As one of the mainstays of the instant messaging world, Yahoo! has finally decided to drag itself onto the VOIP bandwagon with the launch of this Voice version of its popular client. As well as offering free PC-to-PC calls and cheap PC-to-phone (landline and mobile) calls, the program throws in all the usual over-the-top gadgetry and gimmicks we've come to associate with Yahoo! Messenger.

As we've seen before from programs that try to be all things to all people, there's always a danger that things can get a little out of hand for the user, and this is the territory that Yahoo is entering with this latest incarnation of its messenger. It's true that the voice facilities in the program are top-notch, delivering crystal-clear clarity for most calls to PCs and phones. It's also true that the application boasts a bevy of interesting and innovative features, such as the ability to play games and listen to online radio together, send animated, talking emoticons, and quickly share files and photos simply by dragging and dropping them into the chat window.

Although, in the main, these features are good for a laugh, we did have a couple of things that we'd like to raise if we ever met Mr Yahoo! Firstly, we like the games but they lack instructions, so sometimes it can take a while to figure out how to play them. Also many of the so-called 'Audibles,' which are essentially animated, talking emoticons, are a little vulgar to say the least, and not really suitable for anyone with a reputation to uphold.

There are plenty of ways to customize the client to suit your mood too. The main interface is fully skinable, and you can also change the way the chat window looks by selecting from dozens of themed 'IMvironments', which certainly helps to inject some variety into your chat experiences. You can also build your own avatar – a process which can take hours as you carefully select the right haircut, clothes, sunglasses and even breed of dog to have sitting at your side in your IM profile.

Individually, these features are both innovative and compelling, but ironically they combine to contribute to the downfall of Messenger for Voice. The fact is that all of these options serve to swamp the interface and if you have a lot of the features running at the same time it's often hard to find even the text window. While it's fun and novel at first, the messenger very quickly becomes an irritant more than anything. Our advice – stick with Skype.

Download Yahoo! Messenger with Voice 9.0.0.1912 in Softonic

The Google Desktop application allows users to search their desktop content quickly and easily. Praised for its ingenuity and criticised for its intrusiveness, Google Desktop brings the power of Google’s search engine technology to your PC.

After installing the application, you’ll have to give it some time to index the files on your PC, including emails, photos, chats, contacts and calendar events. Google Desktop will index the first 10,000 words in the first 100,000 documents on your PC. The application supports the majority of file types and you can decide which ones to index, or omit protected files, using the preferences menu.

In its latest version, which is compatible with Windows Vista, Google Desktop has been given a new transparent look, providing a pretty sleek feel to your PC. Your search results will appear in your browser (in the familiar Google web page format) and a small preview button allows you to view results without actually clicking on the corresponding link. Results are as precise as we’ve come to expect from Google searches, however we were slightly disappointed to learn that the application doesn’t offer logical 'OR' support or substring search. On another note, Google Desktop is not limited to your PC as you can cross index content from multiple machines and share some panel items with your friends.

Google Desktop is not only about search, though. Joining a marketplace already occupied by Apple’s Dashboard Widgets and Yahoo! Widgets, Google Desktop can be fitted with any number of little gadgets. These mini apps perform all kinds of functions, from fetching your mail to jotting down notes or checking up on your local weather. There are hundreds of gadgets to choose from to customize your desktop bar. Our personal favorites are: Google Translate, the Skype plug-in to check your credit and call your contacts, “Am I Blocked” to find out who’s blocked you on IM, Workspace to quickly move between tasks, System Stats to monitor your PC and Games, a selection of Flash games like Tetris and Moonlander.

When running, we found Google Desktop to use up around 30 MBs, but that can quickly increase if you add more gadgets to it. The application is also constantly re-indexing your files to incorporate your modifications and new elements. However you should rarely feel your PC slowing due to indexing.

When you’re dealing with Google, however, you know the main criticism will be about security. Because Google Desktop indexes all your documents, you’re basically opening up your PC and all your personal files to the Moutain View company. What some users fear is that Google could one day take advantage of that access or that a bug in the application would allow malicious users to infiltrate your PC and steal information.

While the intrusiveness of Google Desktop will give some users pause for thought on installing the app, Google Desktop is highly effective and simple to use. The gadgets you can add to its sidebar may not all be essential, but many of them are quite fun and original and let’s face it, the sidebar looks good. Give it a go if you think your PC is a mess and you need quick access to anything.

