When it comes to photo viewers there are many alternatives to choose from. I've always had something of a crush on Picasa and this new version has made it my absolute favorite.

The brand new Picasa 3.0 is still at a beta stage, but you can already get a glimpse of all the eyecandy it brings to your desktop. The interface remains pretty similar to the previous one, but has been enriched with new options to manage and edit your photos, as well as some new ways to show them off.

Among other features, Picasa now includes a folder manager to handle your folders right on the hard drive, a screen capturing tool, an improved and extended photo editing menu (with new filters and effects) and new exciting options for your creativity, such as creating a movie with your photos.

Picasa now lets you manage your pictures in more comfortable way, both online – by automatically syncing your photo library with Picasa web albums – and offline, with an awesome photo viewer you can use instead of the default Windows image viewer.

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

Download Picasa 3.0 Beta in Softonic

Thanks to the constant improvement of broadband connections, watching TV over the internet is now possible. The current trend is to use Peer to Peer (P2P) technology to stream media quickly to consumers. TVU Player allows you to watch major cable channels over the internet, by sharing your bandwidth with other users.

TVU Player usually streams around 20 different channels, from a large American sports network to the major Chinese television channel and you can watch everything from gossip to movies or sports. TVU Player is extremely simple to use, you only have to double click on the channel of your choice, wait a few minutes for it to buffer, and start watching. Refreshing every now and then lets you check whether new channels are on offer.

TVU Player is a bit unstable, so you shouldn’t be surprised if it fails to initialize or if the channel you are watching tends to lag. If very few people are connected to the same channel you might get poor streaming quality, but if you are watching a popular program there should be a good number of peers sharing the load and the transmission will flow. Always remember to check the number of peers before watching a channel.

TVU Player doesn’t let you set your preferences, like your preferred bandwidth speed or which port to use and there is no way of getting extra information on the channels. There is a command button, but we couldn’t figure out what it was meant for, and TVU Player lacks help files to guide you out of problems. The interface window is mid-sized but you can’t enlarge it, though even if you could, we believe you would end up with a pretty poor quality image.

In other words, TVU Player is far from polished. However it’s an exciting application, which opens up the possibilities of television on Internet. While not everybody might be interested in watching Koweit TV, TVU Player still streams big American and Chinese channels and the other eclectic content. Don’t get taken aback by the instability of the application. If you have a solid broadband connection and a keen sense of curiosity, we suggest giving it a try to get a glimpse of the near future of television.

Download TVUPlayer 2.3.7.1 in Softonic

Although web-based e-mail has meant that many desktop based clients are redundant, there's nothing that beats your own personal client. Koma-mail is the sort of client you can take anywhere on a USB stick which makes it ideal for those that are worried about the security of web based mail.

Best of all, it requires absolutely no installation and supports the all important SSL and APOP protocols. It also features support, as you would expect, for POP3 and IMAP plus it includes some other extra security add-ons such as ActiveX script blocking. From an aesthetic perspective, it's not the best looking e-mail client you'll ever use but it's very easy to find your way around, much simpler than something like Outlook and has everything you need. If you share the client amongst colleagues and employees, you can

You can define multiple user profiles so that each of them have their own settings and it supports multiple accounts, use of templates and both a simple spam filter and RSS reader.

If you're looking for a portable e-mail client to use between various people, then you'll find this helps you easily configure multiple profiles and does a simple but effective job.

Download Koma-Mail 3.75 in Softonic

Sandboxie is an interesting alternative to traditional anti-virus/anti-spyware software. According to the developers, when you run a program on your computer, data flows from the hard disk to the program via read operations. The data is then processed and displayed, and finally flows back from the program to the hard disk via write operations. For example, if you run the Freecell program to play a game, it starts by reading the previously recorded statistics, displaying and altering them as you play the game, and finally writing them back to disk for future reference.

Sandboxie changes the rules such that write operations do not make it back to your hard disk. The key is the transient nature of the sandbox which makes it easy to get rid of everything in it. If you were to throw away the sandbox, by deleting everything in it, the sandboxed statistics would be gone for good, as if they had never been there in the first place. You maye in fact prefer to run your Web browser inside the sandbox most of the time. This way any incoming, unsolicited software (spyware, malware and the like) that you download, will be trapped in the sandbox. Changes made to your list of Favorites or Bookmarks, hijacking of your preferred start page, new and unwanted icons on your desktop - all these, and more, are trapped in and bound to the sandbox.

This is a very original solution to the perennial problems caused by adware, spyware and malware. However, it's dubious as to whether it can deal with the continual sophistication of such programs.

