EarthView is a dynamic desktop wallpaper and screensaver, which displays beautiful views of the earth with daylight and night shadows. It produces colorful, high quality, high resolution images for every screen resolution - even beyond 1600x1200. The program supports map and globe views, urban areas, city lights, atmospheric effects, clouds, local time display and much more.

EarthView supports different maps that show our planet earth in different ways, like photographic or artistic. Many options allow total customization of all view parameters. EarthView has won many awards for its absolutely breathtaking images.

Main features:

• High detail view of the earth
• Day and night view
• Atmospheric effects
• Urban areas and city lights
• Clouds (internet download possible)
• Map and globe projection
• Several beautiful maps to choose from
• Location and local time of more than 3000 cities worldwide
• Wallpaper and screen saver support
• Multiple monitor support
• Many options for full customization

Download EarthView 3.9.1 in Softonic

One of the best Firefox extensions you'll find, FoxyTunes lets you control any media player from your browser.

FoxyTunes is really the ideal add-on if you listen to your music all the time and are tired of switching back and forth between your browser and your media player. The extension fits discreetly at the bottom of your browser window, and includes all the basic playback buttons. You can also have it appear as a floating window, called FoxyTunes Mini. Advanced users will also enjoy being able to control it via keyboard shortcuts.

What makes FoxyTunes such an exceptional add-on though is its customizability. Not only can you add all sorts of skins, but you can also associate with any of the most popular media player, including online services like Last.FM, Pandora or Rhapsody Online. And since Yahoo! has acquired FoxyTunes you'll also now get fresh content from Yahoo! News and Yahoo! Music related to the music you're playing.

Via FoxyTunes Planet, which opens up in a new browser window, you can get search for any track, album or artist and get all sorts of content such as video, articles or audio from your results.

Despite the volume slider not being very precise, FoxyTunes is the ultimate Firefox extension for music lovers. It works with any player and also displays additional content on the music you're playing.

Download FoxyTunes Extension 3.0.4.1 in Softonic

Master touch type is one of the most valuable things you can learn to do if you work in front of a PC all the time.

All The Right Type 3 Plus is a fun way for kids to do exactly that set in a space-age scenario and a futuristic campus that you might expect The Jetsons would study at. According to the developers, All The Right Type has been adopted in classrooms across the USA because it uses uses tried and tested classroom teaching methods to develop typing skills. All The Right Type instructs students on everything from realistic posture and finger positions to shortcuts to speeding-up your typing.

For teachers, All The Right Type is a very useful resource because it allows you to print certificates and awards for achievement and you get special effects when your student completes a task successfully. All The Right Type encourages students work at their own pace and also automatically grades and monitors students on their progress without the teacher having to be looking over their shoulder all the time. The graphics in All The Right Type are not exactly great but that's not really what this program should be judged on. What All The Right Type does do, for kids anyway, is entertain with meteorites, spaceships and planets while their typing skills should improve.

Kids (up to 8 years) will find this fun while teachers can sit back and let All The Right Type do the hard work while they can sit back.

Download All The Right Type 3 Plus in Softonic

Wazzal features the classic Asteroids perspective and gameplay– a zenithal point of view and rotational movements – but in a totally different game.

Wazzal is set in the year 2314, when the human race has expanded to some other planets in the Solar System and you work as part of the crew in a cargo spaceship. When war breaks out, it's your turn to take control of the ship and fight for survival as a space pirate.

Your overall aim in Wazzal is to gather a complete fleet of ships so that you can defeat more powerful enemies. You'll be assigned different missions, usually involving traveling from one planet to another, meeting other people and eventually engaging in space battles.

Despite this original plot, I found Wazzal to be a bit disappointing, especially the graphics, which are not as good as I expected. Also, gameplay in Wazzal is so different from other games it makes it really difficult to control the spaceship.

Wazzal is a new twist to Asteroids clones: a space pirates adventures that unfortunately may be a bit too difficult to play.

Download Wazzal 1.2 in Softonic

Let’s say you’re a bit of a catastrophic person, worried about potential Earth events like volcanoes and earthquakes, maybe near where you live. Earth Alerts is just the program you need to have the situation under control and make you feel safer. At this stage, it only provides data for American cities, but maybe in the future the rest of the world will be reassured about fires, severe weather conditions and, as we mentioned, seismic activity.

