When it comes to P2P file sharing, eMule usually wins hands down but UseNeXT is an interesting, slightly more sophisticated offering which has a lot to offer.

For starters, depending on your connection, it can be remarkably quick. You can download at speeds of up to 25 Mbps with DSL/Cable and it¡s pretty constant rather than the fluctuations you often get with such services. The network also prides itself on security over it's rivals such as Limewire and eMule - with ISPs continually cracking down on users, UseNeXT promises users far more anonymity than most.

The Usenet archives are supposedly some of the biggest in the world - more than 300 Terabytes of data available at all times and they claim that around 2,000 Gigabytes of new files are added daily. The problem in the past was that UseNeXT used to be a very complicated affair that only tech geeks can handle. However, nowadays, it's been simplified to such an extent that eMule, Limewire and other P2P users will feel more than comfortable with it.

While it can't possibly hope to compete with the reach and depth of the major P2P networks, UseNeXT offers an impressive selection with some super fast downloads.

Download UseNeXT 4.81 in Softonic

NoteTab Light is the ultimate free Notepad replacement and a capable HTML editor. A slimmer version of the award-winning NoteTab Pro, this slick application makes text editing a breeze. Move quickly around a stack of large files with a simple tabbed interface. Format your text to your heart's content. Write with the font of your choice, fixed-width or proportional.

Key features:

• Open and edit many documents at once
• Capable of editing huge text files
• Text drag-and-drop editing
• AutoCorrect/Auto-replace mode
• Clip tool for quick and easy text insertion
• Capture text sent to Clipboard

Download NoteTab Light 5.7 in Softonic

If you find that your programming development tool doesn't exactly make life easy for you, you may be pleasantly surprised by RJ TextEd. It's basically a web development tool and a Unicode text editor which aims to make HTML coding simpler, faster and more intuitive.

Some of the key features are syntax error highlighting, auto completion and a very handy CSS editor. One rather unusual feature is that RJ TextEd includes an FTP client that enables you to get your coding published super quick although it's not exactly an advanced client and if you need secure connections, you're probably best not to rely on it.

For those that are relatively new to coding, another handy feature is the HTML validation tool which allows you to format and repair your code using wizards. Finally, it also includes spell checking, e-mail support and advanced search options. The remarkable thing is that this is all entirely free although the downside is that it won't support all coding languages so if you frequently use different ones, you'll need something more flexible.

Download RJ TextEd 4.51 in Softonic

OCR software need not be expensive and can be the quickest way to transfer huge amounts of text in an article or publication to editable text.

TopOCR is completely free and designed to be simple and user-friendly enough for use with a digital camera or smartphone. The aim is to make it easy to acquire documents and texts from business cards, newspapers, books and magazines without having to carry around a bulky notebook computer and scanner. OCR is surprisingly accurate and the developers claim it has up to a 99.8% accuracy rate with a 3 Megapixel camera. There are no page limits and no extra downloads or components needed. It can handle images with mixed text and graphics and it can even tolerate skew and uneven lighting. In terms of output formats, you have searchable PDF and HTML formats that are able to read 11 different languages. In addition, Smartphone owners will find it indispensable with full support for them including a useful (although not very accurate) Text-To-Speech software. This means that you can record thoughts, minutes and dictations and play them back later for TopOCR to print out.

This is a hugely comprehensive and generally accurate OCR package and best of all, it's entirely free.

Download TopOCR 3.0 in Softonic

The original Notepad shipped with Windows is probably the handiest program of all times, small, fast, without frills! Notepad2 tries to follow this principle, it's a small, fast and free text editor with syntax highlighting for HTML and other common languages.

Download Notepad2 2.1.19 in Softonic

Desktop Author sets out with an ambitious promise - to provide you with everything you need to publish your own eBook. Whether you want to create multimedia presentations, newsletters, photo albums or marketing infromation, the program aims to oblige.

The published output is designed to be as true to a real book as possible, allowing the reader to flip the pages realistically by clicking on the right side of the page to move forward, and the left side to move back. Besides text, you can adorn the pages of your virtual tome with images, MPEGs and even Flash movies.