Download Sandboxie 3.30 in Softonic

Firefox already features a password manager, but if that's not enough for you, then you may want to give Sxipper a try.

Sxipper is a Firefox add-on that managers all the usernames and passwords you enter on many different websites on a daily basis. Every time you enter a username and password, Sxipper will offer to remember the data - just like Firefox does – so that next time you visit that site, you don't have to type the same information again.

The difference is that Sxipper is able to fill in complete forms (not just the username-password couple) and can also store different data for different users. I especially liked the way stored data is presented, as an overlay window in which you only have to click on your username to log in to the website.

The only drawback in Sxipper is that it doesn't work with websites you have previously told Firefox not to save passwords for. In that case you'll have to go to the browser's settings to delete them from the list.

Sxipper is a useful add-on that makes user authentication easier and faster on any website you visit.

Download Sxipper 2.2 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

This utility, which has the most comprehensive knowledge of auto-starting locations of any startup monitor (A starting list of auto-run locations was obtained from David Solomon's "Windows Internals" seminar), shows you what programs are configured to run during system bootup or login, and shows you the entries in the order Windows processes them.

These programs include ones in your startup folder, Run, RunOnce, and other Registry keys. You can configure Autoruns to show other locations, including Explorer shell extensions, toolbars, browser helper objects, Winlogon notifications, auto-start services, and much more. Autoruns goes way beyond the MSConfig utility bundled with Windows Me and XP.

Autoruns' Hide Signed Microsoft Entries option helps you to zoom in on third-party auto-starting images that have been added to your system and it has support for looking at the auto-starting images configured for other accounts configured on a system. Also included in the download package is a command-line equivalent that can output in CSV format, Autorunsc.

Download AutoRuns 9.34 in Softonic

Some music players are so complex that you spend more time fiddling and customizing them than enjoying your music.

If this sounds like thinly veiled criticism of iTunes then it is a little bit I guess but the point is that some people don't want online stores, most played lists etc, etc. QuuxPlayer is a simple and straightforward player that has you up and running in minutes and includes a 30 band equalizer.

However, the big draw of QuuxPlayer is Wireless Gamepad support which means that you can control it in a unique way from just about anywhere in the room as long as you in range of your receiver. The look and feel of QuuxPlayer is certainly unique in comparison with other similar efforts. However, the developers already seem to be going against their philosophy of keeping it simple by adding automatic lyrics download, control locking for child management and an automatic directory monitoring service for updates amongst many other things.

That said, QuuxPlayer definitely occupies a unique position in the world of music players and if you've got a gamepad, you should definitely give it a whirl even if controlling music in this way is a bit odd.

Download QuuxPlayer 2.0.5.47 Standard Edition in Softonic

Rainlendar is a lightweight and customizable calendar for your desktop.

When I first launched Rainlendar I was impressed by the widget-like appearance. Widget are small, handy gadgets that can pop up on your screen to show you all types of information, from weather forecasts, to stock charts or the time and date. They are usually small, attractive and very discreetly fit on your desktop. Rainlendar’s elements similarly have that cloud-like feel. The notes, events and calendar windows float around on your desktop and can be moved about your screen and disappear or reappear in a touch.

Rainlendar stands out from classic calendar programs thanks to a highly customizable interface and the possibility to quickly and effortlessly jot down notes and important events. Although it only comes with two different skins, the program offers a link to www.customize.org, where you should find the style which suits your tastes. But Rainlendar doesn’t stop there. You can set up hotkeys to manage Rainlendar at the push of a key and, thanks to various plug-ins present in the program, integrate Rainlendar directly to other utilities like Outlook and iCalendar. Rainlendar is always within reach as a tray icon on your desktop and bringing it up just takes a click of your mouse.

Unfortunately Rainlendar’s real originality is also its weakness. The program offers a wide range of skins but adding these to the program is far from straightforward. You have to drag your downloaded skin into the Skins folder for the Rainlendar program file and then browse to the new skin from the ‘Edit Skin’ option in Rainlendar’s drop down menu.

If you like to keep your calendar on your PC, but find the one offered by Windows too dull, Rainlendar is a good alternative. You’ll enjoy setting your own style and the way it discreetly fits onto your desktop.

Download Rainlendar 2.4 in Softonic

Following the trend of brain workout games started by the popular Brain Training on the Nintendo DS platform, here comes gBrainy, a pack of games that will challenge your brain in different ways.

This game is actually a port of a Linux-based game, but it works fine on Windows too. It includes a bunch of questions and exercises classified into three categories: Logic puzzles, Mental calculation exercises and Memory trainers. gBrainy features a simple, clear design which means you shouldn't expect bright colors or spectacular graphical effects. It's just a plain window where the game displays questions and you simply enter the correct answer (or at least the one you think is correct).