To start monitoring a city, just click the New Location option you find in the Settings menu. Normally, if you write the name of city the program should find it in its database and automatically fill in all the information, like Time Zone or Weather Zone, which otherwise could be tricky to insert manually. Add as many cities as you like to receive regular updates during the day.

On the left side of Earth Alerts’s window, you have the list of your chosen cities, with the corresponding volcano, fire and earthquake alerts and also severe weather indications. There is also a global overview with ongoing Earth activity, with a special Tsunami and Tropical section in addition to those mentioned above.

Earth Alerts provides regular updates on Earth geological and meteorological activities, both globally and for specified American cities. Information is presented in a clear way, although you shouldn’t expect to receive lots of it every day… hopefully.

Download Earth Alerts 2008 1.74 in Softonic

Global Weather 3D is probably one of the most visually appealing weather forecast tools you've ever seen.

Instead of displaying the usual geographic map with weather symbols, the program makes use of an attractive three-dimensional Earth globe to show the current position of clouds on our planet, plus marking their density with a color code. The globe is fully animated, meaning you can zoom in and out and also rotate and flip it with your mouse. The zoom tool though is not very powerful and doesn't allow you to go much into detail.

Global Weather 3D features a quite complete configuration menu which enables you to enable certain tools such as displaying geographical textures, showing day and night zones or adding countries' names and boundaries, among other options. On the downside, the program asked me to register when I tried to create customized waypoints, something I found especially disappointing after seeing the program labeled as freeware all the time.

With Global Weather 3D you can check weather conditions – or at least, cloud position – anywhere on Earth via an attractive interface.

Download Global Weather 3D 1.5 in Softonic

WorldWide Telescope could be regarded as Microsoft's direct competitor to Google Sky, but I wouldn't agree with that.

WWT does contain space imagery that enables you to observe starts, planets, constellations and other celestial elements without having to buy an expensive telescope, that's true. In that sense, it's similar to Google's space browsing tool. But in my opinion, this app is much more intended for professional astronomers – or at least serious astronomy fans – rather than for people who just want to take a sneak peek at our planet as if they were taking a ride on a NASA shuttle.

Don't get me wrong here: there's nothing wrong with being a serious astronomy app. I'm just warning you in case you expect something else. Other than that, WorldWide Telescope is a great tool that all astronomy fans are going to love. It includes loads of information and also lets you download guided tours from the program itself to learn more about a certain topic.

You can freely move around the sky with your mouse, but I found this a bit confusing and soon preferred to use the image galleries under the Explore menu. These galleries were a bit disappointing though, because you can perfectly see the boundaries of the image you're viewing and so it doesn't feel like a real telescope anymore.

Worldwide Telescope is not a space browser like Google Sky; rather than that, it's a comprehensive astronomy atlas with loads of data, photo galleries and freely downloadable guided tours.

Download WorldWide Telescope Beta in Softonic

Free Orion is an open-source, platform-independent galactic conquest game in the tradition of the Master of Orion games. Its commercial competitors, just to give you an idea, are VGA planets, Galactic Civilizations and Space Empires. Free Orion instead is a collaborative promising project, a community effort that moves forward based on the motivation and contributions of users and it is currently in the alpha stage.

Although graphics can be interesting, the game is somewhat difficult to enjoy for new players. There is little in the way of guidance and at the beginning, FreeOrion appears rather boring. In theory, victory is achieved by eliminating all ships and planets belonging to other empires, that's fairly standard, but at this stage there isn't any combat yet.

You must read the 'quick' play guide, (which isn't that quick) in order to understand a bit what to do. The guide starts in a very step by step way: 'to start a game, run the freeorion executable, then click on the 'Single Player' button on the main menu, then 'OK' on the Galaxy Setup screen. You should then see a starmap which you can drag around with the mouse and zoom in/out with the scrollwheel. The triangle next to the star is a fleet. Clicking the fleet opens the fleet window. Try moving fleets around to explore, making a new colony or clicking on techs in the Research screen to read their descriptions.’