There are many slick looking magazines and books appearing on the web these days that are beginning to seriously compete with traditional print publications in terms of reader experience. Judging by some of the example files on the publisher's site, there's certainly a lot you can achieve with Desktop Author, considering you need no special knowledge or programming skills, as used by many of the Flash-built flip-page publications online today.

The GUI is loosely modelled on a traditional desktop publishing app, and although it lacks the range of tools of a heavyweight like InDesign or Quark, Desktop Author contains the standard features you'd expect in such an app, including snap-to guides, image insertion, text formatting and shape drawing.

Considering the program is supposed to be aimed at beginners, the interface is a little cumbersome to navigate at first. Of course, you get used to it, but perhaps the program would have benefited from a Properties Inspector displaying the information about the currently-selected item, allowing you to move, edit, resize, apply styles or just view data on the file in question.

Having said this, there are a few useful tools that speed up the eBook creation process, such as the integrated (albeit basic) image editor, preset buttons to add to your pages, and a collection of built-in templates to get you started. This makes it possible to rustle up a decent looking book in just a few minutes. Of course, as with all creative applications, the more time you spend honing your skills the better the results will become.

Publishing your finished digital books is a matter of simply pressing the 'Publish' button and waiting for everything to be neatly packaged into a DNL file. This can take some time, and once it's done, you still need to install the DNL Reader provided by the developer. There is, however an option to package the eBook inside an executable file, which might be the best option to ensure everyone can read your words of wisdom.

The trial version only allows you to create two pages, but if you have the patience to overcome the slightly awkward toolset layout you'll be crying out for the functionality to add more, making the full version worthy of its $189 price tag.

Download Desktop Author 5.6.1 in Softonic

DestroY MediaPlay is one hell of a flexible media player - it plays video, audio files, DVDs and can even display and play music online.

Not only this, but it features a mini web browser with which you can surf the net. It terms of flexibility, this player is hard to beat. The list of formats it can play is seemingly endless including asf, asx, wav, wma, wmv, ogg, mpg, mpeg and snd amongst many many others. The DVD players is also pretty impressive featuring full support for CDDB so there's no need to label your tracks manually once they are converted to mp3 format. The players also supports some audio streaming although it's designed mainly for SHOUTcast and Icecast streams.

The interface is pretty cool for a free player although it seems like there are only 7 alternatives to the default skin. However, there is an effective Spectrum Analyzer and Oscilloscope plus it supports Drag & Dropping of tracks plus the scheduling of tracks. This can be done by track number, date and up to a set limit of daily, weekly or monthly. In addition to all this, there are hotkeys configurable and you can type in the lyrics for your own karaoke sessions. Add this to an ID3V1/V2 & OGG tag editor, DirectX sound effects and Playlist HTML export and you have a pretty impressive package.

A very comprehensive and modern looking player but it could do with some more skins and slightly more streaming support.

Download DestroY MediaPlay 1.4.0 in Softonic

If you are one of the many that's been left unimpressed with Vista but like the look of it, Vista Buttons is for you. It helps you create Vista/XP/Win98 and Mac style rollover buttons and drop down menus with relative ease.

The interface requires 4 simple steps to create your buttons. You can create your own base on the program although if you import one of your own images as a base, you'll get the job done a lot quicker. The developers claim the program features more than 500 buttons, 100 submenu designs, 50 ready-made samples. This is certainly more than enough to create a really cool looking website menu or desktop buttons although some of the designs are a bit dull. The styles available include Vista, XP, Win98, Mac, Aqua buttons, round, glossy, metallic, 3D styles, tab and drop down menus.

The best thing about this program is that it's aimed at complete novices. You don't require any programming knowledge such as in HTML, JavaScript or CSS to create some really professional looking results. Vista Buttons generates all necessary images, html, javascript and css styles automatically. There's also a theme editor but unfortunately, it's not accessible in the free version.

This is a really excellent design utility and there is little to fault it except it would have been nice to have had a few wizards to take you through the first few attempts.

Download Vista Buttons 2.45 in Softonic

With Portable NVU ("new view") you get a portable and powerful web-editors which you can take anywhere on a USB stick. Like FrontPage or Dreamweaver, this the free HTML editor works on the "What you see is what you get" (WYSIWYG) principle no matter if you are inserting text, images or multimedia objects. Through an easy-to-understand interface, and thanks to many design options, you can design some really impressive sites on the move.

