Archivarius 3000 is a full-featured application to search documents and email on the desktop computer, your local network and removable drives (CD, DVD). The documents can then be searched by keyword or using a query language.

Due to full Unicode support, Archivarius 3000 allows correct search in multilingual documents. For instance, a Greek-German bilingual document can only be handled in Unicode, otherwise Greek symbols and German diacritics would be lost.

File names are also in Unicode, which enable correct handling of Asian documents (Japanese, Chinese, Korean). Archivarius 3000 searches not only e-mail messages, but also attachments, including compressed ones. The following formats are supported: Outlook, Outlook Express, The Bat!, PocoMail, Netscape, Mozilla, Firefox, and those that are compatible.

Server mode allows you to search remotely and have remote access to your documents through any web browser (i.e. Internet Explorer). This mode can be switched on with a single mouse click.

Download Archivarius 3000 4.09 in Softonic

Sometimes having just one single desktop image is not enough. This is the right moment to use Desktop Takeover.

Desktop Takeover enables you to display several photos on your desktop, embedding them right onto your current wallpaper. Simply select the images from any folder on your PC and drag and drop them on the program's interface.

You can then arrange and resize them as you like, though I must say the resizing tool doesn't work very well. The final result obviously looks better when displayed over a neutral image, rather than a highly detailed wallpaper.

The images used in Desktop Takeover can be either static or turned into channels, which means they rotate according to a user-defined period of time. It's a nice way to show off your best shots, don't you think? Also, whenever you grow tired of your multiple-photo desktop background, you can go back to the regular wallpaper from the program itself. Strangely enough, the wallpaper appears then as tiled.

If you ever wanted to be able to use more than one wallpaper on your desktop, you should definitely give Desktop Takeover a try.

Download Desktop Takeover 1.0 in Softonic

StationRipper is an application designed to let you record Internet Radio broadcasts. Users on broadband connections regularly report 3,000-6,000 new songs can be downloaded every 24 hours with the registered version. It allows you to do the following:

• Record shoutcast audio, video streams, and podcasts
• Records up to 600 streams at one time
• Buy the music you are ripping
• Integrate with iTunes - auto-generate iTunes playlists of songs recorded
• Lets you easily find stations to record
• Keeps a list of the music and stations you've recorded
• Listen to any station being recorded with a single mouse click
• Ignore songs under a certain size
• Auto-record whatever was being recorded the last time you ran StationRipper

Download StationRipper 2.90 in Softonic

Have you ever seen those movie computers that could be controlled with single command
lines? Now you can make those fictional images come true with Ubiquity.

Ubiquity is an awesome Firefox add-on that opens a semi-transparent bar on top of your
screen every time you press its associated keyboard shortcut. From there you can run a
wide array of commands, from searching a selected text fragment in Wikipedia to checking
the weather on any city in the world.

The good thing about Ubiquity is that besides supporting quite a good amount of built-in
commands perfectly integrated with the browser, it also allows you to create new ones.
The command creation process though may be a little too difficult for non-techie users, as
it involves coding.

Ubiquity surprised us for its quick response, smart suggestions and nice interface. Taking
into account that this is only a prototype version, things can only get better.

Ubiquity lets you control a wide selection of commands and web tools with just a
single text of line.

Download Ubiquity 0.1.1 in Softonic

Are you a real Softonic fan? If so, this toolbar has been especially developed for you.

The Softonic Toolbar brings the latest reviews, updates, blog posts and software apps published on Softonic right to your web browser. You'll be able to read all the new content published on the site with a single click and you'll always be up to date with the latest program versions and software news.

What's more, this toolbar also features a series of online services, such as local weather forecast, an embedded search engine, an email notifier, a translation service powered by Babylon and a radio player with support for streaming radio stations, although you may need to download a separate plug-in to make it work properly. I found the email notifier particularly useful, as it supports multiple Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo and POP3 accounts.

The Softonic Toolbar also includes a configuration menu where you can customize it by choosing the elements you want to be displayed.

A web browser toolbar that brings you all the best from the web: a variety of online services and all the latest news on Softonic and insideTonic.

Download Softonic Toolbar in Softonic

Those of us who work with computers on a daily basis need to be as fast as possible with the keyboard, and programs like Klavaro Touch Typing Tutor can be really helpful.

Klavaro Touch Typing Tutor is a simple tool that teaches you the basics of typing and also lets you practice to improve your speed and accuracy. Lessons in Klavaro Touch Typing Tutor grow in difficulty as you make progress through the program, from single letters on the keyboard to complete texts.

The good thing about Klavaro Touch Typing Tutor is that it offers support for many different keyboard layouts and languages, which makes it suitable for a wider number of users, no matter what their mother tongue is.