If you are patient enough, and you are really passionate about strictly strategic games you might want to try this project and maybe collaborate in the related forum for further, more exciting releases. As specified in the game's Wiki, the easiest way to contribute when new to the project is simply to join in brainstorming discussions on the forums.

Strictly for strategic games lovers, an intriguing, promising game.

Download FreeOrion 0.3.9 in Softonic

As the moon influences the sea's tides, vegetable development, and even hair growth, stars may have an effect us when we're born. It would be nice to know in which way though, so Free Astrology Birth Chart is here to help... if you are experienced enough to understand the results!

In order to see the birth chart you need to know some fundamental information: the birthday, OK, that's easy; the birth time, that's going to be hard. I'm sure you didn't know how to tell the time at the time of your birth, but your mother will remember if you were born at 2 o'clock in the morning. Next, you need to add information about the longitude and latitude of your birthplace. Don’t worry if you don’t have a clue, there is a search tool linked to Google which should give you the right results, although you have to look for them, and inserting the right values in the forms can be difficult for a non-expert.

Eventually you can press the 'Get My Birth Chart' button and see your personal, coloured chart which includes all the specifications of the planetary positions on the day you were born! That would be cool enough, but I personally don't understand what 'Sun - 19 Leo 17' or 'Moon - 06 Cpr 28' mean. So, in case you're a kind of wizard or a Harry Potter super-fan and you think you can decrypt the information given, then give it a try and post a comment for us.

Print your personal Planetary Position and Birth Chart to impress your friends, even if you don't really know what any of this means!

Download MB Free Astrology Birth Chart 1.40 in Softonic

If you're a big fan of the Solar System and staring into Space through your telescope, then you'll absolutely love OpenUniverse.

Open Universe is an exciting project that brings the Solar System to you - in realtime. Most similar programs simulate or recreate the solar system from static models but this program attempts to show you exactly what is going on at any one time. The program existing in a former state as Solar System Simulator (Ssystem) launched in 1997 and has expanded and advanced so much, that it's now come to encompass the entire universe. The word "Open" has been added to to encourage open source users to improve and enhance the project. This is a million times better than the Space Exploration option on Google Earth with highly detailed images of Earth and the planets. For example, you view the Earth from the Sun, zoom in and out and even zoom in on stars. It labels everything too so no more looking up in the sky and wondering what that constellation is. The graphics are not exactly brilliant - it's a bit block and some of the stars look like blobs of white ink. However as a learning tool, it's a brilliant little resource.

For space exploration fans and those that are trying to teach other about the Universe, OpenUniverse is an exciting and powerful project.

Download OpenUniverse 1.0 in Softonic

This is one of those indie games you find especially attractive, either because it's fun to play, or because it has cute graphics, or because it reminds you of other games you like, or just for all these reasons at the same time.

Frozzd will immediately remind you of Super Mario Galaxy, always keeping in mind that we're comparing Nintendo to an independent game developer. Your objective in Frozzd consists on flying from one planet to another, rescuing a bunch of sweet creatures called mubblies from freezing to death.

You'll have to explore planets on each level, collect all the mubblies you can find and fight any enemies you face. But your best ally will be gravity, which will help you to move around space and jump safely from one planet to another. The game's twelve levels are not very hard to play and can be easily completed, something that makes of Frozzd a great pastime for work breaks.

A simple, nice game based on Super Mario Galaxy that you can play during your coffee break.

Download Frozzd in Softonic

If you're a real Twitter junkie you're going to love this screensaver: with TwittEarth you'll be able to follow twits from all over the world in real time.

The screensaver is actually based on a web mash-up created by a group of developers (who are also Twitter fans, of course) just for fun. The screensaver loads up the Twitter timeline and displays it on a colorful animated globe, with cute characters representing each Twitter user.

In spite of being a 3D screensaver, TwittEarth doesn't use up a lot of resources and works fine almost on any computer. The only flaw I found was that twitts written in special characters (i.e. Japanese, Chinese) don't show up properly.

With TwittEarth you can follow live twits from all over the world in a nice 3D planet Earth that moves on your desktop while you're away.

