Following the release of new versions of both Internet Explorer and Firefox, the infamous 'browser wars' are flaring up again. Despite both Firefox 1.5 and the Beta of IE7 making significant strides, it would be be foolish to think this was a two-horse race. While gaining a good reputation with geeks and power users, Opera has long been a bit-part player among the big boys of the browser world. However, if this preview release is anything to go by, the Norwegian-built browser could finally be ready to punch with the heavyweights.

Opera has been pioneering new ways of browsing the web for some time. It has had tabbed browsing since the days before tabbed browsing was cool and developed the innovative 'mouse gestures' control system, where you navigate through the web just by holding the mouse button and flicking your wrist. The developers even dabbled with a multi-pane interface for viewing several pages within one interface.

The good news is that Opera has lost none of its appetite for innovation, and version 9 is packed with new goodies that will have the programmers at Mozilla and Microsoft choking on their doughnuts. For starters the app runs much quicker than the previous release, making it arguably the quickest browser around (except perhaps for Safari) at rendering pages. Incredibly, despite this boost in performance, the program appears to use less memory than version 8.5, making it far less draining on system resources than Firefox and IE.

In terms of features Opera is the gift that keeps on giving. New to the program comes OSX Tiger-style 'widgets', allowing you to check news, convert currency, view the weather and so on through a series of draggable pop-ups which anchor themselves in front of the browser. Although there aren’t many widgets to choose from at present, this is sure to change once the tech-minded Opera fans start developing more.

Another great addition to Opera 9 is BitTorrent support, allowing you to download torrents directly within the browser – a feature that amazingly no one had thought of before. This system works very smoothly, which makes us wonder why RSS feed reading support in Opera is still so poor.

Among the other new treats within the program is a nifty new search feature which lets you add any search engine to the search bar in the main toolbar. This means you can instantly access searches within your favorite online destinations (Softonic, for instance).

Tabbed browsing remains, although some users may be annoyed to discover that Opera has added close tab buttons to the tabs themselves rather than as a separate button. Having said this, the new web page preview thumbnails that appear when you rollover a tab are a real masterstroke. Mouse gestures are still there too, along with the addition of Total Recall-style voice commands – another example of how cutting-edge this browser is.

Opera's developers have been keen to ramp up security features too, and although they aren't highly original, the new content blocking and pop-up blocking functions serve their purpose effectively. What's more, it's refreshing to see a browser that embraces the latest web standards so freely, with the latest release boasting support for CSS 2.1 and CSS 3 tags.

The browser is remarkably stable and is far better behaved than Internet Explorer 7. Combined with its speed, innovative features and standards support, Opera is undoubtedly web software's best-kept secret, and the final release may prove to be even better than Firefox. Don't say anything though, or everyone will want it.

Download Opera 9.6 in Softonic

miniWEBedit is an (X)HTML editor that allows you to easily create web pages even if you have relatively little HTML knowledge.

The editor contains a tutorial with easy-to-use samples to add buttons, tables, lists, Google search code, JumpMenus and other useful little add-ons to make the page-building process easier. The CSS Editor allows you to create new styles as well as import .css sheets from other sites. Adding Tags, colors and accented characters too is a very simple process.

While building your page, you can switch to preview mode to see how it looks in a browser, validate code at different Markup Validation sites and access the W3C site instantly to get online help if you're in doubt how to apply tags, attributes etc.

Advanced programmers and HTML editors will find nothing new or particularly sophisticated about miniWEBedit but it's a great little tool for beginners.

Download miniWEBedit 2.0.5 in Softonic

Narrator utilizes speech synthesis to read out the contents of a text document, using different voices for different parts. You have a range of "actors" that can portray any number of "characters", so various passages of your document are spoken with differing voices, pitches, inflections, etc. You can have it read out a play or story with appropriate voices. The words are highlighted on-screen, and there are also a couple of silent read-along options for stage directions, or for you to read out your own parts.

Download Narrator 2.0.3 in Softonic

Similar to the other Pedia titles created by the same developer, Gamepedia allows you to store and organize all your items, in this case your video games. Perfect if you own different game systems and your game collection is getting a bit out of hand. You'll be able to enter titles by searching for them directly on six different Amazon sites or scanning the UPC on the game with your Mac iSight camera. Once again here, you'll have to make sure the UPC is clean and your room is well lighted for the iSight camera to work well.