The program is based on the same Gecko engine that powers Firefox and Thunderbird and features an FTP site manager, color picker, tabbed interface, CSS editing, standard-compliant markup, fully customizable interface, a built-in spellchecker and more. For those that want an HTML editor don't worry - you can jump between the WYSIWYG Editing Mode and HTML using tabs.

In my mind, this is one of the easiest and most impressive WYSIWYG web editors I've ever used and the fact that it fits on a USB stick is simply amazing.

Download Portable NVU 1.0 rev 4 in Softonic

PSPad editor has been designed to allow editing several files at once in different programming languages. It's a very simple but powerful tool that allows you to work with several documents simultaneously in different tabs, save sessions, compare texts highlighting differences with colors, spelling and the use of code templates (HTML, PHP, Pascal, JScript, VBScript, MySQL, MS-Dos, Perl , etc..).

It also provides direct access to HTML tags, the preview tab in Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox, etc so you can see how things are going easily. It also contains a hex editor, an ASCII table, an internal browser with Apache, code explorer for Pascal, INI, HTML, XML, PHP.

For a free editor, this is an incredibly powerful and effective solution for any serious programmer.

Download PSPad editor 4.5.3 Build 2291 in Softonic

If you're a programmer then anything that helps you program more easily is a welcome addition to your toolbox. Komodo Edit does everything from background syntax checking and syntax coloring while autocomplete and calltips guide you as you write.

It features support for browser-side languages: CSS, HTML, JavaScript and XML, Server-side languages such as Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby and Tcl and Web template languages: RHTML, Template-Toolkit, HTML-Smarty and Django. In the latest version, there's an auto-update feature so no more checking for the latest features or need to reinstall Komodo to get the latest version. It also has Soft characters and automatic insertion of closing brackets, braces and parentheses.

One nice little touch is that there's an integrated spell checker plus you can even configure the cursor shape. In addition, you've got all the other standard programming features such as auto-indent, block selection and incremental search.

This is an impressive editor which makes programming that bit easier especially for beginners.

Download Komodo Edit 4.2.0 in Softonic

CSE HTML Validator Lite is a fast, easy to use, and free HTML development tool for Microsoft Windows that helps you create syntactically correct HTML and XHTML. You'll be surprised how many problems may exist in your HTML, even if it was made with a WYSIWYG editor or automatic HTML generator. CSE HTML Validator will help you quickly locate and fix HTML problems so that your documents are easily viewed by a variety of web browsers. You can even fix your documents inside of HTML Validator by using the integrated editor. CSE Lite is great for web authors who want to make sure that their web site visitors do not leave their website because they ran into problems caused by poorly written HTML.

Download CSE HTML Validator Lite 6.53 in Softonic

Whether you're an experienced web professional or just a novice writing your first PHP script, PHP Designer 2005 is a free PHP editor designed to provide you with the complete set of tools you need for PHP coding.

The development environment in PHP Designer 2005 combines many powerful features such as customizable syntax schemes for PHP, HTML, XHTML, CSS, Perl, C#, JavaScript, VB, Java and SQL (Ingres, Interbase, MSSQL, MySQL, Oracle, Sybase and Standard SQL), a class/include browser, test and debug your scripts with the PHP interpreter, integration of the PHP manual, parameter hint, auto indent of brackets, automatic close brackets, access to common code/script libraries all combined in this one unique program.

PHP Designer 2005 also includes time saving features as a FTP manager, project manager, file manager, ToDo manager, code templates, snippet support, export possibility to LaTex, HTML and RTF and a lot more…

The interface is a sophisticated streamlined XP interface with 18 different themes to choose between and built-in wizards to help accelerate the process of developing with ease. PHP Designer 2005 may be used for FREE for both private and commercial use.

Download PHP Designer 2007 5.5 in Softonic

An important point in the development of software is the creation of Help files that enable users to learn everything they need to know about your app's usage. This is usually quite a tedious task but fortunately now you can count on Helpmaker to speed the process up.

This program allows you to create the whole Help section of your program from scratch. Its interface resembles that of a standard Windows Help file, so you get a perfect view of what your finished project will look like. Plus, the embedded rich editor offers a large variety of text formatting options and makes the writing task a pleasant one.

