Features

With Skype you can not only have voice chats on your computer – just like telephone, only for free – but also make real phone calls at much lower rates, using the SkypeOut service and paying with Skype credit. Besides voice chats, Skype also includes standard IM functionalities (written conversations, emoticons, user avatars and so on) and also lets you have group video conferences and share screens.

Usability

These video calls are precisely the main focus on Skype's latest version. The program's interface has been completely redesigned with video conferences on mind. This means it's been made wider so that video fits in perfectly with your written chat, your contact list and a toolbar to manage conversation.

The new interface is transformed when you make a call, getting rid of all the clutter, so you just see the video images, and controls. Group video is still being tested in this version, and it's pretty cool.

The other major development is Facebook integration. This is a pretty big thing, as not only does it give you your news feed in the app - anyone can do that - but adds call and sms buttons to any of your friends who share their contact numbers.

If you’ve paid for Skype minutes, you can call your Facebook friends, and if they’re also signed in to Skype you can call them for free. One of the best new features is the automatic call recovery - drop a call and it’s put in pause. Restarting it is now really easy.

Quality

The sound quality during our testing was perfect: loud and clear. Video sometimes appeared a bit pixelated, but nothing we couldn't really deal with. There was also one nice detail, and that's the ability to see your own video image built-in on your contact's video, and the option to take a snapshot of your own image.

Conclusion

Skype 6 features a complete interface overhaul that now focuses more on video chats, and also adds some handy improvements to the way you communicate online.

What's new

Log in with your Microsoft account
Select and pin your favorite contacts
Facebook and Skype contacts combined into one Contacts list
Easier to understand premium subscription notices
Possibility to control Skype video rendering technology for backward compatibility for people who have trouble with video calls

Download Skype 6.3.60.105 in Softonic

What's new in Picasa 3

The latest version of Picasa includes sharing on Google+, including sharing of name tags. You'll enjoy the range of new effects that have been added, allowing you to quickly make stylish changes to your photos. Side by side editing means you can keep an original copy of your photo for reference while you're making experiementing with effects and levels.

What's inside Picasa

Google Picasa features enriching options to manage, edit, and show off your photos in an even more comfortable way, both offline and online – thanks to the Picasa Web Album syncing tool.

It includes Picasa Photo Viewer, which you can configure to replace the original Windows default image viewer. It offers more tools and displays photos on a much nicer interface when viewing them directly in Windows Explorer, so when Picasa asks you if you want to use it, don't hesitate!

How Picasa works

Picasa displays all your indexed photos in a handy folder structure. You can let the program scan the whole drive in search for pictures or select specific directories. A double click on any image will display it in full screen and let you access to a handful of basic editing tools: cropping, straightening, adjusting color and light or fixing red eye, among others.

The possibilities are endless

But Picasa is not only about viewing and fixing images. You can also give free rein to your imagination with its tools to create posters, collages, screensavers and even movies. The greatest thing about these tools is not only the fact that they give you the ability to create something unique and original with your photos; it's also that they're surprisingly easy to use, and don't require any tech abilities or photo editing skills at all.

Conclusion

The all-new Picasa has successfully completed what seemed a difficult task: improving a software app that was already very good.

Download Picasa 3.9.136.12 in Softonic

It's hard to review something like Smart Installer Pack, because it's not really a software app in itself, but rather a collection of software apps.

Smart Installer Pack contains 24 popular software utilities, among which you can probably find the first five or ten you download on your computer after reinstalling your operating system. This is precisely the aim behind Smart Installer Pack: saving you the pain of having to search, download and install all those programs.

Smart Installer Pack includes Yahoo! Messenger, Yahoo Widgets, Skype, Google Earth, Winamp, Firefox, BitTorrent, Gmail Notifier, Rocket Dock, a pack of codecs, Adobe Flash Player, Apple Quicktime, the Java Runtime, Adobe Reader, WinRAR, Open Office, Daemon Tools, Thunderbird, Gimp, Picasa, Avira Antivirus, Google Chrome, CCleaner and KMPlayer.

Of course, you don't have to install them all. Simply browse through the program's tabs and click on the icon of the program you're interested in. Installation will start right away.

Smart Installer Pack is certainly a handy tool that can save you lots of time. On the downside, you're obliged to download a huge file – no matter how many of those tools you'll use – and the programs included in the pack may not be updated to the latest version.

With Smart Installer Pack you can save a lot of time when downloading and installing your favorite software after an OS re-installation.

Download Smart Installer Pack 1.5 in Softonic

Better JPEG edits your JPEG image files, offering the basic tools like crop, red eye or resize. The interface, with the left side explorer panel to search for your pictures and the top tool bar, makes everything easy to access. You can quickly add text comments to your jpegs. Better JPEG claims that all operations are lossless, meaning the quality of the image will stay the same no matter how much editing you do.

We were disappointed by the limited editing features. No contrast, sepia or greyscale features even those are often considered basic. You can send a jpeg via email but for that, you will have to make sure you have a MAPI email client. The application also crashed when we were browsing for pictures.

As the developer states in his description, JPEG is really only useful to quickly edit JPEG images. However, with most photo organisers, like Picasa, already offering more simple editing tools, Better JPEG turns out to be something of a lame duck.

Download Better JPEG 1.7.1.0 in Softonic

Microsoft Photo Story lets you drag photos onto a window, arrange them as needed, then provide custom narration, transitions, zooms, pans, audio soundtracks and/or custom auto-generated music, then export the result as a WMV file.

Applying such features can prove tricky in some programs, but not in Microsoft Photo Story. The fact is, you don’t need to tweak a whole bunch of settings because the program does it for you, automatically generating transitions and zoom/pans without you having to set it up yourself. What's more, the ones generated by default look great.

While you can simply sit back and let Microsoft Photo Story do everything for you, there's still plenty you can play around with if you’re feeling adventurous. For instance, you can build your own custom soundtracks for your slideshow. You can pick from a bumper range of music genres, tempos, instruments and effects, giving you the chance to match the audio precisely to the mood of your show.

Output from Microsoft Photo Story is in Microsoft's WMV file format, which is more compressed than MPEGs or other movie type files. You can choose from various resolutions in order to optimize your slideshow. Unfortunately, however, the output movies from the software are not as sharp as they’d be in VCD or DVD format.

It's a shame that Microsoft Photo Story does'’t support burning DVDs and VCDs with the created slideshow, and you’ll need your own DVD authoring app to do this. There are applications, such as ProShow, that contain burning options and support for higher resolution output, but there's not much that can match Photo Story in terms of its ease of use and automated features.

So, if you want a quick way to create stand-out photo presentations, Microsoft Photo Story is well worth downloading.

Download Microsoft Photo Story 3 in Softonic