On the downside, I missed some extra features found in other similar tools, such as the possibility to keep track of your results with statistics, or to customize the text with which you can practice.

Use Klavaro Touch Typing Tutor everyday and you'll be able to improve your typing speed and accuracy.

Download Klavaro Touch Typing Tutor 1.1.4 in Softonic

If you've got a lot of Windows open at once, it's a real pain to go through each one by one and minimize them.

That's why GameMinimizer offers an excellent solution via a simple application which sits in your tray ready for action at any moment. It works quite simply by minimizing every single window you've got open. Alternatively, you can use GameMinimizer to select a hotkey as the minmizer instead. Unfortunately, this is not customizable - you can only use the combination keys of WIN M or ALT TAB or just F12.

GameMinimizer is very useful in cases where you have several applications open and one of them crashes. Alternatively, it's useful as a "boss" key if you're using windows you shouldn't be in the office. However, the annoying thing is if you've got JavaApplet windows open, it doesn't seem to close them at the same time as other windows which is a bit frustrating or embarrassing depending on what you're doing.

GameMinimizer, despite the name, minimizes everything that's full screen including games, although it will leave certain things behind.

Download GameMinimizer 1.0 in Softonic

The world of dubbing and lip syncing has come a long way since the days when high-pitched voice actors would jabber away in not-so-perfect harmony to Japanese Kung Fu fighters in the martial arts movies of the 1970s. In fact, digital animation technology has improved so much that it’s now possible to animate your own talking heads from your home PC.

CrazyTalk Media Studio promises to give you all the tools you need to import images and photographs before quickly applying mouth, head and eye movement to create realistic looking avatars and fun animations. At first we were a little dubious about the value of such a product, but were soon pleasantly surprised by the power of the utility.

Granted, our initial efforts were limited to taking pictures of friends and giggling inanely as they repeated audio clips from famous movies or songs. These first experiments were a little clunky to say the least and looked far from realistic when we relied on the automatic lip-syncing functionality. However, once you delve deeper into the settings, you start to realize that you can actually produce some impressive animations.

With enough tinkering you can customize everything from the teeth in the character’s mouth to their facial movements and their range of movement. Best of all is the built-in timeline, which gives you complete control of the animation and sound, much as you would do in Flash, or a video-editing suite. Complete with alpha channel support, the program is ideal for producing talking presenters to welcome visitors to your web site or presentations. The simple-to-use export facilities allow you to save to a range of formats whether as a media file, email attachment or a personalized greeting.

There are a few flaws with the program that are a little frustrating, but they fail to prevent CrazyTalk Media Studio from being a great program. Minor niggles are the lack of MP3 audio import support, and the relatively low number of preset templates and characters. The app does have a fairly steep learning curve but it’s good fun to use and is surprisingly powerful.

Download CrazyTalk 5.0 in Softonic

PdfFactory products offer a unique approach to PDF creation that is simpler, more effective and less expensive than that offered by other programs.

Create PDF or print to paper - pdfFactory allows printing to paper or PDF without printing twice. Acrobat is not needed for printing.

It combines multiple documents into a single PDF and increases the convenience of document delivery by having a single PDF that contains material from different sources. Just keep printing documents to pdfFactory and they will automatically be concatenated.

A quicker and cheaper way to create PDF files!

Download PdfFactory 3.36 in Softonic

CUE Splitter is a freeware tool that can split a single big audio track, mostly an album or a compilation, into the relative individual audio tracks, using informations contained in the associated "CUE" file. Sometimes you can find a big compressed audio file (for example MP3, APE, FLAC, OGG, WAV, WMA, etc...) equipped with a small "CUE" text file that contain informations about tracks title, artist and length. Usually these couple of files are generated by programs like EAC, CDRWin, BPM Studio, GoldWave or similar.

With CUE Splitter you can obtain splitted audio track files without burning any CDR or decoding/re-encoding any audio data! Moreover audio files are automatically named using a user-defined "file mask" string, it's tags are filled with informations extracted from "CUE" file and, optionally, an M3U playlist file can be generated (option enabled by default).

Download CUE Splitter 1.2 in Softonic

Studiometry is a project management system that enables you to handle every single aspect of your work projects. Either if you work as freelancer or you're member of a professional team, you can take full advantage of all the tools features in Studiometry to make your work easier and also improve your relationship with customers.

The program takes care of every detail to such an extent that it looks very confusing at the beginning. In fact, I strongly recommend following the tutorial that you can access through the Help menu. Once you learn the basics of the program, you may start creating a new project, adding customers and customizing options. Also, there's a sample project for you to use to practice a bit before starting the real work.

In all, Studiometry is a very complete project manager that can really help you with your work. Just one small complaint: I hope they make the interface font size bigger in future versions. Maybe it's because I'm short-sighted, but I found them to be too small.