Talking about right answers, this is precisely what you may not like about gBrainy. I don't know if it was because of my personal dislike for maths, but I was a complete failure in Calculation and Logic exercises. Well, at leas I did way better at the Memory ones.

You can pause the game at any point, and when you stop it you get quite complete statistics about your performance and results, as long as some tips to improve your score next time you run the game.

gBrainy is a plainly designed game that helps you improve your logic skills with different types of exercises.

Download gBrainy 1.00 in Softonic

Sometimes the mouse cursor can blink way too rapidly when you're trying to aim it at a particular target or area.

SlowMousion is a discreet application that slows down mouse cursor's speed when pressing and holding down a key or button. SlowMousion gives you more sensitive control over mouse movements when drawing shapes, dragging shapes and just about anything else you are doing with a mouse.

SlowMousion is extremely easy to enable and disable which is essential because it can annoyingly activate itself when you least want it to. The best option is to use the program to define a hotkey instead because this saves any confusion. With repeated taps of the key, you can define exactly how fast or slow you want the mouse cursor to move or blink.

SlowMousion is a very basic application that does a simple job but is best activated from the keyboard than mouse.

Download SlowMousion 1.1 in Softonic

E-books are a great way to carry around a huge amount of literature that would prove impractical in physical terms.

However, the perennial question with e-book readers is which one is best for your needs? FBReader makes reading e-books that bit more comfortable by making letters more readable, allowing you to navigate contents and indexes much more easily and generally enhance your reading experience.

Probably the biggest benefit of FBReader though is the ability to search and find any phrase or subject no matter how many pages are in your book. Although this is a very common function in many applications, it's something that many e-book readers don't include for some strange reason, but FBReader does. In addition, if you should need to read a page upside down (why you would I'm not sure) you can rotate pages 270 degrees.

FBReader is a very easy to use e-book reader which improves your reading experience and makes searching texts fast and simple.

Download FBReader 0.8.17 in Softonic

Coollector is an Encyclopedia of Movies, Video Collection Manager and Shopping Tool
combined inside a child-play to use Freeware.

In other words, Coollector blends 3 types of information into a unique interface: your cinematographical culture + your video collection + the videos available in store. This innovative 3-in-1 concept offers a completely new experience because each part interacts deeply and naturally with the others.

Download Coollector 2.18 in Softonic

As a worldwide network, you can find many different languages on the Web, but you may not speak all of them. In this case, you better count on Business Translator.

With Business Translator you'll be able to translate selected text strings – no matter how long - and complete websites as well. The way the program translates web content in fact is very interesting: it loads the selected website on its own built-in browser and displays it in the target language, although keeping the same design.

Being an automated translating machine, you shouldn't expect perfect results in Business Translator. But in any case you'll be able to get a rough idea of what any foreign text is about.

Business Translator features a simple interface with a few customization options, plus some other tools such as the possibility to print or save the translated text right away. The program also includes what it seems to be a fairly complete dictionary. And I say "seems to be" because it was so painfully slow I didn't have enough patience to wait for the definition I was looking up.

Business Translator puts an end to language barriers by providing you with a handy translating application.

Download Business Translator 9.02 in Softonic

The torrent phenomenon is one of the most hyped about in the world of technology among Peer to Peer (P2P) users. It consists of sharing large files, like movies, software, or games anonymously and quickly with other peers. The file you want to download is cut up into small segments shared by users, creating what is called a swarm, and does not go through a central server, significantly reducing the bulk of file transfers, The Bittorrent client is actually the first P2P application to use this technology and became immensely popular when it was released. Torrents are considered by online users as a great way to download recently released movies or tv shows.

Thanks to a straightforward, uncluttered interface Bittorrent appears as a friendly torrent client that beginners will feel comfortable with. We particularly appreciated the integrated search box to look for files on the bittorrent website. Once you’ve found the torrent you want, download it to your PC, open it up inside Bittorrent and let the client do its job. The speed at which you download will depend on the number of seeds, that is people who have the complete file and are sharing it. The more seeds there are the quicker files will download.

You can set multiple torrent downloads and the downloading speed is fairly quick. It’s easy to configure the client and we suggest choosing the right port and setting upload and download rate limits to avoid hogging your bandwidth. It’s also good to set your downloads by priority to monitor more precisely how your torrents are doing.

Compared to the exhaustive Azureus, Bittorrent is very simplistic. It doesn’t provide half as many statistics and doesn’t let you customize the interface. Integrating a search box is a great idea, but it limits searches to the bittorrent website, not considered the most thorough source by torrent aficionados.

