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

If you have different devices with video capabilities, you need a complete video tool like ALO AVI MPEG WMV 3GP MP4 iPod PSP Converter.

With ALO AVI MPEG WMV 3GP MP4 iPod PSP Converter you can convert from the most popular video formats to those formats used in devices such as the iPod, the Zune, the PSP, the PS3 or the Apple TV. All you have to do is load the source video, select the target format and let the program take care of the rest. Plus, you can convert several videos simultaneously.

Formats are conveniently organized in profiles according to the target device.
ALO AVI MPEG WMV 3GP MP4 iPod PSP Converter lets you tweak those target profiles by customizing bitrate, frame rate, video codec, audio bitrate and other elements, but unfortunately you can't save this customization as a new personal profile.

ALO AVI MPEG WMV 3GP MP4 iPod PSP Converter features a straightforward interface and is really easy to use. It includes a video window preview, but it's meant to only show video as it's being converted, not work as a built-in player.

With ALO AVI MPEG WMV 3GP MP4 iPod PSP Converter you'll always find the right combination to convert videos from one format to another and watch them on any device.

Download ALO AVI MPEG WMV 3GP MP4 iPod PSP Converter 5.1 in Softonic

If you'd like to switch to Mac but haven't made up your mind yet, you can have a sneak peek at the operating system with the LeopardXP BricoPack.

LeopardXP BricoPack is a visual theme for Windows XP that completely transforms your old Microsoft OS into the brand new Apple system in just a couple of clicks. Unlike other visual themes that need certain libraries and drivers, or require you to install third-party apps on your own, LeopardXP BricoPack includes everything you need and is incredibly easy to install: click on the Next button a few times, wait for a while, restart and that's it.

LeopardXP BricoPack is obviously not like the real thing but it does quite a good job in trying to make Windows XP look like the Leopard OS. Not only does it install new skins, wallpapers and icons, but it also adds new functionalities such as a Mac OS style dock bar, a Spotlight clone (which by the way doesn't seem to work properly), a top toolbar and a similar file explorer. All of these are included in LeopardXP BricoPack as extra tools and you can choose not to install them. Also, LeopardXP works fine even in systems with low resources.

On the downside, there are still a few areas in which LeopardXP BricoPack could be improved: for example, there are some Windows icons that the theme doesn't replace and don't really fit in, like the Windows logon and switch off screens.

LeopardXP BricoPack is an attractive visual theme that completely transforms Windows XP into Mac OS Leopard. It includes everything you need and is extremely easy to install and uninstall.

Download LeopardXP Bricopack 1.0 in Softonic

Akram Audio Editor provides cool and easy-to-use interface that allows you to edit an audio file visually (Cut, Copy, Delete Select, Delete Silence, Paste, Paste From File, Mix, Mix From File). You can apply a variety of effects including Amplify, Compressor, Delay, Envelope, Equalizer, Expander, Fade, Flanger, Invert, Normalize, Phaser, Reverb, Reverse, Silence, Stretch, Trim, Vibrato, Chorus, and Pitch Shift.

The program also lets you insert noise and silence in an audio file; Insert and change described information about a marker; Apply different filters to the selected part of an audio file (Band Pass Filter, FFT Filter, High Pass Filter, High Shelf Filter, Low Pass Filter, Low Shelf Filter, Notch Filter, Finite Impulse Response Filter, Peak EQ Filter); Record an audio file from a microphone or from other input device; and Play an audio file or any part of it.

Akram Audio Editor supports audio format of uncompressed WAV PCM,compressed WAV (ADPCM, GSM, DSP and others),MP2 (MPEG 1/2 Layer-2),MP3 (MPEG 1/2 Layer-3),VOX (Dialogic ADPCM),WMA (Windows Media Audio 9),RAW audio (PCM, A-LAW, U-LAW),MPC (MusicPack),AVI (audio track),Ogg Vorbis (Version 1.0),G.721, G.723, G.726,AIFF (Apple audio format) and AU (UNIX audio format).

Download Akram Audio Editor 2007 5.0.112 in Softonic

I'm about to convert to Mac myself but if I wasn't, I would definitely use Mac OSX Tiger Theme 1.3 to at least feel like I'd converted.

The skins feature the classic Aqua and Graphite schemes and the newly introduced Platinum scheme which you can find in the System Preferences and Mail programs in Mac OS X 10.4. They've also included Brushed with over 20 substyles added for good measure. The Apple menu is unfortunately, not an exact copy of the original but it's pretty close. It's basically a stripped down Start Menu that has been made to look like the Apple menu in Mac OS X. In addition, there are also left and right handed titlebar buttons for those that want their PC to look like a Mac but at the same time keep their right handed Windows buttons. The look and feel is remarkably Apple although Windows keeps creeping through especially with it's annoying sounds sometimes to spoil the illusion. If you have any widgets installed, you may also find that they don't show with this installed.

A great skin for those that either can't afford a Mac or those that simply prefer the elegant Mac look and style.