The games pages look great with the game covers, and you can browse them in a Cover Flow style interface. Gamepedia also allows you to create smart collections to manage games any way you want, say by theme, character or alphabetical order. You can also create your own wishlist from Amazon and keep tabs on who's borrowed what from your collection. Statistics are also fun to check out, to get an idea what your games library is composed of. The only downside to Gamepedia is that it's pretty much the same as the other pedia titles, except with games. It would have been great for the developer to create only one application instead of four.

Download Gamepedia 4.3.1 in Softonic

PremiumSoft Navicat is a powerful MySQL database administration and development tool aimed at professionals and beginners alike. It has a user-friendly GUI and allows quick and easy creation and sharing of information.

This latest version includes a new import wizard that supports excel files; improvement of performance and usability; a tabbed window that performs multiple operations in a single window; virtual grouping providing better categorisation for objects and an event scheduler.

Since early 2001 PremiumSoft Navicat has been downloaded 1,100,000 times. There must be something good about it!

Download Navicat Lite 7.1.5 in Softonic

Choosing the right font for a project is essential when it comes to its presentation. We've all seen those cheesy used car commercials using a messy font like "Sand". Don't let that happen to you! Take control of your font collection. In the old days, before Font Pilot, you'd be stuck manually installing one font at a time and relaunching your programs until you found the one you liked. Not anymore!

Using its superior font management engine, Font Pilot plunges into your system and digs up the dirt on your fonts. Copyrights, licenses, descriptions, postscript names, file sizes, locations, and so much more! However, Font Pilot would have hardly graduated flight school if it didn't go above and beyond its other classmates.

Font Pilot allows you to browse an entire folder of fonts that are NOT installed with a visual preview! While viewing the slideshow, click the Install button at any time to have that font permanently installed and activated on the computer. No fuss, no gimmicks, just pure functionality. Also activate (without installing) fonts on the fly!

Amongst these great features, and numerous others like the character map, key combo list, and print engine. Font Pilot is an essential font management software tool in any graphic designer's repertoire. Give it the free fifteen day trial, and we're sure you'll find it hard to let go!

Download Font Pilot 2.2.7 in Softonic

Renaming files can be an absolute nightmare if you're faced with a batch of wrongly-named ones, or recovered files which have had their IDs corrupted.

A Better Finder Rename is a comprehensive file renaming solution for Mac and can rename huge numbers of files in seconds. A Better Finder Rename allows you to do just about everything from adding, removing, inserting and replacing characters and text to adding formating, changing and even inserting sequences of numbers.

In addition, with A Better Finder Rename you can change the date and time of a huge batch of files at once plus convert file names to Windows NTFS, SMB, DOS, Mac OS, etc. You can also change the capitals of files name to lower case if need be. As you'd expect from such a simple application, there's not much to A Better Finder Rename and the interface itself is very simple and straightforward. Simply browse to the files you want and define exactly how you'd like to change them. What's most handy is that you can preview changes in A Better Finder Rename before you make them to see how it's going to look and affect the files (including MP3 files).

A Better Finder Rename is an excellent renaming tool which is simple to use and can save you hours of wasted renaming time.

Download A Better Finder Rename 7.9.9.3 in Softonic

Textexpander is a clever tool that, if correctly used, can save you countless hours. The application allows you to create your own abbreviations for text you often write or images you tend to use more. Although creating your own snippets can seem a bit tricky at first, it's very easy to do thanks to the friendly interface. You can create as many snippets as you want, add labels and make elements case sensitive.

While all your snippets are stored in a list on the left side of the interface you can create groups to keep them organized by relevant subjects. Textexpander can be particularly useful to quickly insert in special characters or formulas, that would take much more time to type. On the whole, it's a real time saving and ingenious application that will be of great use to editors, web programmers and even everyday users.

Create abbreviations for your most commonly used phrases with Textexpander.

