WinFF is the Windows version of one of the most popular video converters on Linux. It enables you to covert video files into several different video formats including Xvid and WMV.

WinFF has a basic GUI with a multitude of options and functionalities that will help you select the videos you need, previsualize them and define the format of the conversion. In addition, there are other specialised options such as the ability to change the ratio of the conversion, the resolution or the quality of the audio track.

Although WinFF is a fairly stable converter, it does struggle with long names especially those with unusual characters. To avoid problem, I advise you simply all of the names of the files that you want to convert. Otherwise, you might find that the program simply rejects the files for no apparent reason.

This is a convenient and quick file converter that still needs a few bugs ironing out before it would be my number one choice.

Download WinFF 0.42 in Softonic

Both the iPhone and iPod Touch are great tools to have your favorite music and videos always with you, but what if you also want to carry files or documents?

The solution is then DiskAid, a simple tool that lets you manage the contents of your Apple device as if it was just another removable drive plugged into your computer. DiskAid doesn't require any special drives or difficult configuration at all; just connect the iPhone or iPod Touch to the PC and you're good to go.

DiskAid lets you browse the contents of the device in a neatly organized folder structure, drag and drop these contents to and from the PC and also perform some file management tasks like creating new folders or renaming others.

On the downside, you'll find that the folder structure is not easy to recognize, that is, folders' and files' names do not always correspond to the apps and files you have in your device. For example, while checking my music collection, I saw that all the MP3 files were renamed to strange character sets instead of their regular names.

With DiskAid you can easily use your iPhone or iPod Touch as a storage unit for files and documents, and also transfer them to and from the PC. You'll have to guess what their real names are though.

Download DiskAid 1.2 in Softonic

If you don’t like the standard Windows keyboard shortcuts, move a step ahead and create your own with HotKeyMan.

This simple tool enables you to create personalized shortcuts by combining the Windows, Alt, Ctrl and Shift keys with any other characters in your keyboard and then assigning this combination to a variety of functions. These may include opening files (documents or applications), taking screenshots, sending keystrokes to any given program and maximizing or minimizing windows.

HotKeyMan already includes lots of default shortcuts you can keep, delete or edit at will. You can add as many new combinations as you want, always making sure they don't ovewrite other previously existent shortcuts – something the program doesn't warn you about.

The only problem will then be remembering them all, though you can always take a look at the crib sheet you can open from the program's icon in the system tray.

If you're more of a keyboard user than a mouse one you're going to like HotKeyMan: a program that lets you assign keyboard shortcuts to almost anything in Windows.

Download HotKeyMan 01.00.01.00 in Softonic

If your kids are crayoning all over your furniture and walls then get them switched onto Magic Whiteboard where they can doodle away for hours without causing any damage to house and home.

Drawing is apparently one of the best way for kids to develop their ability to reason and coordinate along with playing with toys and other creative pursuits. Magic Whiteboard is exactly what you'd expect it to be - a whiteboard which kids can use over and over again to paint, draw and doodle with several different colours. However, this is no ordinary whiteboard because it is designed not only for individual use, but also for collective drawing in a home network with up to 5 computers. This makes it ideal for parents or teachers who want to help their kids draw.

In fact, the program allows a remote user to take the character of a cartoon character who helps them draw. This means you can sit in another room and see what your kid is drawing while you help them from a distance. Once the masterpiece is complete, you can output the image in BMP, JPEG, or GIF formats which is rather limited although it's doubtful that anyone who uses this would need any other particular format.

An unusual and innovative whiteboard that can be as much fun for parents as it is for their children.

Download Magic Whiteboard 2.3 in Softonic

Web Site Maestro is recommended if you manage more than one web site and/or you need extras like tag and link checking, plus instant uploading and other FTP facilities. The application runs a number of checks and processes on your code, helping to speed up your web site and make sure everything works.

The program checks the tagged pair structure of your site, the validity of your hyperlinks, and also allows you to convert special characters within the ASCII 128 - 255 range to their appropriate # notation.

Download Web Site Maestro 6.5.1 in Softonic

If you're constantly opening new programs throughout your working day, do you realise how much time you could save by using a launch application such as Key Launch Portable?

If you've used a Mac, you'll instantly recognise the format of Key Launch Portable from the Spotlight application on Mac's. With this program however, the small interface appears when you repeatedly press the spacebar or control key. You can also configure other keys to activate the interface in the preference menu.

As you write something in the interface, you'll see the name of the program you want to launch before you've even typed it as Key Launch Portable predicts as you type. You can configure this to recall specific web pages and even documents too according to their name. For example, you can enter 'c' to open the 'calculator' or assign the letter 'w' to open 'Microsoft Word'.