Download Studiometry 5.1.5 in Softonic

If you're a big fan of Wordpad but wish it was a little more advanced, then without doubt, TextPipe is for you.

With TextPipe you can specify all your text processing needs through one application rather than having to remember and manage several text editors, command line tools, custom scripts and Word and Excel macros. In a nutshell, TextPipe basically makes it fast and easy to convert, transform and re-form data in text files including HTML and XML documents. Probably the most outstanding feature of TextPipe is that it is very fast and can handle files of unlimited size. TextPipe is also remarkably efficient at handling multiple tasks simultaneously. The advantage of this is that you only need to learn how to use one tool rather than several to do multiple tasks. For those that have invested a lot of money or are planning to invest a lot of money in an editor, it's also a much cheaper solution. If the developers claims are right, it certainly packs an impressive punch when it comes to making corrections. They report that in a recent speed trial, TextPipe made the same number of changes to a document in seconds that took MS Word hours.

A very powerful all in one text editor, cleansing and conversion tool although it will only come into it's own if you're dealing with very large documents and tasks.

Download TextPipe Pro 8.1.8 in Softonic

Tabs can be created that show the contents of folders. These mini-explorer windows provide true explorer context menu access for folders and files as well as full drag/drop support. Enter richly formatted or plain text notes into note tabs. Each note tab is associated with a text file of your choice anywhere on disk. It offers basic word processing functions but more readily available than your average word processor.

You can browse the web using internet tabs. These tabs offer the rudimentary function you expect from a web browser but with the convenience of being readily available in a screen tab. These are great for sites that you frequent throughout the day like weather, traffic, news, etc. The tab manager is your control panel for Stick. Create, delete, edit tabs on the fly. Tabs are very customizable with the ability to have their font, colors, slide behavior, transparency and more changed quickly and easily. Save groups of settings as templates and apply them to other tabs with the press of a button.

The RSS News Feed Plugin is a simple RSS client that allows users to connect to one or more RSS feeds in a single tab. The plugin supports auto-refresh, auto-pruning and textual previews of items. It will also notify you via popup when new items are downloaded. Only supports RSS 0.91 and RSS 2.0.

Download Stick 2.8.0.82 in Softonic

ComicRack brings more entertainment to comic lovers by providing an excellent tool to read electronic comics in your PC. It supports several formats and allows displaying comics in several ways, such as two pages view or full screen.

The program also includes some useful tools, like a magnifier to pay attention to every single detail and a smart list system to organize your comic collection and share it locally, like the iTunes library. These lists can be displayed on either side of the interface or at the bottom, but they take too much space.

ComicRack works very well and enables you to enjoy comics in a very natural way. It's also easy to use, although you'll have to test every single function by yourself as there's no help available.

Download ComicRack 0.9.93 in Softonic

Some years ago ICQ was one of the most popular IM applications among Internet users. But when Microsoft launched MSN Messenger, many of these users forgot about their original IM client and joined a network that was growing very quickly. In the meantime, ICQ continued to be upgraded until finally reaching version 6, which sets a new milestone in the history of this classic piece of software.

To begin with, the installation process is fast and easy, the only downside being the fact that you must set ICQ Search as your web browser's default search engine, as there's no way of getting around this option.

This new ICQ boasts a fresh-looking interface which has been completely redesigned. Also, you can customize it with skins, although you'll have to download them because there's not a single skin included in the program. It does include, however, a very complete personal profile which you can fill in with all your information, including name, location, interests, spoken languages and a personal avatar that ICQ oddly refers to as "devil".

Generally speaking, ICQ 6 offers all the functions that we find in other IM applications, namely instant written messages, voice calls and video calls. All of these are complemented with a very nice set of animated smilies and the so called "Tzers" which are the equivalent to Messenger's "Winks". Chat sessions can be grouped together under the same window, which prevents your taskbar getting cluttered. ICQ allows you to start text conversations right from the contact list using the Quick message feature. There's also the option to send SMS messages to your contacts, but this is not available in all countries yet.

This new version promises to give you complete control over configuration settings. However, we must admit that we had some trouble in finding them, until we happened to click on the "Main" button on the interface. The configuration options are quite complete indeed, allowing you to change every single detail regarding sounds, notifications, privacy and security, message history, appearance and the program's general behaviour.

In all, ICQ seems to have developed a new version with a fresh redesign only to measure up to its main competitors but without really offering any new functions. Again, choosing ICQ (or any other IM app) ends up being just a question of which IM your friends use.

Download ICQ 6.0.0.6063 in Softonic

Many Windows users stay with the standard applications included in the operating system for their most common tasks, like managing files with the integrated File Explorer. However, there are alternative file managers that can also help you to do the job – and sometimes even better than Windows Explorer! Total Commander is one of them.