Download Textexpander 2.4 in Softonic

Imagine Poker is a configurable Texas Hold 'Em game that allows you to play in a poker tournament against 16 iconic characters from history, fantasy, legend, and fairy tales: the Abominable Snowman, Abraham Lincoln, Blackbeard, Cleopatra, Dracula, Joseph Stalin, Julius Caesar, Little Red Riding Hood, Merlin the Wizard, the Mona Lisa, Napoleon, Neptune, Rendlesham the Alien, Robin Hood, the Tooth Fairy, and the Wicked Witch.

Characters blink, smile, get angry, and even cry. By using over a dozen attributes unique to each character, it was possible to bring these figures to life and build each with his/her own poker playing styles. The fun begins when you sit down and try to win the tournament. To succeed, you will have to defeat them all!

In Imagine Poker you can choose your Texas Hold 'Em tournament among Limit, Pot Limit, and No Limit, and also manipulate the blind bets as you like. Other options at your command include sound effects, speech commentary, the style of deck, game speed, and more. If you want to focus on your own game and not on the other characters, or if you just want to speed things up, simply turn on the "Fast-Forward" option and the game will jump to the next hand every time you fold.

Download Imagine Poker 3.6 in Softonic

I've spent many an hour beating my brains over a beastly crossword in a newspaper and have often thought it would be nice to construct my own in order to exact revenge on some of my enemies. Well, as the name suggests, Crossword Forge gives you the power to do just that. Creating a crossword is a very easy task in the program and is simply a matter of writing the question of the clue and entering the correct answer. Of course, the tricky part is to make all the letters and words match up, but with some practice it becomes easy to juggle the words around to fit.

There are some neat ways you can customise your puzzles with Crossword Forge, such as changing the font and colours, adding foreign characters and applying a picture in the background of the crossword. What's more, the grid can be as big as you like, meaning you make the puzzle really easy or really difficult depending on the intellegence of the person you're making the crossword for (or on how much you hate them!) This makes Crossword Forge a perfect way to entertain your buddies or for use a teaching aid.

Download Crossword Forge 5.3.5 in Softonic

Mystery Island II is fun game that combines elements of puzzle games, adventure games and science fiction.

The plot is thus - you are a Navy Seal currently serving aboard the USS Volarus when your submarine is destroyed by an unidentified vessel, probably a Russian nuclear warship. You escape the final blast and wash up on a tropical island. That's where your adventure begins. It turns out that the world has been invaded by aliens and it's your job to find clues and save the world from an alien takeover.

The island is littered with clues that eventually guide you towards the final defeat of the aliens. The games can be anything from puzzles to codes you must crack and locations you must find. In this way, the game is very similar to 'Escape From Monkey Island' except with less detail and worse graphics. In fact, the graphics are probably one of the biggest letdowns although considering this is a pretty cheap adventure game, you can't expect miracles anyway.

Likewise, the sound effects are passable and you can choose from a gently paced one to one that's a bit more racy. Everything is controlled by the mouse with left and right movements indicating the direction you want the character to go and you wave the cursor over an object to see if it can be picked up and used or not.

All in all, this is a decent attempt at an original adventure game (especially on a Mac) and if only the developers had had a bit more money to invest in it, you can't help feeling that it would be so much better.

Download Mystery Island II 1.8 in Softonic

Vendetta Online is a massively multiplayer game, shipping now, which permits thousands of players to interact as the pilots of spaceships in a vast universe. Users may build their characters in any direction they desire, becoming rich captains of industry, military heroes, or outlaws. A fast-paced, realtime "twitch" style combat model gives intense action, coupled with the backdrop of RPG gameplay in a massive online galaxy. Three major player factions form a delicate balance of power, with several NPC sub-factions creating situations of economic struggle, political intrigue and conflict. The completely persistent universe and detailed storyline add to the depth of immersion, resulting in a unique online experience.

Download Vendetta Online 1.8.21 in Softonic

For those of you that spend a major part of their day writing, having a good program to create and save abbreviations can be a real lifesaver. Typinator is one among many such applications but stands out thanks to its ease of use and functionalities.

Typinator is easily accessible from your menu bar. Once you open up the program window you'll see you can create your own set of abbreviations. Just type in the corresponding text in the box at the bottom of the window and enter the abbreviation. You can save all these in different sets, which are ordered at the top of the interface.

