If there is something we have learned here at Softonic, it's that a good PDF creator is hard to find. They are either ugly, slow, lack functions or, more often, all three. Will PDF-XChange Viewer be any different?

It is! Viewing PDFs with PDF-XChange Viewer is fast and smooth - you can skip through and back pages, view documents in a variety of layouts, and search and find pages and keywords seamlessly. PDF-XChange Viewer's toolbars are totally customizable, and there is a considerable range of configuration options.

PDF-XChange Viewer's editing options are also impressive. Although the free version doesn't allow you to create documents from scratch, it does let you edit extensively, with a few exceptions, mainly the ability to add or remove pages. Commenting, underlining, stamping, attaching files and creating text boxes are all easily done, and can be modified and removed in the click of a button.

There are also tooltips, so you know what you are doing before you click. This feature is very welcome, as the PDF-XChange Viewer help is not very good. Additional cool features include a snapshot tool, document preview when opening PDFs and a huge range of interface language options.

PDF-XChange Viewer is a great PDF editor that is streets ahead of its many rivals.

Download PDF-XChange Viewer 2.5.211 in Softonic

Photo editing

Massive photo editing tools like Photoshop are great, but some find them too heavy and complicated for everyday usage. PicPick is definitely a better choice if what you need is just a simple image editor. With PicPick you can easily perform simple photo editing tasks, including brightness, contrast and color adjustment, grayscale, blur, pixelate and other special effects.

Screen capture

But PicPick isn't just an image editor: it's also a full-featured screen capturing tool with which you can capture the image on your monitor in several ways: full screen, active window, user-defined area and more. Plus, PicPick can work with several documents simultaneously and captures can be triggered with customizable keyboard shortcuts, which makes it even handier.

Other tools

PicPick has a selection of othet tools that you're not going to need every day, but when you do find yourself with a need to, say, pick a specific color on your screen, magnify something, or use a virtual whiteboard to "draw" on your screen. There are 7 of these tools, and although quite niche, they're a nice touch.

PicPick is a lightweight yet full-featured image editor and capturer, perfect for simple daily image editing tasks.

Download PicPick 3.2.4 in Softonic

Interactive visual spidering with simulated G-time Multi-site parallel spidering Screenshots management: store page miniautures, and evidence where the folds lay Visually edit your robots.txt and XML Sitemap files Access and extensive set of visual reports: HTML suggestions, URL suggestions, SEO suggestions, site-wide analysis and tests. Export to native Excel data format

Visual SEO Studio differs from other desktop spiders in its visual approach to SEO: other than the traditional table view, crawl and index trees are shown; screenshots are stored with crawl data; SERP snipped evidence the way links would appear; unique reports can list which page titles and descriptions would appear truncated on the SERP; XML Sitemaps can be visually edited to export only a subset of the crawled data; robots.txt can be administered with a full fledged IDE.. and much more!

SEO agencies, SEO consultants and professionals, in-house SEOs, webmasters caring for SEO, web developers needing to approach SEO, CRO professionals needing to check folds, designers looking for a great tool to shoot and organize web page miniatures

Download Visual SEO Studio 0.8.6.13096 in Softonic

The ever-improving processing power of the latest PCs means that science is increasingly looking towards them for help in research.

Geneious combines a series of major DNA and protein sequence-analysis tools into one powerful software solution. It's obviously aimed at serious biologists or research scientists but it's been designed with ease of use so that those scientists who aren't computer-savvy can use it. Although it's not cheap to upgrade to the full version, it's a snip compared to the cost of what this kind of analytical software would usually cost in the science world.

For those familiar with biological processing concepts, Geneious features sequence alignment, Contig assembly, primers, cloning, BLAST, phylogenetics, automatic publication updates and more:. This basically means it provides sophisticated genome and protein research tools that aim to speed up the analysis process. The latest version features several major improvements including a new search interface and 3D modeling tool.

Geneious is an excellent tool for biologists and scientists that are involved in research but don't feel comfortable with professional research software.

Download Geneious 5.5.6 in Softonic

Download Xara Xtreme 4.0.1.5601 in Softonic

Getting rid of blank space makes your PDF easier to read on small electronic devices like ebooks, and this is pretty much what Briss has been designed for. Open your PDF and use the cursor to draw around the areas you want to keep. You can draw as many areas as you need and move them around freely. Use the preview button to make sure you have what you need and hit Crop PDF.

Briss works by overlaying all the pages of your document and giving you an “x-ray” of the overall outline. You then crop around this outline, keeping the text you want.

Briss is a very simple, no-frills program that fulfills a very specific job. It’s by no means perfect, however – figuring out how it works, for instance, takes more than a few minutes, and it wasn’t always the most stable application. Even so, Briss is free and open-source, so if you are preparing PDFs for reading on a portable device, give it a try and it might do exactly what you need.

Briss isn’t exactly a sophisticated tool, but if you need to cut a PDF down to size, it’s worth a try.

Download Briss 0.0.13 in Softonic

The PrtScr key is quite useful – it lets you capture the screen without any third-party app. But this simplicity also makes it quite limited.

If you want to get rid of those limitations, use, the PrtScr app instead. In spite of sharing the same name, this capturing tool has nothing to do with Windows standard capturing function. It offers extended functionality, such as the ability to capture user-defined areas or send the captured image by email straightaway, and also features a fairly complete settings menu where you can customize the keyboard shortcut to launch the program and the format in which to save captured images, among others.

When running, PrtScrt displays an icon in the system tray from where you can access the program's tools. I loved the way images are displayed on the desktop right after capturing them – floating in a kind of smooth 3D animation.

On the downside, it took me a while to distinguish between its three main functions - and to find the help file as well, hidden in the "About" window. I also missed some editing tools, at least the most basic ones.

PrtScr lets you capture images in a stylish way and share them by email right away, but lacks documentation and also editing tools.

Download PrtScr 1.5.0 in Softonic