If you’re a newbie to the torrent world, Bittorrent is a good bet. It’s safe, stable and sharp. Associated with the huge database of legal torrents that is the bittorrent website, it makes for a very rich P2P experience. Advanced users will probably frown upon its lack of options but others should give it a try.

Download BitTorrent 6.1 in Softonic

Managing passwords is a difficult and sometimes stressful ordeal if you've got hundreds of different ones for various sites but Lastpass makes life that bit easier.

Lastpass is basically a free password manager that makes your web browsing easier and more secure by bringing everything under one password. Lastpass can create strong passwords that protect all sites, meaning that logging into your favorite browser, network or secure network becomes a one-step affair.

Lastpass is particularly useful for those that want to work together securely in different locations because it allows you share credentials to log in via Lastpass. This includes those that are working on Mac and Windows platforms as it works across both. Of course, the big concern is security - if your Lastpass password is lost or obtained by someone else, it makes everything protected under it vulnerable. However, it does use SSL and RSA encryption so you should be OK.

Lastpass is a great way to manage passwords under one umbrella without worrying about remembering the access credentials to them all.

Download Lastpass 1.28 in Softonic

Flickr is a great site to share pics, but in order to keep your photo collection in perfect shape you need to devote some time to it. Luckily jUploadr can help you in this task.

jUploadr, as you may have inferred from its name, is a photo uploading tool that has been specifically designed to work with Flickr and also with Zooomr, another photo sharing community. With jUploadr you can upload and manage your photos in a more comfortable way, because several steps in the process are fully automated and can also be applied to photos in batches.

jUploadr is certainly one of the most complete photo uploading tools I've seen. It allows you to resize and tag your images prior to uploading them, as well as applying custom default security settings to them and publishing them in the same order they were taken.

The main drawback in jUploadr though is its incredible slowness when uploading images. Oh well, at least you can just minimize it to the system tray and forget about it while you focus on something else.

With jUploadr you can fully automate the process of uploading photos to Flickr, even if it takes longer than usual.

Download jUploadr 1.1.2 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

One of the best things about the PSP, apart from the brilliant games, is that you can watch films on it.

However, if your favourite films are on DVD, you'll need some way to convert them and the quality of the conversions can greatly affect your enjoyment of the films. Xilisoft DVD to PSP Converter is powerful and highly user friendly DVD to PSP converter which helps convert DVD to multiple formats including PSP, MP4, MPEG-4, H.264/PSP AVC Video, DVD to PSP audio format MP3 and DVD to PS3 Video MPEG-4. In addition, it supports DVD to PSP MP3, AAC, DVD to PS3 Video (480p, 720p, 1080i) MPEG-4. Although it's ideal for beginners, it will also appeal to those who want a bit more control over conversions due to a multitude of customisation options. Depending on whether you want your video to fill the whole screen, it allows you to convert DVD to PSP by customising the resolution, file size and even the part of the DVD that you want to rip. Even better, you can avoid ripping subtitle and audio tracks that you don't need by choosing to ignore them completely. The interface is simple but elegant with a preview window in the bottom left hand corner to help you review conversions or select the section of DVD that you want to rip. The conversion time may be a little longer than you're used to with such apps but the all round usability more than makes up for that.

A quick, easy and convenient burner that will impress with it's usability and range of conversion formats.

Download Xilisoft DVD to PSP Converter 5.0.40.0729 in Softonic

Would you like to impress your friends with an impressive presentation of your last holiday pictures and are you looking for a special way to do it? What could be better than having a whole art-gallery just for you, maybe set in an ancient castle, or in a modern skyscraper or, why not, in a Chinese garden?

Photo! 3D Album is a simple free program that lets you upload your photo collection in very nice 3D settings that you can choose from a menu that pops up when you create a new project. If you don't like your original selection, don't worry as you can change the template later. It's like a first-person computer game, where you navigate through the gallery and you attach your photographs to the available canvases. Although there are many, frames are limited and this is a real problem for medium-size collections.

When you have finished navigating and uploading, you have several options in order to export your photo-collection. You can create a screen saver or a stand alone gallery which can be run with a double-click, or alternatively a web gallery in VRML or Shockwave format. For the latter format you will have to register, for free, on the developer's web site. When you launch the final video, press F1 if you want to navigate freely around the gallery.

Photo! 3D Album is great to create cool animations with the photos you want. Unfortunately the spaces available in the art gallery are limited, as they would be in a real one. It's also an interesting program to create your own personal screen savers.

Download Photo! 3D Album 1.1 in Softonic