First of all, be warned that Total Commander is intended for medium to advanced users, and especially for those who like working mainly via keyboard shortcuts. It's not that Total Commander can't be used with your mouse; it's just that it's optimized to be keyboard-controlled.

Total Commander doesn't have what we could describe as an eye-catching design. In fact, it looks pretty dull. It does, however, support three possible views (Full, Brief and Tree) and also uses a double-pane interface, which seem to be quite a common characteristic among other alternative file managers.

This double pane allows you to perform file management tasks like moving and copying in a much more comfortable way. But Total Commander has other aces up its sleeve. It includes extra integrated applications like an FTP client, a ZIP viewer, a renaming tool, a disk space analyzer and a file synchronizer. Another great tool I found to be especially interesting is one that allows you to control, manage and edit file associations so they're not suddenly messed up by a program that you just installed.

Like we said before, Total Commander is intended to be used mainly with your keyboard. This is why it offers handy shortcuts for common tasks like viewing, editing, copying, moving or deleting files. But if you find it hard to abandon your mouse, don't worry: you can use the icons on the program's toolbar as shortcuts for Notepad, Wordpad and the Control Panel, and also add your own shortcuts to your favorite applications via the Configuration > Button bar menu. In fact, Total Commander has such an exhaustive configuration menu that you'll be able to tweak every single detail of the program.

In all, Total Commander is an excellent application that could almost be described as a professional file manager for the advanced user. If you prefer more simple apps then you’d better stick to Windows Explorer.

Download Total Commander 7.04a in Softonic

The Start menu is supposed to give you quick access to programs and files, but it often ends up being a real mess. This is the time when you need some alternative like Executor.

Despite its scary name, Executor is a nice, useful application that enables you to open files and launch your favorite applications and websites just by typing the keywords you have previously assigned to them. What's more, as the program auto-completes each entry, the first few letters are usually enough. The program also includes some built-in keywords for the most common tasks, such as performing a Google search or opening the Control Panel.

Executor features an extensive configuration menu that enables you to customize every single detail. It also has support for skins, but the included skins are generally very dark and hard to read. Luckily enough, you can create your own personal color combination and save it as skin.

Download Executor 0.98b in Softonic

BestSync Folder Synchronizer allows you to synchronize, mirror, backup, encrypt and/or compress data between folders, removable media, network drives or FTP servers, along with a wide range of possible options and functionalities.

You'll be able to synchronize files between two folders in single direction or bi-direction, synchronize with FTP servers (useful for updating web pages) and encrypt and compress data, which will come in very handy when copying private information to a USB device.

Tasks can be scheduled in different ways, triggered by means of several events (inserting your USB device, mounting a network drive) or even run as Windows services.

BestSync Folder Synchronizer also integrates seamlessly with Windows Explorer by adding a new command to context menus, from which you can easily encrypt, compress, decrypt and decompress files.

Download BestSync Folder Synchronizer 2008 3.6.18 in Softonic

Would you like to create your own presentations in Flash but you don't even know where to start? Then FlyPaper is for you.

FlyPaper is an intuitive application that lets you create Flash presentations without having to code a single line. Simply select your favorite photos or videos, add some transition effects and save the result as an FLV, MPG or MP4 video.

That said, the truth is that I expected FlyPaper to be easier to use. The interface is not as straightforward as I thought but luckily the program at least features a complete tutorial you can watch the first time you run it. Also, FlyPaper includes a wide array of material (templates, themes, ready-made stories…) to get you started, although the files are actually stored on the program's website and you have to download them in order to use them.

In spite of all, FlyPaper is a very decent tool to create multimedia presentations which comes in specially handy for those of us who don't have the slightest idea about Flash.

FlyPaper lets you create beautiful customized Flash presentations with photos, videos and animations even if you don't know anything about Flash.

Download Flypaper 1.0.1.2 in Softonic

PDF is a great format to share documents regardless of the operating system you use. But if what you really need is doing some work on your PDF files, then PDF Split and Merge may be useful for you.

As its name clearly states, PDF Split and Merge lets you split and merge any PDF documents in a very easy way and in just a few steps. The program has one main drawback though and that is its unfriendly interface, which takes a while to get used to. After that, PDF Split and Merge is really a helpful tool.

You'll be able to split PDF documents – with several configuration options to choose from – as well as joining several of them together in one single file. PDF Split and Merge works quickly and efficiently, getting the job done in almost no time.

Despite a counterintuitive interface, PDF Split and Merge is a great tool to split and merge PDF files in just a few seconds.

Download PDF Split and Merge 1.0.0 in Softonic