iTunes is the best music player out there, but don't you wish you could control it without interrupting your task at hand? Now you can. Control iTunes. Whether it's to pause the player, adjust the volume, skip a track or rate a song, you can do all that and more with simple customizable keystrokes.

Why bring up iTunes just to see what track is playing? SizzlingKeys features a floating window that shows you the current song name, artist and more. Place it anywhere you wish on the screen by simply dragging it. Having all the features you can imagine is useless if the app is difficult and confusing to use. That's why we make ease-of-use our top priority. Customizing SizzlingKeys cannot be easier.

What SizzlingKeys lets you do:

• Control iTunes player
• Rate songs
• Select a playlist (searchable!)
• Search for songs
• Shows you the current song

Download SizzlingKeys 3.2.6 in Softonic

I'm a sucker for any game that features 3D graphics (it goes back to the days of Stunt Car Racer on the Amiga) and especially those that are free.

Marble Arena ticks both boxes and while it's not exactly the most spectacular or exciting game around (certainly not a patch on Stunt Car Racer) Marble Arena is a lot of fun. Basically, Marble Arena requires you to roll your marble around a 3D obstacle course going up and down slippery slopes, mastering air vents, jump-zones and even vortexes.

The more obstacles you successfully navigate in Marble Arena, the further you get and the more points you score. You can face a variety of surfaces such as sand, water, glass, ice and tarmac and if you get through them all, you're rewarded with upgrade points which you can use to improve your marble or change your skin.

It can be a bit boring on your own after a while although you do quite attached to the ball's plight. However, I imagine the real fun starts when you add more balls and more players who can roll against each other at the same time.

Marble Arena will either make you roll over and go to sleep after a few levels or lose your marbles trying to navigate it's many challenges.

Download Marble Arena 1.4 in Softonic

Headline is a small desktop RSS reader with a chat client-like interface and loads of smart features.

The application comes with a large choice of feeds, but you can easily add your own and remove the ones you don't want. Instead of previewing items in the interface, a preview window pops up, in a Quick Look fashion. Headline includes its very own video player, so you watch videos and listen to audio items in the preview window.

The search box at the top is particularly responsive and useful if you don't want to scroll down your list of items. You'll also find a button at the bottom left which lets you switch between feeds and entries. You can mark items you like as favorites and share them via email or iChat.

The compact size comes at a cost, which is no browser view. However it's worth sacrificing it for an interface that stands out from other typical desktop RSS readers.

Headline is a compact desktop RSS reader with a good video player and sharing features.

Download Headline 1.0 in Softonic

With Last.fm, music fans have found a place to congregate and share musical tastes. The Last.fm player places the “social music revolution” onto your desktop, giving you access to thousands of tracks from all musical genres.

The beauty of the application is that it encourages you to find similar artists to the ones you’re accustomed to and also pushes you to interact with users who share the same tastes. Search results appear as a tag cloud, with the biggest elements being the most popular. With thousands of songs available on Last.fm, it’s pretty unlikely that you’ll listen to the same thing twice. The player is streaming and you’ll have to be connected to the internet and have a Last.fm account for it to work.

Although slightly bulky, the Last.fm player interface is sleek and accessible. We like the shiny control icons and the “now playing” window. This is where you’ll find all artist information like album cover, a small description of the artist, related tags and artists and top listeners. The menu bar on the left includes your recently played tracks, recently loved and recently banned, although to listen to these you’ll need to upgrade your Last.fm account (€2.50/month). The last 10 stations you’ve listened to are automatically saved in your history file.

The social experience is central to Last.fm and becomes pretty addictive. By listening to tracks you create a profile of yourself, the music you listen to and the artists you like. Last.fm then connects you to other users that have similar tastes, whom it calls neighbours. In the Last.fm player, you can connect to neighbours' stations and listen to their tunes. The lists of the friends you made on Last.fm will also appear in your player. If you have the Audioscrobbler plug-in installed, Last.fm can also track all the songs you play in your favourite desktop music app (like iTunes) and connect you with even more neighbours.

Most of us here at Softonic have Last.fm connected all day, simply because it doesn’t require you to have your own music library, it’s free and provides an endless flow of new tunes. In line with modern evolutions in online music, this web music application mixes streaming and social tools to give you an exciting music player. No music fan with access to Internet should be caught dead without it.

Download Last.fm player 1.5.3.45507 in Softonic

Reelbean offers you a converter, an exporter and a media player all in one friendly interface.

Converting movies is a very common thing to do nowadays, especially with all the different devices you can play a video on. The video iPod in particular has been extremely successful, given how easy it makes it store and watch videos anywhere.