Although the program is limited to English, French and German it features really thorough correction sets for the three languages, which should ensure you don't make any typos.

Typinator integrates perfectly in any word processing program and will read imported snippet files from similar applications like Textexpander or TypeIt4Me.

Simple to use and great to store all sorts of abbreviations, Typinator will save you loads of time when typing up documents.

Download Typinator 3.1 in Softonic

Tired of the limited choice of smileys in your chat client? More iChat Smileys will provide you with 120 new emoticons to illustrate your online chats with friends.

Contrary to what the name suggests, this pack will not only allow you to add smileys to iChat, but also to other clients such as AdiumX, Proteus, Fire, Mercury and Skype. The pack is very easy to install and can be used right away. You'll see it offers all sorts of emotions, from happy to sad, ecstatic, disappointed and even original characters like a policeman, pig or a witch. There are also a few miscellaneous icons like a moon, sun or mobile phone.

I do get the feeling that some of them are a little outdated, or highly similar to the ones already present in MSN Messenger. Still, if you're a big fan of emoticons and can't really imagine a chat without them, then this pack will surely extend the choice already present in your chat client.

More iChat Smileys is a good set of 120 new emoticons for chat clients like AdiumX or Skype.

Download More iChat Smileys 3.1.1 in Softonic

Tired of searching and remembering keyboard combinations for umlauts and other special characters? Want to get the most out of your fonts? Then PopChar is the right tool for you.

PopChar makes "typing" of unusual characters easy without having to remember keyboard combinations.

Whenever you need a special character, PopChar is there to help. Click the "P" in the menu bar to display a table of characters. Select the desired character and it instantly appears in your document.

PopChar X supports Unicode fonts with thousands of characters available. Just switch from ASCII to Unicode to see all of them, neatly arranged in the standard Unicode categories.

Web designers will especially enjoy the ability to insert HTML symbols.

Features:

• Simple to use, just click and select
• Iinserts accented characters, foreign letters and any other character from all installed fonts
• Automatic Font Detection
• Full Unicode support
• Character Search Function
• Various Insertion Options
• Insertion of HTML Symbols
• Recent Characters View
• Displays the keystrokes needed to create selected characters
• Automatically starts at login

Download PopChar X 4.0 in Softonic

There's already a plethora of word processors on Mac, and most of them fit the job perfectly. Bean is an open source text editor with a very nice interface and its personal set of features. We liked the inspector tool, which gives you quick access to elements like alignment, spacing, or indenting. Bean also carries a dictionary and makes it really simple to check the spelling and definition of a word.

Bean's font manager, which lets you add new ones or arrange your favorite ones, is very well thought out. Bean also has a statistics window, which you call up directly from the menu bar, and that will give you word count, number of paragraphs and more. Bean is a very pleasant word processor to use and you always feel like tools are immediately accessible. It's a good free and simple alternative to Microsoft Word or Open Office.

Download Bean 1.3.2 in Softonic

QuarkXPress® is powerful design and page layout software with an intuitive, versatile interface that lets you combine superior typography with color and pictures to produce dynamic final output for print and Web delivery. QuarkXPress is widely used by magazines, newspapers, advertising agencies and design firms, marketers, printers, corporate publishers, catalog houses, and book publishers.
A new way to work

Industry experts are calling QuarkXPress 7 one of Quark's most significant upgrades ever. With more than 160 new features and enhancements, QuarkXPress 7 cements Quark's tradition of innovation by enabling a new way of working that focuses on the layout, design, and production environments as a whole rather than as separate processes.
QuarkXPress Passport

QuarkXPress Passport® offers all the features and capabilities of QuarkXPress plus the ability to display menus, check spelling, and properly hyphenate text in 11 languages - making your international publishing easier and more efficient.