Download Google Desktop 5.8.809.8522 in Softonic

Nothing helps you get through a tough day at the office than a good old-fashioned viral email. Whether it’s funny, stupid, interesting or just plain sick, receiving a forwarded video, picture or text document is the highlight of the day for many a tortured office drone. Now, thanks to the rather unique MetaCafe, you don’t even need to wait for your pals to throw this spirit-lifting material your way.

The basic premise of the software is that it automatically trawls the web for popular viral items including movies, images, games and other time-wasting files. Within just a few minutes of firing up the app (or allowing it to load automatically on start-up) you’ll be presented with a series of the hottest files doing the rounds on email at the moment. Each item comes with a preview thumbnail and a brief description of what it’s about. You can then choose to download and play any movies, or view images within the MetaCafe interface.

The simplicity of this program is quite staggering and it makes it as easy as possible to siphon the stuff that’s likely to appeal to you. The categories (video, images, games, and other) can be customized so you only receive items that are of interest to you, such as funnies, news-related, sports-related etc. There’s a very helpful idiot’s guide that appears when you launch the program and the online help is particularly useful.

Other useful features include a ‘TV mode’ for viewing videos in full-screen with movie player controls, and the ability to forward links to the items to your buddies from within the program. You can even submit your own files to MetaCafe if you’ve been forwarded a particularly good file that you want to share with the rest of the user base.

Generally, the operation and performance of MetaCafe is very slick but there are a couple of things that bugged us a bit. For instance, it can take a while for the program to find new items when you start and this is made more confusing by the fact that there is no progress bar to show you that it's actually doing something. You should also be careful to ensure that the adult content filter is checked, as some of the material can be a little risqué for youngsters or the faint of heart.

Despite these minor glitches, this is a very original software concept that will help brighten up your day and amuse your friends and family to boot. Just don't let the boss catch you playing around with it.

Download MetaCafe Pro 1.2.28 in Softonic

Poster Forge is a fun tool that enables you to create posters with your own digital pictures in a very easy way. Unlike other similar tools, which only create larger versions of the image for you to print out, Poster Forge adds some cool effects that can turn any picture into a motivational poster, movie poster or a Far West "Wanted" style poster.

The program's interface is divided into three tabs (one for each kind of poster) and includes all the tools you need to customize them. Simply add a picture, type in any text you want, tweak a few settings and you're pretty much done. Unfortunately, there were things I couldn't customize, such as font size. Also, even though there's a tool to move the picture around and make it fit better, it's very limited and sometimes the picture needs to be cropped with a third-party app.

Once finished, the poster can be saved as an image file or conveniently printed as a poster with the built-in printing tool, which enables you to optimize poster printing and make them easier to assemble.

Turn your photos into original posters very easily and in just a few minutes.

Download Poster Forge 1.01.10 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

ZeallSoft FunPhotor is funny and easy to use photo blending software, a fun-filled Windows application that lets you blend your family portraits with well known artwork to create comical images.

With a few short steps, you can add your face to the carved granite US Presidents on Mount Rushmore, put your portrait on a $100 bill, or create all sorts of gag gifts for your friends. Choose from more than 100 high quality templates that include the Mona Lisa, a bodybuilder, or the US President speaking from his official podium. You can also build your own custom templates.

Download ZeallSoft FunPhotor 10.16 in Softonic

It's really unbelievable to find free software applications as amazing as Photoscape. But as they say, truth is stranger than fiction. Here you have a really excellent photo editing tool that includes just about everything you need to view, optimize, edit, print and have fun with your photos, all for free.

Photoscape strikes us from the very beginning with an uncommon interface design from which you can choose what you want to do: view pictures, optimize those that didn't come out so well, print several photos on a single page collage-style or perhaps add any of the dozens of filters and special effects included in the program. Other extra tools featured in Photoscape are a file renamer, a color picker, a screen capture tool and even a RAW converter.

We really have nothing negative to say about Photoscape. Just download it, test it, love it and keep it forever. It's free!

Download Photoscape 3.1 in Softonic

Locating and removing duplicates can easily become a time-consuming nightmare, and may eventually even take away the fun of taking pictures. Difficult lighting and exposure problems, camera shake and digital noise can pollute your images. If you encounter difficult shooting conditions, you are probably taking a few duplicates with somewhat different settings. Selecting the best shot out of a few duplicates is relatively easy, but what if you have hundreds of duplicate shots?