If you are the lucky owner of such a device then you surely have had to convert videos to play them properly on it. It can be a little difficult to find the right application to do the job though. We like Reelbean, because it lets you convert and export in many format, including the iPod friendly MPEG4 and 3GPP for other mobile devices. The process is easy and fairly quick.

Reelbean doesn't limit itself to converting though, and since it handles so many formats, you can also preview and play them from it. Video quality is good and you can use the slider at the bottom to move forward and backwards in the movie. Reelbean also plays any streaming media.

The limitations in the trial version are the only things that we found disappointing. You won't be able to convert, extract or export videos, so you're pretty much left with the playback functions of the software.

Despite the limitations in the trial version, Reelbean is an excellent application to convert, export and play all sorts of video formats.

Download ReelBean 3.8.2 in Softonic

Limewire, one of the world’s most popular peer-to-peer filesharing applications, has received a lawsuit from the RIAA, who are demanding $115 million in damages, claiming the application promotes the infringement of copyright. Similar applications like Grokster and Kazaa have been forced to go legal and speculation goes as to when Limewire will have to buckle and pay up. The existence of the popular P2P application is not under threat, but if you haven’t given it a try yet, here’s just what makes it a standout program.

In terms of file sharing, Limewire is the cream of the crop, offering the essential peer-to- peer tools in what is probably the friendliest interface of applications in its class. Beginners will appreciate the search bar, which allows you to select the type of file you’re looking for, video, image, audio, or program. Limewire has a “what’s new” button to check out what popular files users have recently exchanged. We also enjoyed the direct connect option. If you know the IP address of one of your friends, type it in the box and Limewire will browse that user’s files. This is a quick way of sharing files with someone else and can come in handy when working on a project and exchanging documents. The only little snag we have with direct connect is that it doesn’t let you enter the username, much simpler than looking for your friend’s IP address.

Downloading with Limewire is very intuitive. After you’ve searched and found the file you are looking for, double-click on it to start the downloading process. The speed of your download depends firstly on the quality of your connection (broadband is a minimum), if you’ve correctly opened your router’s ports and whether you’re downloading a popular file or not. We would like to point out the effort that Limewire takes to make itself accessible to beginners. Not only does a tip pop up every time you launch the application, the help option also leads you to Limewire’s support centre, FAQs and a forum to get in contact with other users.

The lawsuit carried out by the RIAA is all the more surprising because of the measures Limewire takes to keep you in the realms of legality. If you decide to download Limewire from its website, you will first have to agree you will not use it for copyright infringement. When you’re configuring the application, you can set content filters, to avoid downloading files that copyright owners do not want you to share. To avoid embarrassing situations, make sure you tick the “block adult content” box, which will filter out any pornographic files from your searches.

The best way of checking the quality of the audio or video you’re downloading is via Limewire’s mini player. It’s fairly basic and to par with the players you find in similar filesharing applications, but we appreciated the way it was integrated in the program.

If there’s one thing that we’re still expecting from the Limewire team, it’s that it finally decides to jump on the BitTorrent bandwagon. Torrents are the way forward when it comes to peer to peer file sharing because of the speed, the security and freshness of downloads. Large files like movies or complete seasons of TV series are much easier to download via BitTorrent. We were also annoyed by the “buy the PRO version” window that popped up every time we started Limewire.

For its wealth of possibilities and huge base of users, (more than 4 million simultaneously on the Gnutella network) we encourage you to give Limewire a test drive. Because of the controversial nature of the application, you should always make sure that you aren’t using Limewire for illegal activities like copyright infringement. However don’t be scared off by the legality issue. Limewire, like most P2P applications is one of the most exciting possibilities that the internet gives us. It would be a shame not to give it a try. You should also check out Frostwire, the not-for-profit project of the Limewire development team.

Download LimeWire 4.18.6 in Softonic

Breakaway offers a little feature that you won't find in iTunes: it will automatically pause the media player when the jack of your haedphone is plugged out. This will prevent you from embarassing situations, especially if your music is on really loud.

Breakaway only takes a few seconds to set up. Make sure you check 'headphones mode' to make it work and 'resume play on reinsert' to automatically restart your music once you plug your headphones back in. You can also set a mute key and have it force open iTunes.

Breakaway is what we like to call a niche application. It those one specific thing, but does it well. If you find yourself listening to your music with your headphones most of the time and don't want to find yourself in the unpleasant situation of having it blaring out of your Mac when you remove your headphones then this is for you.

Breakaway is a niche program to pause your iTunes music when your headphones are removed.