The complexity of this program, which even includes some extra tools to create image maps, buttons and icons, may be a bit overwhelming for first-time users. However, this can be easily solved with some practice.

Download HelpMaker 7.3.19 in Softonic

WorldCast is a free two-in-one tool: A free bulk email software and also an e-mail address validator. It detects many of the common invalid addresses that exists on many emailing lists, reporting errors like bad email addresses, time-out operations, etc., providing a detailed log of the entire delivering process.

Features:

• Automatic subscription/unsubscription of email addresses
• Syntax-oriented editor
• Mail merge capabilities
• HTML editing and preview support
• Attachments
• Spell-checker
• Thesaurus
• Extensive filtering of the results
• Crash recovery
• Message attachments

WorldCast as a bulk emailer acts like a self-sufficient SMTP relay, sending your customized message straight out to the recipient's mail server (without using your ISP's SMTP server, although it still offers the possibility to use any SMTP server). It has extensive mail merge capabilities. Given a certain emailing list, containing email, name and job, for instance, the software generates a customized email to each recipient. WorldCast as an email-address validator verifies an entire emailing list, reporting the bad and good email addresses. WorldCast accepts an unlimited number of projects, importing/exporting recipients (mailing lists) from dBase tables, text and CSV files, as well as address books. Working with huge recipient lists, it imposes no limits to the recipient list size. WorldCast is safe - If, for some reason, your computer hangs in the middle of some processing, it safely recovers it to the state it was before the crash.

Download WorldCast 4.0.1.1 in Softonic

MailList Controller is an email mailing list, bulk email and marketing solution designed to send out personalized messages, manage multiple mailing lists, newsletters, campaigns, e-zines, announcements, support and group mails.

The program runs as service on your desktop, workstation or server. You can use the built-in mailserver for direct delivery or use an external SMTP server. The WYSIWYG editor allows you to create personalized rich-text (HTML) messages or you use your default mail client. Other features are: webform requests, single and double opt-in, ODBC support, linked lists, returned message detection and many more.

Download MailList Controller Free 6.03 in Softonic

Alleycode is a fast, sleek and highly productive award winning HTML editor with unique features. If you are new to HTML, Alleycode's great tutorial will walk you through your first coding steps... If you are an established coder you will find a refreshing, non-bloated infrastructure with fast and accurate delivery. Beyond HTML, Alleycode's wizardry focuses on PHP and CSS interaction for professional and easy management of your projects. Best of all, Alleycode is free!

Download Alleycode HTML Editor 2.20 in Softonic

Create your own custom eBay Auction Templates with Sellercore HTML Auction Editor. Build your own templates from scratch or edit an existing template. Organize and add Free Images, Graphics, and Text Effects.

Download Sellercore HTML Auction Editor 3.2 in Softonic

WebTide HTML editor is a new free HTML editor. It is designed to help web developers in creating fast and professional websites. It is also a programmer text editor.

The code navigation is a tool to count on in a HTML editor when you seem lost in the code. WebTide HTML editor outlines the structure of a HTML file and it's containing CSS and PHP code in a tree outline. The brand new error underlining and error tooltips will show you in a snap what's wrong with your code. Html is a complex language, and this free html editor is the key in easilly creating and maintaining a website.

The HTML file formatter will beautify your HTML code while improving it's readability.
The code completion tools WebTide provides for HTML, XML, CSS and PHP languages will help HTML newbies and will increase the pleasure of developing of any professional HTML coder.
The advanced search features WebTide HTML editor provides will help you find whatever you want in a snap.

Download WebTide HTML Editor 3.0 in Softonic

A powerful, free HTML editor, AceHTML comes packed with outstanding features. Although this Web page software is completely free, it offers a solid collection of tools to help novices and professional webmasters build Web sites with speed, ease, and convenience.

Simply put, AceHTML Freeware HTML editor beats every other paid-for HTML editor hands down. AceHTML is the best freeware HTML editor around—it is the best Web development software you can find.

No other free HTML editor comes packed with so many features:

• HTML Syntax Checker
• International alphabet support
• Windows XP compatibility
• Code Explorer
• 175 predefined DHTML and JavaScript codes
• Powerful style sheet editor

Download AceHTML Freeware 0010 in Softonic