With Key Launch Portable, you'll save precious minutes of your day rather than looking through your Start menu for programs. However, it can sometimes be annoying when it brings up the wrong program which it frequently can do if you have many installed on your PC.

Download Key Launch 1.9 in Softonic

Remember that great Street Fighter arcade you used to play twenty year ago? Now you can have it back on your own computer!

Paintown is an open-source project that will brings many sweet memories back to you – that is, if you ever played that kind of games. It's a side-scrolling fighting game that follows the style of all those good ol' popular fighting arcades. The good thing is that, being open source, you don't have to spend your quarters to play Paintown.

That said, don't expect too much from it, especially as regards graphics. Both characters and backgrounds are very pixelated but at the same time this is precisely what gives the game that sweet retro look. As for characters' movements they're quite limited when comparing to other similar games, but there's a complete list of special punches and kicks you can check at the developer's website.

Paintown is a side-scrolling fighting game with old-style graphics that will please arcade lovers

Download PainTown 3.0 in Softonic

Once upon a time computer games didn't have the luxury of fancy graphics to make them appealing to users. Instead, they had to rely a lot more on imagination and original ideas to entice gamers. I remember loads of text-based adventure games that had me gripped for longer than many of today's lavish productions.

Lost in the Pyramid recaptures the magic of those classics in the form of an imaginative quest in which you star as Indiana Bones, a famous archeologist who has a dream one night about a pyramid. After waking up, you must go to consult a psychic who reveals where to start your mission, then it's off into the wild unknown to explore the mythical building of your dreams.

Along the way you'll need to make decisions based on the information presented to you on screen and your responses determine whether you score points and progress to the next stage, lose points, or even lose one of your five lives. The control system is akin to most text-based adventure games, where you need to respond to a statement (e.g. 'Open the door?', 'Go to Africa?', 'Pay the psychic?') by clicking Yes or No (or 'What' to repeat the question).

The responses to your answers can be hilarious at times and this makes the Lost in the Pyramid great fun to play. Some of the put-downs and one-liners delivered by the computer are worthy of a Chris Rock stand-up show. Despite its humorous nature, progressing through the levels in no laughing matter, and some of the puzzles will take you quite some time to complete.

Graphically, the game isn't anyway near as bad as those famous text-based games of old on on the Commodore or Spectrum. There are colorful cartoon pictures along the way that illustrate what is happening, although I felt there could have been more of these, as some stay on the screen for a long time.

Overall though, Lost in the Pyramid is really good fun, and is a big enough adventure to keep you captivated for ages.

Download Lost in the Pyramid 1.2 in Softonic

Kids love stickers and with Sticker Book, they will never run out of stickers again. Kids can create scenes with Sticker Book by selecting from hundreds of stickers and placing them over and over again on colorful backgrounds. With dozens of backgrounds and eight different categories of stickers, a kid's imagination can run wild. Sticker categories include: toys, kids, adults, vehicles, plants, animals, furniture, and fantasy characters.

Download Sticker Book 1.05.98 in Softonic

Quest Creator is a role-play game creator in which you can easily design your own adventures in mythical, medieval settings.

Using preset or custom characters, set up worlds in which you control the plot, action, and difficulty of the game.

A variety of graphic images are included for you to use with Quest Creator such as these enemies: slimes, orcs, goblins, ogres, trolls, skeletons, zombies, dragons, and many, many more.

You can play your own games or have your family and friends join in. Create your own fantasy world today!

Download Quest Creator 2.42.13 in Softonic

After establishing a turning point in the history of videogames with The Sims, Maxis is back to present Will Wright's new project: Spore.

Spore has been under development for several years now, and it's supposedly hitting shelves next September 7th. This never-ending wait has created an enormous hype around Spore that we can now luckily soothe down a bit with the Spore Creature Editor.

First of all, bear in mind that this is by no means the complete game; it's just the editor part, where you create the characters that will later take part in the story. That said, and despite being only an editor, this demo is surprisingly fun.

Spore Creature Editor lets you create just about any living being you can think of, no matter what size, shape or color it is. You can customize every single detail: body, arms, legs, eyes, horns, anything! Of course, this demo doesn't include all the elements available in the complete game but still, you get the idea.

After creating and coloring your creature, you can try it in the Test Drive mode: make it walk, see how it dances to different music styles, try different feelings to see how it looks when it's angry, happy or scared. You can even generate a baby-sized version of your creature to check how your descendants will look like.

The Spore Creature Editor enables you to save all the creatures you create and also share them with the Spore user community in the Sporepedia, though you'll need to register for free in order to use this feature.

The Spore Creature Editor is just that: an editor to create your characters in the Spore game. However it's really fun you use and lets you discover the potential of this game.