Download Breakaway 1.75b in Softonic

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Download Opera 9.52 in Softonic

Have you ever wanted to keep a video you find on the web and play it on your iPod?

If so, you'll enjoy Cosmopod. This effective little plugin lets you download and convert web videos in seconds. The addon supports all sorts of web formats, including FLV and Divx and can convert them into high quality iPod-ready videos thanks to H.264 and MPEG4 encoding. You can even drag and drop videos from your Mac and convert them with Cosmopod.

The plugin features an embedded player, so you can preview your encoded video and make sure it's what you want and that the quality is OK. Although it's a shame that Cosmopod only works with Safari, the plugin integrates perfectly with the Apple browser, thanks to a cleverly designed interface. You can also activate Growl support to get notified when conversions are finished.

Cosmopod is a little Safari plugin that will allow you to download any encode any web video to an iPod ready format.

Download CosmoPod 2.7 in Softonic

MacDust is a small and lightweight application designed to clean up your computer. MacDust performs many tasks that could easily take you another five seconds if you weren't using MacDust. The application also removes hard to get at files, and even files you forget about. The Caches folder can get rather large, so using MacDust at least once a week can save you hundreds of megabytes!

Firefox

• Eat (Erase) Cookies
• Erase History
• Erase Download History
• Complete Reset

Safari

• Eat (Erase) Cookies
• Erase History
• Erase Download History
• Complete Reset
• Empty Icon Cache

Camino

• Eat (Erase) Cookies
• Erase History
• Erase Download History
• Complete Reset
• Empty Icon Cache

Chats

• Erase Adium Logs
• Erase Colloquy Logs
• Erase iChat Logs
• Erase Yahoo Logs

Finder

• Empty Caches
• Empty Logs

Torrent

• Remove Azureus Active Torrents
• Remove Azureus Inactive Torrents
• Remove Azureus Logs
• Remove Azureus Temporary Files
• Remove Transmission Torrents

Third Party

• Aquisition Incompletes Cleaning
• ARD Cleaning
• Internet Explorer Cleaning
• XSlimmer History Removal
• YummyFTP Recent Connections Clearing
• DVD Player Cleaning
• Stuffit Deluxe Cleaning
• Warcraft Cleaning

Download MacDust 2.74 in Softonic

The Mac is not the most competitive market for DJ-ing software (compared to Windows) but if it were, DJ-1800 would be one of it's best picks.

DJ-1800 is a complete, self-contained professional DJ system for the Mac which simply requires a decent AMP to get the most out of it. There's absolutely no need for a mixer, CD player or record deck and it can run from a digital music collection so there's no need to lug around heavy boxes if you're a professional DJ.

DJ-1800 can use a variety of MP3 and musical input sources so you'll never find yourself short of music options. If you've run out of space on your Mac for example, DJ-1800 provides support for music stored on an iPhone or iPod Touch. For professionals, DJ-1800 now supports all the major controllers including including the Denon DN-HC4500, M-Audio X-Session Pro, Numark DMC2, Numark iCDX and Numark Total Control

For beginners DJ-1800 is a minefield - it''s incredibly complex to use but professionals will find DJ-1800 one of the most slick DJ'ing apps they've seen on the Mac in a while.

Download DJ-1800 X 2.1.1 in Softonic

WordOMatic is puzzle style word search game. Rearrange the letters by sliding rows to form words across or down. The words created are removed and replaced with fresh letters. As letters grow old, they change color; The object of the game is to use all available letters before they become void.

WordOMatic is an original game belonging to the Word Search genre which includes games like Scrabble®, Boggle® and Jumble as well as modern PC games like Bookworm and Text Twist.

This is one of the easiest games to learn and play. The game knows over forty thousand words from three to six letters. Players are encouraged to use words that contain a wide variety of letters. Bonus points are given for using longer words, and for avoiding repeated words. WordOMatic knows more than eight hundred words containing 'X'; How many do you know? Maybe it is time to learn some more!

Download WordOMatic 1.3.4 in Softonic

Mac users are often said to be the most loyal customers in the computer market, but that's because they have very good reasons, such as iTunes, to stick to Apple products. And if I were in your shoes, I wouldn't miss the opportunity to have this application on my Windows PC.

iTunes has become one of the most popular music managers available today. When you run it for the first time, you can choose your music folders or let the program take care of everything. Then you can keep on adding new music, videos, podcasts and other multimedia elements from various sources and – of course - synchronize all this content with your iPod or iPhone thanks to a perfectly seamless integration.