It features:

• Intuitive and adaptable interface
• Picture manipulation and color management
• Flexible options for importing and editing text
• Precise and professional typography
• Multiple document layout and text flow options
• Share attributes among complex projects
• Tools for creative document design
• Professional printing capabilities
• Tools for media-independent publishing
• XTensions software for customizing workflow
• QuarkXPress Passport

New features:

Transparency

Color opacity

Alpha channel masks in TIFF and PSD

Drop shadows

Synchronized angle

Runaround

Picture Effects enhancements

Support for raster EPS

Non-destructive mask manipulation

Integrates with Shared Content feature

PSD Import enhancements

Background transparency supported (in addition to layer transparency and blending modes)

Composition Zones

Revolutionary layout feature lets you design once and use anywhere with live updates

Intuitive color management

Automatic monitor profile detection

Easy soft proofing

Shared Content

Retain picture attributes when replacing pictures

Synchronize attributes and content of any item, image, or text

Typography

Advanced OpenType features

Glyph palette

Insert Special Character menu

Font fallback

Streamlined interface

Measurement palette enhancements

Smart palette snapping

Identify layer items with layer colors

Tables enhancements

Running headers and footers

Splitting tables and running tables

Auto resize cells

Automatically select all even rows, even columns, odd rows, or odd columns

Transparency

XDraw graphics

Improved text smoothing

Anti-aliased graphic export to Web

Quark Job Jackets

Synchronized design settings (among multiple users)

Synchronized color settings (among multiple users)

Customizable preflighting (layout evaluation)

JDF support

Advanced color management

Backward compatibility

Source and output setups

Many new advanced settings

PDF/X 1-a and PDF/X 3

Evaluation

Verification

Output Styles

Print

EPS

PDF

PPML

Print dialog enhancements

Easy-to-use preview

Create Print Style from dialog

Font download

Output JDF

PostScript 3 enhancements

Summary screen

Projects and Layouts

Single layout mode

Append projects

Export Projects

Multiple Window and Split Window view

Variable data

PPML export

Download QuarkXPress 7.31 in Softonic

A story development tool can be very useful in helping you organize all the pieces of your story. If you're a writer, you'll know it's not always easy to keep track of all your characters, plot, settings and events in your story.

Storyist lets you manage all the pieces of your story, includes a text editor, which lets you format both manuscript and screenplays and a storyboard to get a different perspective on your story. You can highlight sections and add notes and organize every element in many different ways. I quite liked the use of index cards to jot down ideas and tie them together.

You can link in between sections to keep your plot well tied up and add specific elements easily.

I did find that Storyist lacked story templates, as it only actually comes with four very similar ones to start with.

Storyist should give you a complete overview of your story and make sure every element ties up well together.

Download Storyist 1.3.8 in Softonic

A good html editor is essential if you want to get some coding done or work on a website. Taco HTML Edit lets you edit both HTML and PHP in a simple and tabbed interface.

Taco lets you quickly insert specific characters and create clips of code. You can also add any link, image, list or table. The tree view on the left always gives you an idea of which document you are working on. The difference between Preview and Live Preview isn't clear at first, but actually the first one will open up your default browser while the second will show the result in a pane at the bottom half of the interface.

I enjoyed working with tabs and the Batch find tool to look for specific code. The code completion tool is also really handy, helping you out.

I did find Taco HTML Edit somewhat sluggish at times, especially when working with multiple times.

Although it can be a little slow, Taco HTML Edit is a good html and php editor with some useful tools and a good multi-pane interface.

Download Taco HTML Edit 2.0 in Softonic

Have you ever thought of combining music and graphic art? You might have tried to paint after being inspired by some music, but I guess you won’t have seen a program that creates sounds, based on your drawings. This is the kind of software I hope my flatmate will never discover!

HighC lets you use different types of special brushes whose signs on the pentagram can be read by the program as notes of a song. The results of my experiments were rather funny and all I managed to get was a sound that reminded me of the ‘voice’ of R2-D2, the little cute robot from Star Wars.

You can even export your creation as an image file, apply sound effects and play around with different types of settings. I can’t guarantee you will move a lot further than the funny little robot ‘voice’ of the George Lucas’ character, but you can try at least. To be more honest, it’s really proper drawings which we are talking about, but more hieroglyphic-style signs or a kind of bad Japanese writing i.

Whether you love Star Wars or better still, you like the idea of ‘drawing music’, give HighC a try and see what you can create with the power of your signs.

Download HighC 2.2 in Softonic