Image Comparer helps you out of this predicament by analyzing your digital images and automatically selects the best shot out of many duplicates, allowing you to move or delete them in a couple of mouse clicks. Image Comparer is slightly different from similar programs in that it does not just look for exact duplicates. Instead, it analyzes and recognizes an image's content, and groups pictures that look alike. You can specify the level of similarity that is sufficient to consider pictures to be duplicates. View them in pairs or see the top ten similar images and keep the best one!

This is an extremely useful program for professional or amateur photographers that take duplicate photos with very similar settings. However, for the average user, it's fairly unnecessary because it's designed for those that have hundreds, not just a few, duplicate images.

Download Image Comparer 3.5 in Softonic

This easy photo editor, despite its scary name, lets you apply a quick retouch to your images in just a few simple steps.

Phantasmagoria is developed in Java, which makes it compatible with all platforms and operating systems. It works in a very simple way: load the picture and select the task you want to do, focusing either on photo improvement or special effects.

As for the first group, Phantasmagoria only features color correction, contrast equalizing and red-eye removal tools, whereas the special effects category includes a wide variety of filters with which you can give your photos a totally different look in a very easy way.

That said, Phantasmagoria has also some flaws, such as the impossibility to preview effects before applying them (not even if you modify some values, which is especially annoying). Also, there's no "undo" option but only a "revert" button that brings the picture back to its original state.

Phantasmagoria features a large variety of effects for a quick photo retouch but unfortunately lacks some basic options (like being able to preview changes or undo options.

Download Phantasmagoria 1.0 in Softonic

Would you like to make a photo card but can't be bothered opening a proper graphic editor? I'm sure you are not alone. Try Photo Card Maker with which you have several templates divided into categories. Upload the photo you want and export you final card as JPG, PNG or BMP.

Let's make a point: we are not talking about fine design here. The only cute available templates are the cartoon ones. The Holiday, Travel and Sport ones are a fairly basic and I wouldn't recommend them if you are looking for something slightly cool or stylish. That said, if you are not too fussy, they will save you lots of time when you have to make an announcement to your acquaintances.

A nice feature allows you to upload a photo which you can resize and rotate so that it will fit exactly the apposite photo space in the template. The program automatically takes care of the card's layer level as sometimes your picture will be surrounded by stars and circles. It is also possible to modify the default text which is useful considering it is often miswritten. The good news is that you can download more cartoon themes!

Photo Card Maker will let you create lovely cartoon photo cards to send around in image format. It is very easy and fast to make announcements or best wishes with this free program, so if you like cartoon-style cards, don't hesitate longer and give it a try.

Download Photo Card Maker 1.0.1 in Softonic

Windows Live Writer is a desktop application that makes it easier to compose compelling blog posts using Windows Live Spaces or your current blog service. Blogging has turned the web into a two-way communications medium. Our goal in creating Writer is to help make blogging more powerful, intuitive, and fun for everyone. Writer has lots of features which we hope make for a better blogging experience. Some of the ones we are most excited about include:

WYSIWYG Authoring

The first thing to notice about Writer is that it enables true WYSIWYG blog authoring. You can now author your post and know exactly what it will look like before you publish it. Writer knows the styles of your blog such as headings, fonts, colors, background images, paragraph spacing, margins and block quotes and enables you to edit your post using these styles.

Writer also includes other views including HTML source-code editing and web preview mode. Now you don’t have to waste time going through the process of publishing, refreshing, previewing, and tweaking your post to get it looking the way you want. It’s all right there in Writer as you create your post.

Photo Publishing

Writer makes inserting, customizing, and uploading photos to your blog a snap. You can insert a photo into your post by browsing image thumbnails through the “Insert Picture” dialog or by copying and pasting from a web page. Once you’ve inserted the picture, Writer provides contextual editing tools to modify size, text wrapping, borders, and apply graphic effects. Writer also allows you specify a smaller thumbnail to that will link to a larger image for detailed viewing. Photos can be either uploaded directly to your weblog provider (if they support the newMediaObject API) or to an FTP server.

Map Publishing

Whether you are blogging about a vacation or a political conflict, maps are a great help in engaging the imagination of your readers. You can do this using Writer's ability to insert a Windows Live Local map directly into a post. Even better is that the map can be customized directly within Writer - including changing the view to show road, aerial or bird's eye detail and by adding pushpins (including custom links and/or photos for each pushpin). When readers click on the map they get a larger view on the Windows Live Local site.

