The major developers might not agree with us but the rise of open source equivalents to large, expensive packages has arguably been the most exciting development in the software industry in the last few years. The GIMP and Mozilla Thunderbird are two leading lights of the open source phenomenon and have collectively saved users millions as alternatives to their big-budget rivals.

Artweaver certainly has the credentials to take on the big players and comes stacked with an ample range of brushes, which can be tweaked and customized easily to suit your designs. Just like its more illustrious rivals, the brush selection can be beefed up through plug-ins, although the range of available brushes is pitiful compared with those you can download for Adobe Illustrator. Nevertheless, it's promising to see freeware products embracing extendability in this way.

Other welcome features include a mighty effects selection, layers and transparency functionality, plus support for a range of file formats. You can also add text layers, making it great for creating logos or promotional material. However, it's when you put pen to paper that Artweaver stumbles somewhat. The fact is that the app renders certain brush strokes much slower than its major rivals, and unless you're packing heat processor-wise you're likely to be frustrated by the lag time waiting for the strokes to appear on the page. For such a polished program otherwise, this drawback threatens to stifle its attempts to win over the graphic design market. This said, for a pre-release version ArtWeaver is an impressive piece of kit.

Download Artweaver 0.5.5 in Softonic

Microsoft's long awaited answer to Adobe's Flash is finally released. This lightweight (1,4Mb) plug-in works on most popular browsers both on Mac and PC. It's really simple to install, and you'll just need to restart your browser to make it work. We went to the Silverlight home page to see the plug-in in action. Although it's got a lot of snazzy effects, obviously set up by Microsoft to impress users, the plug-in worked smoothly and we experienced good image quality. Silverlight can stream high resolution video well and supports HD quality videos.

Developers will be glad to know that you can write managed .NET code that runs right in the browser. Using Expression Studio and Visual Studio (which are separate from Silverlight), designers and developers can build their own Rich Internet Applications with Silverlight.

On the downside, Silverlight supports Windows Media audio and video, VC-1 and MP3 but not other popular formats like H.264, Flash or AAC. Flash still remains the reference by far, but with many big content providers looking to use Silverlight we should be seeing more of it in the near future.

Download Microsoft Silverlight 2.0 in Softonic

This fully featured online translation software helps you translate web pages, web sites, as well as word, sentence and documents into your native language, if your native is any of the following languages: English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Chinese, Korean and Japanese. Great improvement on multiple server support, IE Observer and Unicode Viewer since last version.

Features include:

• Translate whatever you can imagine, document, web contents, letters, chats, and emails and more
• Translation among 11 languages
• Build-in, full-featured word processor
• Supports Microsoft Word, Notepad, WordPAD, Adobe Acrobat, Outlook Express, Outlook, Internet Explorer, Netscape Navigator, Frontpage and more
• 100% Unicode compatible
• Unicode Viewer enables users to automatically download Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Russian fonts from Microsoft website, when neccessary
• Open a wide variety of documents, .DOC, .RTF and .TXT
• Save or print the translated text with a print
• Multilingual user interface

Download Web Translator 8.01 in Softonic

When it comes to photo editing, the undisputed king is Photoshop. But if you're looking for a cheaper alternative that can give you the same – or at least similar – functionality then Active Pixels is an excellent choice.

This photo editor resembles Photoshop in many aspects, from the way menus and windows are laid out on its interface to the keyboard shortcuts used for many actions. It also includes similar tools, like the magic wand, the gradient, the polygonal lasso and others. What's more, it supports working with layers. Active Pixels also includes some extra embedded apps, such as a red-eye fixer, a picture browser and a screen capture tool - although it only grabs full-screen images.

That said, bear in mind that this free photo editor is not as powerful as Adobe's big shot. Despite the large number of filters and effects included, some of them lack proper configuration settings. I specially disliked the way sliders are designed: they're very uncomfortable to use.

In any case, Active Pixels is an excellent photo editor that can be very useful for those cases in which you don't have Photoshop at hand or you just prefer to use a lighter app to perform the same tasks.

A great photo editor with which you can edit and optimize images, all for free.

Download Active Pixels 3.05 in Softonic

Vextractor is a professional software for converting raster images to vector (vectorizer). Vextractor converts drawings, maps and other images, including logos, black-and-white illustrations from raster to vector format.

The program can save converted raster images to the following vector formats: DXF, WMF, EMF, EPS, AI or SVG. Files of these vector formats can be imported to popular vector graphics applications like AutoCAD, Corel Draw, Adobe Illustrator, and many others.

For the purpose of supporting GIS applications, the program allows saving images to the ArcInfo Shape and MapInfo MID/MIF formats. This software is a perfect replacement for the traditional tracing and digitizing. It can save lots of your time, for it is much quicker to use this program rather than do the tracing by hand or using a digitizer.