Download TwittEarth Screensaver in Softonic

I must admit strategy games are not exactly my cup of tea, but I do appreciate good strategy titles when I find any. And Sins of a Solar Empire is one of them.

This adventure will please strategy fans for sure, as it includes all the typical elements you can find in this game genre: resource management, merciless battles and smart planning to take your empire to the highest level. But don't be fooled by this apparently traditional scheme: being set in outer space, Sins of a Solar Empire is quite original for a strategy adventure.

This particular setting means that every element in the game is related to space. So, instead of using regular soldiers, horses, combat units or even tanks, you manage spaceships. And instead of conquering towns and villages, you take over planets. Graphics are just fine, certainly not as detailed as other strategy games that are set in historical environments though.

Sins of a Solar Empire features single player and multiplayer gaming modes (though the demo only lets you play the first one). Solo gaming presents you with a series of scenarios and various challenges, including typical strategy elements such as diplomacy alliances, research and development of new strategies and a rather unconventional black market where you can trade crystal and metal without following the legal procedures. As you can see, there are many elements to be taken care of, which means that the game may feel a bit overwhelming at the beginning. This confusion is particularly noticeable when moving around the playing area, because maps are quite large and you can easily get lost.

Even if you're not a big strategy fan, you'll appreciate Sins of a Solar Empire for its original gaming environment. If you like strategy, you should definitely give it a go.

Download Sins of a Solar Empire Demo in Softonic

Google Earth Pro is the professional version of Google Earth. It's downloaded upon registration on its website and adds some extra features to the free version. Do these additional functions make a difference? Let's dig a bit deeper.

Making use of a vast satellite imagery database –actually the same as the free version, Google Earth Pro displays locations from all over the world, enabling you to zoom in from the image of the whole planet to the streets of any capital city. As a Pro version user, you're supposed to enjoy a faster performance, but we couldn't really notice any difference.

Another interesting feature included in the Pro version is the ability to record videos with your movements around the world, which you can use to illustrate trips or even give directions. You can choose different resolutions, but record only in WMV format.

Technical support assistance, Premium print and a GID data importer are other additional capabilities of this Pro version. However, taking into account that both versions share the same image database, which in the end is Google Earth's biggest value, you may as well use the free version.

Download Google Earth Pro 4.3 in Softonic

Have you ever wondered what life is like on the other side of the world, just on a normal day like today? Stop wondering: now you can see it.

Satellite Live is an impressive mapping application with which you can view satellite imagery from any location on the planet, traveling from one place to another with just a mouse click and zooming in and out at your will. In a way it works very much like the popular Google Earth but with a slight difference: Satellite Live offers live, real-time images.

The program uses former military technology that has now been released to civilians. Software developers have quickly taken advantage of it, producing a striking piece of software like you'll never have seen before.

You're able to watch people actually walking down the street, parking their cars, buying groceries from the market stall or going for a walk in the park. Obviously the program only shows images from public and open areas so forget about peeking into somebody's bathroom to witness private stuff. Nevertheless, Satellite Live features an extraordinary zoom level with which you won't miss a single thing.

The program includes also a locating feature (which finds any place on Earth in a matter of seconds), an embedded screen capturing tool and navigational buttons to move around maps. However, there's no support for extra information layers yet.

Bear in mind that the level of detail may vary from one place to another, which means that populated areas such as New York, Los Angeles, London or Tokyo have more image quality than the Nevada desert or the Amazon jungle. In any case, Satellite Live is still an incredible application that opens a window to the world from your own computer.

Satellite Live lets you witness what's going on in any location on the planet, in real time. Though the level of detail may vary, it's still an impressive app with which to learn how life is in other parts of the world.

Download April Fools Satellite Live 1.0 in Softonic

SkyOrb could be defined as a domestic planetarium, a space simulator that enables you to travel around the Solar System without leaving the comfort of your computer.

The only downside to having a planetarium at home is that you're the one in charge of it. SkyOrb is not easy to configure, although you may as well leave every option as it is. In any case, some knowledge of astronomy is advisable, especially since the program doesn't include a help section.