Writer SDK

Already thinking of other cool stuff you want to insert into your blog? Good! The Windows Live Writer SDK allows developers to extend the capabilities of Writer to publish additional content types. Examples of content types that can be added include:

1. Images from online photo publishing sites

2. Embedded video or audio players

3. Product thumbnails and/or links from e-commerce sites

4. Tags from tagging services

Compatibility

Writer is a great client for Windows Live Spaces but also works with other weblogs including Blogger, LiveJournal, TypePad, WordPress (and many others). Writer supports RSD (Really Simple Discoverability), the Metaweblog API, and the Movable Type API. We want Writer to work well with every blogging service out there. If you can’t get Writer to work with your blog, we want to know.

Stay Tuned

We will continue to post updates and other information on the product to this Space in the coming weeks. Please subscribe to our RSS feed or visit again soon to get the most current information on Windows Live Writer.

Download Windows Live Writer 12.0.1366.1026 in Softonic

EyeRoller enables you to create hilarious animations with any photo. The resulting image will follow your mouse with its eyes!

The program has two working modes, Automatic and Manual, which makes it suitable for both novice and advanced users. The first one guides you through the whole process in a step-by-step wizard, whereas the latter lets you do all the work by yourself. It may be more difficult, that's true, but it's also more precise.

Whatever working mode you choose, the idea is to select the eye area in your image (it works at its best with face close-ups) and overlay a fake eye that will follow your mouse while moving it around the screen. The final effect is really funny, but be aware that the animations created with EyeRoller can only be opened with this same program.

If you want to create a fun effect with your pictures in just a couple of minutes, you should definitely give EyeRoller a go.

Download EyeRoller 1.1.4 in Softonic

Comic Life is a really fun application with which you can create comics out of your photos and images.

What I enjoyed most from the application is how easy it is to work with. With this type of program, you're looking to play around and Comic Life feels just like that. You can quickly drag and drop your images onto the interface, arrange them in order onto a page, drag bubbles and then enter your text.

Comic Life offers many shapes, forms and text lettering with styles reminiscent of the best cartoons and comics. All can be extensively customized to your taste from the style attributes tab on the right. I also quite liked the choice of filters, with which you can give a different aspect to your photos, like turning them into a scene from Sin City. If you don't want to get carried away into editing, Comic Life also features loads of page templates and themes that you can start off with.

Importing pictures onto the screen is easy, as you'll only need to drag and drop them from your desktop or pick straight from the preview pane in the application. Even more, you can use your webcam or DV camera to take snaps and post them immediately into your comic strip.

The only little downside to this app is that it sometimes uses up a little too much RAM.

Very intuitive and loaded with features, Comic Life is a great way to have fun with your pictures. It has all the bubbles, styles and fonts you'd expect to make good looking comics. Highly recommended.

Download Comic Life 1.3.4 in Softonic

As the hard drives and Flash memory cards of the world’s burgeoning photography community continue to fill up, there is increasing demand for low-cost methods of keeping their images in some kind of order. With some snap-happy enthusiasts taking hundreds of pictures a week, there’s a danger that the fun of photography will be replaced by the mundane task of finding the shots you once they’re on your PC. While programs such as Photoshop Album and PaintShop Album are pretty good at helping you sort images, StudioLine aims to take things one stage further – by not charging you for the privilege.

You might expect that by not demanding a fee for a photo organizing program, you’d have to settle for a largely scaled-down version of its costly equivalents. We were pleasantly surprised to see this wasn’t the case, and the application is brimming with features that not only make it easier to sort and search for photos, but which can instantly improve the appearance of your images.

The main premise of the program is to help you whip your photo collection into some sort of order, and it does this admirably. You start with an Image Archive, which is basically a database where you can load in all of your images. From here, you can create a hierarchical tree system of folders based through an Explorer-style interface, making it a painless process. Sorting through your images is aided by the capacity for adding information about a photo using the ‘Descriptors’ data, photos, allowing you to categorize by image topic, date, location or person. You can even enter a star rating for each image to help you later in the sorting process. Another nice inclusion is the ability to change the size of thumbnail previews using a slider when viewing all the images within a folder.

As if the slick sorting facilities weren’t impressive enough, the program boasts a range of editing tools that rival many priced image editors. There’s a diverse variety of tools ranging from preprocessing, through photo correction, to special effects, all of which can be previewed and applied with ease. The Classic version of StudioLine Photo comes with a raft of features that you don't get in Basic. These extra treats include a Timeline view that automatically organizes images by date, a star rating facility, and a neat image archive filter which significantly ramps up your picture hunting speed.