Download Spore Creature Editor in Softonic

Now normally, the thought of getting a virus on my computer fills me with dread. However, as soon as I started playing HexaVirus I discovered a new passion for bugs.

That's largely because this game is just so darned addictive. You start out with a gameboard filled with different colored hexagons. The object of the game is to remove the hexagons by getting different viruses to eat them (obviously it's not based on the scientific nature of viruses, but that doesn't matter).

A colored virus appears in the bottom left-hand corner of the screen. When you click to select it, all the touching hexagons of that color will be wiped away, freeing up more space on the gameboard. You need to select the color of the virus you want to lay down based on the position of the hexagons on the screen.

It sounds complicated but within a couple of tries of HexaVirus you'll understand exactly what's going on. You must clear the board within 30 moves, a challenge which becomes as infuriating as it is gripping. The sense of achievement once you've cleared the board is so immense that you'll be itching to go to the next level and try to clear it in one less move.

The graphics are fun and colorful and the animations of the little virus characters are cool too. Beware though that this PC version of HexaVirus has been ported from a Windows Mobile game, so the game screen is small.

Ultimately though, it's an innovative and thoroughly enjoyable puzzle game.

Download HexaVirus 1.1 in Softonic

Mozilla Firefox is a fast, full-featured web browser that's easy to use. It has lots of great features including popup-blocking, tabbed-browsing, integrated search, improved privacy features, automatic updating and more. Plus, thanks to the PortableApps.com launcher bundled in Mozilla Firefox - Portable Edition, it leaves no personal information behind on the machine you run it on, so you can take your favorite browser along with all your favorite bookmarks and extensions with you wherever you go.

Intelligent Start

Firefox Portable now uses an intelligent start system that keeps track of where you're running it from. That way, if you run it a second time from the same location or move to another PC that happens to give you the same drive letter, it won't have to do as much to start Firefox up.

Alternate INI Locations Dropped

To improve startup time, the alternate directory layouts for the FirefoxPortable.ini file have been dropped. It will need to be placed next to FirefoxPortable.exe. If you use an INI, you'll also need to update it with the new INI options.

Most Alternate Directory Layouts Dropped

To simplify the launcher, all alternate directory layouts have been dropped except placing the launcher one directory above the FirefoxPortable directory.

Improved Unicode Support

Firefox Portable has improved support for unicode, so you can drop a file with non-ASCII characters right on FirefoxPortable.exe and open it up.

Improved Live CD Support For Windows 95/98/Me

Live mode has been improved for better compatibility with most Windows 95, 98 and Me systems.

Download Firefox Portable 3.0 in Softonic

Besides letters and numbers, keyboards have dozens of signs that are used by many languages around the world but which are not always easy to insert. Many of them require strange key combinations that you obviously don't know by heart.

This is why PopChar Win is so useful: it enables you to insert special characters in your writings on the fly, so that you don't waste your time trying different combinations or looking them up on the Internet. I specially liked the way characters are inserted: simply select it with your mouse and it will be copied to whichever text editor or email client is open. Plus, the program's window can be launched with a hotkey and closes immediately after inserting the character.

On the downside, this version is just a demo that doesn't provide access to all characters. Also, I don't understand why the complete text font list is displayed only in a separate window and not under a menu, which would be much easier.

Download PopChar Win 3.4 in Softonic

These days of football fever are probably the best time of the year to play KickOff, an original online football game.

KickOff follows the trend of online casual games you can play for free, just by registering a free account on the game's website and downloading the client. This time football (or soccer, if you prefer it that way) is the main subject of the game, but not in the way we're used to seeing it: in a big stadium, with a crowd of people roaring and 22 professional players running after the ball. Kick-off focuses on street football, on those casual matches you play against your friends in the neighborhood.

The game in itself is quite easy to control. There are only three keys for different kinds of pass and shoot, besides the arrow keys to control movement. Graphics don't follow a realistic style, but are based on a more manga-like design instead, using bright, shiny colors and paying a great attention to detail.

KickOff includes three different game modes: a practicing area, free gaming against people from all over the world and a complete league that you can only enter when you obtain the necessary license. This license, together with the so called "tics" (a kind of user points), is obtained by playing matches. Tics will also eventually allow you to acquire new abilities and new items for your player.

The only main drawback to KickOff is its server problems. While testing the game I was disconnected from the game twice, which automatically closes the client as well. I also had some minor lag issues while playing online matches. Hopefully these problems will be solved soon and we can all enjoy an exciting online soccer game for free.

KickOff is an enjoyable online football game with which you can play fun matches againts people from all over the world, though you may have the odd server problem while playing it.

Download KickOff 1.0.6 in Softonic

The game presents the hard battle between the forces of evil and a powerful hero – the character we control. This time it's not just Dante (the original protagonist), but two people instead: the aforementioned Dante and also Nero, who appears in this demo and has nothing to do with the CD burning tool.