Download Vextractor 4.10 in Softonic

As far as free PDF converters go, doPDF is one of the best out there saving you tons of cash on Adobe's patented version and whatsmore, doing it in half the time.

The program is remarkably simple to use. Just open a document in Microsoft Word, WordPad, NotePad or practically any other text editing software, choose Print and select doPDF. The program asks you where to save the PDF file and when finished, the PDF file will be automatically opened in your default PDF viewer. This process takes less than a minute and you'll be amazed at how accurate the PDF is. Occasionally, it can suffer with unusually formatted text and images and so they won't come-out exactly as you want but this can be remedied.

Unfortunately, there's also no option to print large web pages (such as long news articles or forum pages) without dividing it into separate pages so you'll end up with lines dividing the article up throughout your PDF documents. The other slight downside is that it seems the PDF files it creates can be rather large although if you ZIP them up, this is not much of an issue.

An excellent PDF converter that's fast, easy to use and serves as more than an adequate replacement for Adobe's software.

Download doPDF 6.1.274 in Softonic

If you love playing Flash games but don't always have an internet connection, then FlashOffliner is what you need.

FlashOffliner is a system tray program that lists and runs games made with Adobe Flash and allows you to play games without an internet connection. The program basically "saves" games for offline storage, which can then be accessed and played at any point. The other big advantage of this is that you don't have to deal with advertisements.

The first thing to do is to right-click on the game you want to play and view the source code. In FlashOffliner window, paste this code in and it will save the games as a SWF file. Once you've done it, you can play the game independently of the program, although you can use CTRL+R to reset the game at any point.

FlashOffliner is an excellent addition to every Flash gamer's connection and a great way to avoid adverts.

Download FlashOffliner 1.0 in Softonic

VirtualDub is a video capture and processing utility licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL). It is designed to be a general utility that can trim and clean up video before exporting to tape or processing with another program. It does not possess the editing power of a general-purpose editor such as Adobe Premiere, but is streamlined for fast linear operations over video.

It has batch-processing capabilities for processing large numbers of files, which you can extend with third-party video filters. VirtualDub is best at processing AVI files, although it can read (not write) MPEG-1 and handle BMP image sets.

Download VirtualDub 1.8.6 Stable in Softonic

ACDSee Pro is one of the most comprehensive image viewers you'll find. Elegant and full of features, it's an essential for anyone working regularly with images.

To discuss and review all the features of this program would require an essay but from the quick viewing of images to support for a vast amount of image formats, audio and video, the possibility of examining within compressed files, retouching images, batch processing of images and mass conversion formats it's an impressive piece of software. This Pro version, as its name suggests, is particularly focused on the professional end of photography. It offers excellent support for RAW format images, new tools for editing and retouching images, more possibilities for processing huge images (now you can also apply sepia effects for example) and the interface has changed slightly to make the work flow even better.

Probably one of the best image programs out there outside of Adobe software.

Download ACDSee Pro 2.5.333 in Softonic

One of the few drawbacks of owning a digital camera is that it can often be tricky to import photo files in RAW format from your snapper to your computer. Stepok's Raw Importer aims to solve all that by providing you with a simple tool for grabbing images off your camera with the minimum amount of fuss.

The free program actually helps you improve the quality of your images as part of the process, offering you features for selecting the interpolation method and making adjustments to the resolution, colour intensity and saturation. Although Raw Importer only supports conversion to JPEG or TIFF, this should be fine for most people, and it does make brisk worked of converting these files. With the inclusion of a Batch Import mode, there's really no need to look elsewhere when dragging RAW format images from your digicam.

Download Stepok Raw Importer 1.2 in Softonic

GMDesk is the kind of application only Google fans would install. In any case, if you use Google apps on a daily basis, you may find it useful too.

With GMDesk you gain automatic access from your desktop to several different Google tools, including Mail, Calendar, Docs, Maps, Reader and Picasa web albums. The big advantage of using GMDesk is that you don't have to open your web browser, load the website of each one of those services, login with your username and password and then wait for it to load. GMDesk is not faster than your browser, but it makes the whole process just easier.

GMDesk is based on Adobe AIR and has no settings menu except for the possibility to choose which Google service you want to load first on launching the program. Like I said, GMDesk may be interesting for Google fans, but I wonder if it's really necessary, as it doesn't really add anything new to the Google apps we all know.

If you're hooked on Google apps, GMDesk is made for you: an app launcher that enables you to access Google tools right from your desktop.

Download GMDesk 0.99 in Softonic

Find Desktop is the entry level solution for document management. The extreme simplification of all operations, allows you to drammatically decrease the time needed to find, view and elaborate documents. Find Desktop is integrated with a powerful "full-text" retrieval engine, supported by O.C.R. (optical character recognition) engine.