The user interface is generally a joy to use, with lots of customizable options, and draggable palettes like those you see in professional editing suites. There are a couple of bothersome aspects of the interface which could do with changing though, such as the fact that an image loads in a new pop-up menu when its thumbnail is clicked on, rather than in the main window (as a tab perhaps). The tips boxes that spring up a little too frequently can also get a tad irritating, especially as there seems to be no way to permanently disable them.

Apart from these minor niggles, this is a fantastic program which, is arguably the cheapest way of effectively managing your image collection. The addition of features for creating slide shows, web galleries and emails only serves to raise its status as a serious contender to its big budget rivals.

Download StudioLine Photo Classic 3.50.10 in Softonic

Have you ever wanted to sit down and compile your family tree but were daunted by the task? Agelong Tree is a program intended for helping you do just that by storing and displaying information about your relatives and the key events in their lives. With millions of users sharing family information on the internet, tracing your family history has never been easier. Although sites such as Genes Reunited now boast over 90 million users, not everyone wants to share their family information online. Which is where Agelong Tree comes in.

The program works with a spreadsheet style interface and automatically builds the tree as you enter family members. Each box has a “mechanism of events” option which allows you to compile complex biographies, store texts, photos, sounds and even videos of your relatives. You can also export this information statistically and view it in attractive graphical presentations.

An algorithm automatically builds the interconnectedness of the family tree as you enter information about people and hit the save option to compile it. One of the key elements of the program is the event display module which highlights the major moments in a person’s life and displays them in graphical form. There are a number of standard event types such as birth, marriage, house move but you can also create your own event types which can have one or more participants. For example, there are three standard participants in the event of a birth – the newborn, the father and the mother. Along with standard participants you can add to an event an unlimited number of participants with other roles such as a witness, a midwife or even a lover (such as if the baby was conceived outside of the marriage by the milkman or something).

You can also filter your family by criteria. For example, you can select all those who lived in your home town, who were born in the 30s or all those who held certain jobs. This is one of the handiest features of this programme and it’s lacking from websites such as Genes Reunited. It’s quite interesting to be able to filter your family members’ attributes to see which ones you had the most in common with or which showed the most similar characteristics.

The drawback is that obviously, since it’s not online and you are not interconnected with other users, you can only extend your family tree as far as your knowledge goes. You also have to enter each member manually which is terribly time consuming when you are talking about biographies, events in their lives and other details. These factors are already done for you by other users on website based family trees.

Nevertheless, the attractive graphics and ease of use make this an excellent choice for anyone who would rather keep their family history to themselves.

Download Agelong Tree 3.1.1 in Softonic

DeformerPro is probably one of the easiest ways to have some fun with your photos and your PC on one of those boring Sunday afternoons.

First of all, bear in mind that this program is mainly intended for people who have little or no knowledge of photo editing at all. Power users may find it then a bit too simple but in any case it works really well for a quick morphing effect.

Simply run it (no installation required) and load a photo. Then start deforming the image with the mouse's right button and see how it's coming out in real time. At the beginning it'll all look weird but soon you'll get the knack of it. The overlaid grid also helps to achieve better results. Just one thing: you really need to be careful because DeformerPro only supports a one-level undo.

Once you like the final image (you can get a better look by temporarily disabling the grid) you'll be able to save it as JPG, BMP or PNG, ready to be published online or shared by email. Just be careful not to hurt other people's feelings!

Though probably too simple for expert image editors, DeformerPro is a great tool to apply warping effects to your photos in no time.

Download DeformerPro 1.0 in Softonic

PhotoChances is an easy tool to create photographic effects for your pictures. With a large amount of assorted treatments each with many variable parameters, the program runs in two modes: Slideshow and Lab Mode.

In Slideshow Mode the program will show your digital photos with the effects chosen randomly. At any time you can pause the show and capture the resulting image. You can also store the effect for later use with any image.

In Lab Mode the program allows loading the "recipes" of the effects used in any image you captured. Then you can choose any target images to apply that effect and save them. There are additional controls to fine-tune the result. The program comes preloaded with an assorted selection of "recipes" (effects) that you can expand with your own captures.

Download PhotoChances 2.6.002 in Softonic

As the hard drives and Flash memory cards of the world’s burgeoning photography community continue to fill up, there is increasing demand for low-cost methods of keeping their images in some kind of order. With some snap-happy enthusiasts taking hundreds of pictures a week, there’s a danger that the fun of photography will be replaced by the mundane task of finding the shots you once they’re on your PC. While programs such as Photoshop Album and PaintShop Album are pretty good at helping you sort images, StudioLine aims to take things one stage further – by not charging you for the privilege.