The game's objectives involve completing several missions, gathering objects and of course, killing all the evil creatures you'll find on your way to the final boss. And the best part in the game is precisely these fights against demons, monsters and other strange living beings. Being a hack and slash adventure, Devil May Cry 4 focuses on close combats and enables you to perform extraordinary movements and incredible combos with your sword and a new powerful weapon, the Devil Bringer. Plus, battles feature a hard-beating background music that reminds me of the Blade original soundtrack and which only make them more exciting.

The graphics in Devil May Cry are impressive. I tested the game on a Vista machine with DirectX 10, and I can tell the game makes the most of the computer's resources, rendering beautiful landscapes, realistic light effects and smooth movements.

On the downside we find game's controls. You can really tell this game was originally developed for consoles, because it's really hard to control it with a keyboard. If you have a gamepad you can plug into your PC, I'd recommend using it even if it's only to test the demo.

Devil May Cry 4 presents us with a new episode in the war between Nero and Dante against the forces of evil. Great graphics and brilliant battles make of this game a worthy action adventure, despite its difficult keyboard controls.

Download Devil May Cry 4 Trial Edition in Softonic

Convert TrueType and PostScript Type1 fonts between Macintosh and PC platforms. Runs under Windows XP, 2000, 2003, NT and Vista.

This is what CrossFont has to offer:

• Convert PostScript Type 1 fonts to OpenType CFF format for Windows PC and Macintosh
• Convert PostScript Type 1 fonts between Windows PC and Macintosh
• Convert TrueType fonts between Windows PC and Macintosh
• Generate missing supporting font files (AFM, PFM, INF, PFA, etc.)
• Support for OS X data fork fonts (.dfont)
• Supports reading Stuffit (.sit, .sea) and Zip archives
• Preview fonts before conversion
• Character outlines, metrics and hinting are preserved between platforms
• Drop font files and folders onto main window for easy conversion
• Automatically search folders and subfolders for supported font files
• Automatically assigns kerning if it exists
• Create font families

Download CrossFont 5.3 in Softonic

There was a time when point & click games were really popular, but now it seems that they're not that trendy anymore. However there are companies like Frogwares that still believe in this genre, and keep on publishing conversational adventures.

This is the case of Dracula: Origin, a vampire game that follows the traditional point & click pattern and presents you with a truly Gothic adventure full of mystery, romance and terror, in a gloomy environment.

Though I personally don't enjoy this kind of games that much, I must admit Dracula: Origin looks pretty impressive. The game stands out for its highly detailed graphics in the design of characters and especially in the recreation of environments. The sense of realism makes the game experience even more pleasant and rewarding.

The story is also quite an interesting one. You play the role of Van Helsing, the famous scientific whose main aim in life is to destroy the so called Prince of Darkness. Your objectives will then be exploring all the locations you visit, talk to other characters, gather different objects and try to get hints from them all that could take you to Dracula. Like in similar adventures, gameplay is basically reduced to using your mouse to move your character, use objects in your inventory, talk to other people and other actions.

Dracula: Origin will surely please fans of this genre. However it also requires a lot of patience, so if you're not really into conversational adventures maybe you should look elsewhere.

Download Dracula: Origin Demo in Softonic

Creating your own CD labels is one way to turn bland looking blank CD and DVD's into your own personal creations.

CD Label Designer is aimed at making the process superfast and supereasy courtesy of several templates. The program comes bundled with a number of predefined popular layouts to save you time and unleash your creativity. You are not restricted to labeling software that only allows you to edit certain areas - just about anywhere is editable or writable. You can place images, text, circled text and shapes anywhere you want including more than 50 backgrounds and options to move, rotate, resize, use transparency, choose fonts and colors, or put frames around text. You can apply some basic effects and transformations in pictures and type formatted text that supports all language character sets. The useful thing about this program too is that it allows you to resize and rechange the size of labels according to the size of your text and images whether they be rectangular, round, CD/DVD based or not, for plain paper or custom surfaces.

If you want to give your CD's or DVD's an extra touch of class, then CD Label Designer is about the most flexible labelling software you will find.

Download CD Label Designer 3.5.3 in Softonic

Text editor that highlights more than 50 filetypes! (C/C++, HTML, ASP, PHP, Perl, Pascal..) Built-in spell checker, HEX editor, UNICODE, code templates, auto correction, print preview, bookmarks, export the text with highlighting to RTF, HTML and LaTeX format, support many character sets, scripting engine, evaluate math expressions, regular expressions, support file format for Windows, Unix, MacOS.

Download GridinSoft Notepad 3.3.2.4 in Softonic