This allows you to search directly in the text, starting from one word or exact phrase contained in electronic or image documents. Other important functions are the mail indexing system, the enhanced scanning functions (with virtual annotation capabilities) as well as the management of the classification fields associated with documents render Find Desktop the fast and economic solution for document management.

Find Desktop is equipped of technology "Highlight" that evidences directly on the original document (image file or electronic file) the search results and supports the most common electronic document formats (Adobe Acrobat PDF, Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, etc..) with search capabilities also in ZIP file. The Automatic Web Update allows you to maintain the software always up to date.

Download Find Desktop Standard 1.84 in Softonic

There's an increasing demand for alternatives to Adobe's resource hogging, RAM sapping, not least expensive PDF creator and PrimoPDF weighs in as an excellent alternative.

The fact that this program is free makes it all the more appealing. One of the problems with these PDF programs is that invariably, they change the formatting of your text, once you've converted your Word, Publisher etc. document to PDF. PrimoPDF largely avoids this however converting to PDF as faithfully as the original. It's also remarkably fast and the installation is equally speedy.

Once installed, the program appears as a virtual printer in your Printer Driver preferences too. The main downside, of which there are few, is that you are regularly prompted to register although this is a small price to pay for an excellent program. It's also a bit unreliable when converting images. Text is fine but images can sometimes be in the wrong position or formatted incorrectly when converting from Office documents. It also doesn't use Windows standard way of saving documents - it has it's own format which doesn't suggest a file name but it's a small drawback.

A really excellent PDF creator that will have Adobe critics laughing all the way to their virtual printers.

Download PrimoPDF 4.1.0.9 in Softonic

There is nothing that annoys me more in Firefox when a PDF document tries to open and crashes the browser. That was until I tried PDF Download.

PDF Download prevents this problem ever arising by allowing you to control exactly how and when PDF files are opened or downloaded. Instead of opening PDF files "blind" which is currently the case, PDF Download lets you know exactly how big it is with options of whether to convert it, open it, download it or convert to HTML. PDF Download stops the annoying problem of PDF files taking ages to open - especially big ones. With PDF Download, you can see instantly whether its a big file, in which case, it's advisable to download it for reading later as opening a big PDF file is like waiting for Christmas to arrive sometimes.

The PDF Download plugin usually presents you with 3 options unless you've instructed it to do the same thing by default all the time - convert the PDF to HTML, download the PDF or open the PDF in the browser. One bonus with PDF Download, that perhaps separates it from others, is that it's not just limited to Adobe Reader. PDF Download also works with Foxit Reader and other PDF readers although to be honest, if you're using Foxit, you won't find much use for PDF Download anyway as it opens PDF files much more smoothly than Adobe Reader.

PDF Download is an excellent PDF tool which will result in fewer Firefox crashes although not everytime as it still seems susceptible to crashes when opening PDF files in the browser.

Download PDF Download 2.0.0.0 in Softonic

One of the worst problems with Adobe's Acrobat reader is that it often takes about a week to load PDFs. OK, maybe not quite that long, but it is very slow.

SumatraPDF is one of several apps knocking around that are designed to simplify your PDF viewing - and it doesn't do a bad job either. Opening files in the program is virtually as quick as opening and closing your eyes and it doesn't take a genius to find your way around the interface.

Options are a little thin on the ground but SumatraPDF provides a very comfortable environment for reading PDFs and you can print documents without much hassle. Give me this over Acrobat any day for looking at eBooks.

Download Sumatra PDF 0.9 in Softonic

It seems that everyone is slowly starting to realise that the future of video broadcasting lies online rather than inside a television.

Following the success of Joost, Babelgum and VeohTV, Adobe decided to get in on the act with the release of the Adobe Media Player. The philosophy of the software giant is that if you use a browser to navigate web pages, why shouldn't you use one to view multimedia too?

The result is basically a version of Joost as seen through the eyes of Adobe. Now out of beta release, the app provides an interesting and immersive way of watching videos online. Navigation is very smooth and feels natural and there are a number of features and services that make it easier to eyeball TV more effectively. For instance, you can create a list of favorites, and keywords add ratings to Flash video, build playlists and use the Dashboard-style interface to check out the latest episodes of your top shows. You can also now subscribe to RSS feeds that tell you when new episodes are online.

Content is king though, of course, and version 1.1 of Adobe Media Player adds a lot more episodes and channels from a broad range of genres. At the time of writing, Adobe estimates that there are around 25,000 episodes available through its media player. Adobe has even partnered with Sony Pictures to offer some movies through the service, such as Jerry Maguire and Men in Black. I was also impressed by the speed and quality of the videos.