Managing your iTunes library is a piece of cake. The program's interface is simple and straightforward, plus there are right-click shortcuts and keyboard hotkeys for many tasks. You can view extended information about each track and edit their tags, give them a score with the iTunes star ranking tool and comfortably browse through your collection with the amazing Cover Flow system. And for those of you who work in a LAN environment, the great news is that you can share your music libraries with your network mates.

One thing I particularly like of iTunes as music manager is its ability to create playlists. The Smart Playlist tool enables you to create almost any kind of playlist based on just about any criteria you set: artist, genre, date added, star ranking or even the number of times you've played each song. Another great playlist is the so called Party Shuffle, which comes in very handy when you invite some friends over to your place. You can then leave iTunes working as a DJ and play music on its own, but if you drop by the PC at any time, you can freely add more songs to the list or rearrange them in any way.

However, if there's something where iTunes is not perfect yet, that's the player function. You may disagree here, but I think the iTunes player falls too short, especially when compared to its music manager side. It does have some interesting features, like the Smart shuffle function and crossfading playback, but I still find it too simple. The visual effects in the Viewer window are particularly poor. I also missed the ability to control the player from anywhere with global hotkeys, which is great if you listen to music while you're working on the PC with other apps. Fortunately there are some plug-ins that cover this need.

In all, despite these slight flaws, iTunes is probably the best choice to manage your music collection –and that includes Windows users.

Download iTunes 7.7.1 in Softonic

Arkanoid is still as fun now as it ever was. Whether on a big old arcade box or on your Mac, the game always manages to keep its fun and excitement.

Arkanoid: Space Ball puts you in control of a little spaceship, with your goal being to destroy as many colored tiles as you can by hitting a ball back and forth. Arkanoid: Space Ball comes with plenty of bonuses and varying difficulty levels.

The quality of the graphics and sound isn't amazing, and I have to admit I expected something a little better, at least to separate Arkanoid: Space Ball from other games of the same genre.

Arkanoid: Space Ball comes with a level generator and editor, good for coming up with your own challenges, but most players will probably not matter with it.

Arkanoid: Space Ball is a good adaptation of the classic arcade game on Mac.

Download Arkanoid: Space Ball 1.1.9 in Softonic

CoverSutra is a gorgeous little app to enjoy cover art from albums and play your iTunes library from your desktop.

I admit that I love using CoverFlow to browse and playback my music in iTunes, but this little app might just change my musical habits. First of all, it serves as a player for your iTunes library, with your list appearing in a sleek dark interface and playback buttons present in a floating dark window.

Secondly, CoverSutra knows how to put cover art forward like no other app. Every time you play a track from a new album, the cover will discreetly appear on your desktop, with its rating. You can also choose from three different CD case styles to display albums in.

Cover Sutra includes a full range of keyboard shortcuts by which you play back your songs and is fully set up to work with your Apple Remote. Users will also like having Growl support and Last.fm integration, so you can still scrobble what you're playing. Additionally, the latest version includes Spotlight search, which is much more powerful and faster than the search feature you originally have in iTunes.

Thanks to a gorgeous interface and intuitive tools like keyboard shorcuts, Growl and Last.fm support, Apple Remote and Spotlight search integration, CoverSutra is an excellent way to enjoy your music. Definitely recommended.

Download CoverSutra 2.1.4 in Softonic

AOL Radio is a streaming radio client that allows you to listen to over 200 stations in 25 genres and more than 150 CBS stations.

With an interface built specifically for Leopard, AOL Radio aims to be an attractive radio player for Mac users. You can browse the different genres from the list at the bottom part of AOL Radio. Double click on one and you'll see the radios available.

AOL Radio supposedly offers up to ten presets, although you only see five on the interface. Adding preset stations is as easy as clicking the number while your favorite radio is playing. Right click on the preset to verify what radio you have added.

With more than 350 stations available, you really have a wide choice of sound to listen to, from soul to hard rock, techno or talk shows. Still, AOL Radio is limited to American radios and only plays some from the CBS network.

Even though it only streams CBS stations, AOL Radio lets you listen to over 350 stations in the US.

Download AOL Radio 2.0 Beta 1 in Softonic

Flip4Mac™ WMV is a collection of QuickTime components that allow you to play, import, and export Windows Media video and audio files on your Mac using your favorite QuickTime-based applications. The Windows Media® Components for QuickTime have been highly optimized for G4 and G5 Macintosh computers and support playback of Windows Media HD.