The main space view window is quite intuitive: you can move around with the mouse and zoom in and out planets, satellites and other celestial elements, although it doesn't really show any more detail. Also, it feels awkward not to be able to zoom with the mouse wheel.

Download SkyORB 1.8 in Softonic

Earth3D enables you to have your own personal planetarium at home. Simply copy this tool to your hard drive – no installation required – and be ready to enjoy great views from our planet while sitting right in front of your computer.

The program grabs spatial imagery from NASA, USGS, CIA and other resources and displays them on a simply-designed interface. You can change between different views and locations by using the categorized list on the left side of the interface, while viewing images themselves on the right side. While the virtual trip can be quite fun, bear in mind that this is no Google Earth, so don't expect to be able to see your home from outer space.

Earth3D features some interesting extras such as the ability to capture images or even record a small video while you're moving around the Earth or zooming in and out – just with your mouse. However, there's one big problem that prevented us from giving Earth3D a better score, and that is its incredible slowness when loading pictures.

Earth3D includes a beautiful collection of images from our planet in 3D perspective, but unfortunately takes way too long to display them.

Download Earth3D 1.0.4 in Softonic

3D Earth Screensaver is more than just a standard screensaver with some nice space imagery.

This screensaver makes you feel like you're flying through space. It presents you with an animated image of our planet as it floats in outer space, including also the Sun, the Moon and even the ISS orbiting around. Images are really beautiful: you can see reflections from sun beams on the surface of Earth, and also the city lights that begin to appear as darkness covers the planet.

3D Earth Screensaver includes two viewing modes: the demo mode, which simply acts as a screensaver and displays images, and the interactive mode, which enables you to actually interact with the screensaver. You can move from one point to another, zoom in or zoom out and learn more about our planet thanks to the screensaver's layers that include time zones, flags, borders and other details. Just one thing: don't expect to reach street level. This is not Google Earth.

On the downside, I didn't like having icons and text boxes displayed on the image in demo mode. I would have preferred to just have the gorgeous image of our blueish home: Earth.

It may not be as accurate as Google Earth, but 3D Earth Screensaver delivers beautiful images of our planet while you're away from your computer.

Download 3D Earth Screensaver 1.0 in Softonic

If you're interested in Geography, you're going to like Sun Times.

Despite its confusing name, Sun Times works as a kind of world atlas of human geography, displaying all sorts of information about each country in the world. The first image you get is a world map with the current day/night light scheme, so that you can check the time of any location in the world. But that's not all: Sun Times also displays details such as sunrise and sunset times, latitude and longitude of the most important cities and even pictures of famous monuments and landmarks.

The program's extended options enable you to check on climate, astronomic data and airline routes, although sometimes the map is just too small for the amount of information to be displayed. In fact, sometimes Sun Times just overwhelms you with so much data.

On the downside, I missed the possibility to export all this information into an easier-to-read format. In spite of that, I found Sun Times very interesting, especially for educational purposes.

Despite its confusing interface, Sun Times is a great tool to learn more about many countries in the world and other geographical and astronomical data.

Download Sun Times 7.0 in Softonic

There can't be many people on this planet who have never watched a video or listened to a song on a computer. Chances are you've used one of the popular media players such as iTunes, Winamp or Windows Media Player, but have you ever stopped to think there might be some more interesting ways to play back movies or audio? If you're yearning for something a little bit different then you might find that XULPlayer fits the bill.

The application can play a wide range of different formats, whether it's audio, video, or even images. It's a little different to the rest of the bog-standard players out there and boasts a number of very interesting features. Besides all the normal playback functions, it includes several simple editing tools for changing the appearance, colour and rotating the image.

Another great concept incorporated into XULPlayer is the ability to have dual-video, allowing you to play two audio files or DVDs simultaneously and cross-fade them. It's a pretty slick interface and many of the useful features such as the subtitle options and video screenshotting are available with a single click of an icon. The app has a few little bugs that need ironing out but I'm sure in the upcoming updates these will be addressed.

Even now, XULPlayer provides a refreshingly unique alternative to those popular media players that have become household names.

Download XULPlayer 0.2.1.1 in Softonic