One of my main qualms with Adobe Media Player though, is that many of the episodes are not available outside the USA. Fine if you live there, of course, but for those of us in other lands it's so frustrating to see a show you want to watch only to discover it's not available (of course, you don't find this out until after an advert has played in the player).

Glossing over the unavailability of some programs and channels, Adobe Media Player is making all the right strides to becoming the best place to watch TV online.

Download Adobe Media Player 1.1 in Softonic

If you have all your online friends scattered across different IM networks, you need an IM client like Meebone.

With Meebone you can connect to multiple IM networks simultaneously, giving you the chance then to chat with your friends from Jabber, Meebo, MSN, AIM, Yahoo!, ICQ and Google Talk at the same time.

When you run Meebone you'll be asked to login to any of the supported networks. Then, if you want to join another network at the same time, click on the "Sign on" button at the bottom of the program's interface.

Meebone is actually an Adobe AIR desktop port of an online cross-platform IM client named Meebo. Maybe this is why its interface is not perfect yet and has some glitches, but we have to bear in mind that the program is still at a beta stage.

Meebone lets you chat with your online friends at any moment, no matter what IM network they use. The program is still in development though.

Download Meebone 0.1 Beta5 in Softonic

Ever fancy making your own film but don't have the patience to learn the major editing packages such as Adobe Premiere and Final Cut?

Then Auto Movie Creator converts you into Steven Spielberg but without the hours spent learning how to cut and splice and render videos that most video editing packages require. In fact, the program does much of the work for you via the editing wizard which is effectively your Assistant Director. It takes you logically and slowly through every step holding your hand as you go from capturing video to outputting it in a format that's suitable for your needs. One of the most time-consuming parts of editing is going through the footage to see which parts you need to take out. Auto Movie Creator even does this for you simply by selecting "Detect Scenes" and the program automatically scans your footage for the best quality shots. It also allows you to add professional style effects such as dissolves and fades simply by dragging and dropping them into the timeline. You can also add photos and other images into your video to give them a more personal touch.

Auto Movie Creator feels more like a photo editing package than a video editor but this is the key behind it's appeal - it requires absolutely no prior editing knowledge and is simple enough for even the most amateur of video makers.

Download Auto Movie Creator 3.13 in Softonic

Wouldn't it be nice if you could edit PDF documents in the same way that you edit Word documents?

Well you can with Abdio PDF Editor (formerly known as Microadobe PDF Editor) which is a professional PDF editing application. Abdio PDF Editor aims to make creating and editing PDF files just like using Mircosoft Office Word and for the most part, it succeeds. Abdio PDF Editor also allows you to work with a wide range of file formats such as native Word and HTML files.

Creating a new PDF is easy in Abdio PDF Editor. Simply open a new project, select the page size you require and the background color. Next you have the option to import a document into Abdio PDF Editor. You can import by selecting "File" and then "Import" Word (DOC), RTF, TXT, HTML and XML formats. From here, you can edit text much as you would in Word. You can insert images and tables, hyperlinks and edit the header and footer just as you would with any Word document. To secure your document at the end, you can define a password so that it can only be opened by authorised users in Abdio PDF Editor.

If you're not a big fan of editing in Adobe's PDF own editor or are a grand master at using Word, Abdio PDF Editor is a considerably easier way of editing PDFs.

Download Abdio PDF Editor 8.6 Build 80705 in Softonic

With Adobe Dreamweaver you get an intuitive yet powerful tool to design and put up your own websites. Dreamweaver is tailored both for beginners and more advanced users as it includes many tutorials and help and a solid collection of advanced features that designers will enjoy working with.

Organized in the classic Adobe style that you immediately recognize in any of the developer's programs, Dreamweaver gives you easy access to all your editing and designing tools. You can work with a full code or full design view, however most people will prefer to choose the split view, which is much more flexible to edit with.

You'll find Dreamweaver makes it easy to insert any sort of element, whether an image, a Flash file or a piece of audio. Elements can be moved around an adjusted until you are happy with the layout of your pages.

This latest version has improved the CSS capabilities in Dreamweaver with more templates, and a tool to manage your styles and move them to your own style sheets. The CSS code also comes with comments that explain how it works and how to use it, something that beginners and experienced users alike should appreciate.

I was a little disappointed that the interface only underwent slight cosmetic changes, but the biggest drawback of all to Dreamweaver in my opinion is still the price. Even though it's a powerful application, not everybody will be ready to pay $399 for it. You'll also have to make for sufficient disk space to accommodate the 1GB installer package.

Adobe Dreamweaver is a reference in terms of web designing, editing and creating and offers a lot of help and guidance.

Download Adobe Dreamweaver CS3 9.0 in Softonic