This single trial download includes all of the Flip4mac WMV features including:

• Playback (Player)
• Import (Player Pro)
• Export with built-in encoding profiles (Studio)
• Export with custom 1-pass, SD profiles (Studio Pro)
• Export with custom 2-pass, HD profiles (Studio Pro HD)

Download Flip4Mac WMV 2.2.0.49R in Softonic

When Softonic programmers are tired of working and need a break, they usually play a quick game at the table-football the company has installed in the coffee room. But now that I've found this game, they won't have to leave their desks to play their favorite pastime!

Master Kick is a fun arcade football game that's already been available for a while on different portable devices (Palm, Pocket PC). It's not exactly like other football sims you may have seen before: actually, it's a table-football (or foosball) game, meaning you play with football players attached to bar that you can move up and down to play the ball around the game field.

I don't know if it was because I'm hopeless at table-football, or because the game's AI is too high, but I found scoring goals quite difficult even in the easiest playing mode. On the upside, the game in itself is quite elaborate, with a varied selection of fields and even some crowd cheering sound effects in the background. You can play either a quick match or a complete league, and also try different team layouts. The only thing I missed was the possibility to play against another human opponent.

Master Kick is a fun table-football game, more like an arcade than a simulator. Pity it doesn't have a multiplayer option!

Download Master Kick 1.4.1 in Softonic

It seems that everyone is slowly starting to realise that the future of video broadcasting lies online rather than inside a television.

Following the success of Joost, Babelgum and VeohTV, Adobe decided to get in on the act with the release of the Adobe Media Player. The philosophy of the software giant is that if you use a browser to navigate web pages, why shouldn't you use one to view multimedia too?

The result is basically a version of Joost as seen through the eyes of Adobe. Now out of beta release, the app provides an interesting and immersive way of watching videos online. Navigation is very smooth and feels natural and there are a number of features and services that make it easier to eyeball TV more effectively. For instance, you can create a list of favorites, and keywords add ratings to Flash video, build playlists and use the Dashboard-style interface to check out the latest episodes of your top shows. You can also now subscribe to RSS feeds that tell you when new episodes are online.

Content is king though, of course, and version 1.1 of Adobe Media Player adds a lot more episodes and channels from a broad range of genres. At the time of writing, Adobe estimates that there are around 25,000 episodes available through its media player. Adobe has even partnered with Sony Pictures to offer some movies through the service, such as Jerry Maguire and Men in Black. I was also impressed by the speed and quality of the videos.

One of my main qualms with Adobe Media Player though, is that many of the episodes are not available outside the USA. Fine if you live there, of course, but for those of us in other lands it's so frustrating to see a show you want to watch only to discover it's not available (of course, you don't find this out until after an advert has played in the player).

Glossing over the unavailability of some programs and channels, Adobe Media Player is making all the right strides to becoming the best place to watch TV online.

Download Adobe Media Player 1.0 Beta in Softonic

Make no mistake: the media industry has changed significantly in the last couple of years. Big corporations are now starting to consider the possibility that their traditional business models could well be about to crumble around them. Newspapers are facing the blogging threat, podcasting is the cool alternative to radio, and now the big TV stations must be starting to sweat a little following the dawn of free online video services such as YouTube, Joost and the one we're about to review: Miro.

After a few months in beta stage, Miro has reached version 1.0, which is considered as a new milestone in the production and development of video and TV content for the Web. Miro is defined by its developers as "the open-source Internet TV platform". In fact, it's been built by a non-profit organization called the Participatory Culture Foundation, which aims to bring together a community of broadcasters to create, what it calls, an 'Internet video ecosystem'. But besides all these elaborate definitions, Miro is simply a great application to watch online videos.

You could now be wondering what's the point of using Miro if you can get those same videos from other places? Well, Miro makes the process faster and much easier. The program uses open protocols to let you subscribe to video channels and video blogs that are fed in via RSS, and uses BitTorrent to download the files. You can also watch videos from Youtube and Dailymotion, or use it to subscribe to a Youtube channel you like, for example. The program supports video playlists and can resume playback just where you stopped.

The inclusion of the 'Channel Guide' is a welcome one, as it helps you get started with the program and also lets you search and browse the various channels effortlessly. Not only can you browse through the existing channel list, but you can easily add new channels simply by clicking a button to subscribe. There are more than two thousand channels available, and all of them are free. Beware, however, that the video quality may vary from one channel or video source to another.

Another great benefit of Miro is that it can handle a wide variety of video formats and, as a good open-source project, it ignores DRM and patents. These and other interesting features are used to compare Miro to Joost, but I think there's no reason for this comparison: they're just different applications with different purposes. In any case, Miro's first public release is an excellent example of how video content from different sources can be integrated into one single application and served directly to your PC in a fast, easy and elegant way.

Download Miro 1.2.4 in Softonic