during our tests, sometimes it didn't even display it at all.

Download Album List 2.06 in Softonic