You might expect that by not demanding a fee for a photo organizing program, you’d have to settle for a largely scaled-down version of its costly equivalents. We were pleasantly surprised to see this wasn’t the case, and the application is brimming with features that not only make it easier to sort and search for photos, but which can instantly improve the appearance of your images.

The main premise of the program is to help you whip your photo collection into some sort of order, and it does this admirably. You start with an Image Archive, which is basically a database where you can load in all of your images. From here, you can create a hierarchical tree system of folders based through an Explorer-style interface, making it a painless process. Sorting through your images is aided by the capacity for adding information about a photo using the ‘Descriptors’ data, photos, allowing you to categorize by image topic, date, location or person. You can even enter a star rating for each image to help you later in the sorting process. Another nice inclusion is the ability to change the size of thumbnail previews using a slider when viewing all the images within a folder.

As if the slick sorting facilities weren’t impressive enough, the program boasts a range of editing tools that rival many priced image editors. There’s a diverse variety of tools ranging from preprocessing, through photo correction, to special effects, all of which can be previewed and applied with ease. The fact that you can apply changes you’ve made to one photograph to hundreds of other images in one click is another major boon, and is ideal if you want to turn a batch of images into black and white, or apply an auto-colour correction to an entire album of photos, for instance.

The user interface is generally a joy to use, with lots of customizable options, and draggable palettes like those you see in professional editing suites. There are a couple of bothersome aspects of the interface which could do with changing though, such as the fact that an image loads in a new pop-up menu when its thumbnail is clicked on, rather than in the main window (as a tab perhaps). The tips boxes that spring up a little too frequently can also get a tad irritating, especially as there seems to be no way to permanently disable them.

Apart from these minor niggles, this is a fantastic program which, is arguably the cheapest way of effectively managing your image collection. The addition of features for creating slide shows, web galleries and emails only serves to raise its status as a serious contender to its big budget rivals.

Download StudioLine Photo Basic 3.50.4 in Softonic

Photo editing applications are ten-a-penny these days. Besides the scores of programs that are freely available for download or to buy, you normally get some kind of image manipulation software bundled with your digital camera, scanner, etc. However, if you're new to the image editing or digital photography game then you may find that many of these applications are either too complicated or just downright garbage.

PhotoImpression sets its stall out as a powerful, feature-filled photo editing application that doesn't make creating classy graphics too difficult to achieve. It has to be said that it pulls this off pretty well, and its colourful interface manages to marry some of the advanced features of programs like Photoshop with the simplicity of an app like the GIMP or IrfanView.

The GUI is laid out in a way that leads you intuitively through the process of organizing, enhancing, and creating interesting looking photos and graphics, whether it's to share on the web, email to your pals, or print out. Clicking each of the tabs that represent these stages of production will bring up a series of controls that help you perform a variety of tasks, from fixing problem photos to applying effects and frames to your images.

It would have been nice to see support for more advanced manipulation tools such as layers and gradients in PhotoImpression, but for someone who's just retouching or revamping their snaps, this is ideal. The application performs admirably compared to the wonderful, if strangely-named, GIMP. However, perhaps the key difference with this and its open source rival is you must part with cash for the full version of PhotoImpression.

Download ArcSoft PhotoImpression 6.5 in Softonic

MAGIX Ringtone Maker lets you add some spice to your mobile device by creating your own ringtones and animated pictures. The program is extremely friendly to use. The interface itself is clearly divided in sections to select your media, edit the ringtone and export it. A help guide is easily accessible from the bottom right of the interface and tutorials for specific actions from the menu bar. We were impressed with the advanced editing tools on hand to add effects like distortion, filters or delay. Similarly, the equalizer was very effective at adjusting sounds. If you want to add extra elements, you can also access the extensive Catooh online library from the menu bar. MAGIX Ringtone Maker features a "simulate ringtone" button, quite useful to test your creation before exporting it.

We were also well impressed with the export function. The application provides a list of many mobile manufacturers and models to allow you to export to the format which most corresponds to your device.

Overall, the structure of the interface feels great, especially the timeline view, which really makes it easy to edit your media. We did feel however that some elements, like the media selection part at the top, felt a little bit crowded. It's a shame that you can't resize the interface window. Similarly, the installation process was a bit lengthy.

On the whole though, MAGIX Ringtone Maker is a great application to create and add media to your mobile device, providing a very accessible interface and loads of advanced editing tools.

Download MAGIX Ringtone Maker 2007 (UK) in Softonic