Download Mac OS X Theme 1.3 in Softonic

In the beginning was Microsoft Office. Then OpenOffice appeared as an open-source alternative. And now IBM makes a new move and offers its own productivity suite, all free of charge. The idea is not new: there have been a few free suites launched lately, but all of them were online. IBM Lotus Symphony is the only desktop suite that, together with OpenOffice, can offer a free alternative to Microsoft's proprietary apps.

IBM Lotus Symphony offers three tools: word processor, spreadsheet and presentations. It's true that other productivity suites are usually more complete. However, Lotus Symphony stands out for a convenient, single-windowed interface from which you can launch the three apps. Simply click on the "Open" button and select the kind of document you want to open: the program's toolbar will change accordingly. What's more, you can have as many opened documents as you want at the same time, no matter which type, and switch between them in the top tab bar.

The suite includes all the basic tools that you could expect in such an application: spell checker and tables for documents, predesigned templates for presentations and charts for spreadsheets - to name a few - besides the usual configuration options as regards fonts, colors and the like.

In my personal opinion, I'm glad to have another possibility to choose from when deciding which suite I'm going to use. A little rivalry is always good and usually produces better and wider options for computer users. And it seems IBM is beginning to take the suite competition quite seriously.

IBM Lotus Symphony has left the beta stage behind and now offers a stable, highly functional productivity suite that, despite not being as complete as other suites, may perfectly fit your needs.

Download IBM Lotus Symphony 1.0 in Softonic

In an age of multiple media players all with different codecs and formats, it's nice to know there's at least one out there that can play just about anything.

Haihaisoft Universal Player supports almost all popular digital media formats and can also play digital media files protected by DRM-X. Amongst the players it can emulate are Windows Media Player, Real Player, Adobe Flash Player, Apple QuickTime Player, PowerDVD and Flash Video (FLV) Player. Whatsmore though, this player embeds itself into Internet Explorer meaning that whenever you are presented with a format compatible with any of these file types, you can watch it instantly. The number of formats it can play is mind-boggling, including those protected by DRM such as WMV(Windows Media Video), WMA(Windows Media Audio), ASF, WMS, DVD, VCD, SVCD, MOV, RM, RMVB, AVI, MPEG, WMV, 3GP, FLV, SWF, MP3, AMR, M4A, ACC, OGG, MIDI, GIF and JPEG file format. Best of all, the program is constantly updated with the latest codecs so you don't need to worry about it suddenly not being able to play files.

A completely free player that supports just about any format imaginable and embeds itself into IE perfectly.

Download Haihaisoft Universal Player 1.0.7.1 in Softonic

Despite being known mainly as a music player, the iPod has evolved into supporting video as well which means it's also a great device to watch videos on the move.

But before that, you need to convert your videos with ImTOO DVD to iPod Converter, a powerful video conversion tool that has been especially developed for iPods and iPhones. The program supports the popular video formats for iPod (MP4) plus MP3 and AAC, all of them categorized in several profiles to meet different requirements in size, audio quality, video quality and other settings. You can create your own customized profiles as well.

ImTOO DVD to iPod Converter can convert video from DVD discs or IFO files on your hard drive. Also, you can choose between converting the whole movie or just some selected chapters. Just make sure there's enough space on your device!

With ImTOO DVD to iPod Converter you can easily convert DVD videos to iPod format and watch your favorite movies on the go.

Download ImTOO DVD to iPod Converter 5.0.35.0515 in Softonic

To stay organized when working on multiple projects you need to learn how to manage your time well. Timesheet a free utility to keep track of the time spent on different jobs.

Don't expect anything too fancy with Timesheet: it works with Java, so you'll get everything except an attractive interface. On the other side this means that the interface is clear and works efficiently.

Nothing too difficult with Timesheet: create a new project, create a new entry, add start and end times and you are ready to go. The left side of the program structures all entries by data and reflects time spent. The center of the interface shows all your entries, and if some of them are still not finished you will be able to see the duration counting down.

Timesheet won't let you reorganize entries by columns, which limits the ways you can see your data. We also found it quite difficult to change time and date as you need to enter them exactly as they are seen in Timesheet.

Timesheet is a good effort at a time tracking solution, however it offers too many limitations to be used intensely. Try Project Clock as another way to manage your time.

Download TimeSheet 0.8.4.2 in Softonic

The evolution of computers reveals a trend towards multimedia centres where users can listen to music, watch videos, surf the net, work and view photo albums. If you’ve gotten your hands on media files, you’ve probably been in the situation at least once where you had to convert the files to transfer them on a different device (such as a phone or an iPod) or in order to play it in another application. SUPER makes audio and video conversion a breeze thanks to a well presented interface and a slew of options.

SUPER’s single window interface is divided into audio and video and the selection of output options is done via the three drop down menus at the top. We appreciated the number of formats available. SUPER allows you to convert movies and music to play on recent devices such as Apple iPod, Sony PSP and 3gp for use on Sony Ericsson and Nokia mobile phones. The huge bit rate menu, from 64 to 9792 Kbps, means you can truly optimize and quicken the conversion process. We were disappointed however that SUPER only offered 2 video codec outputs (H263 and MPEG-4) and 3 audio codecs (AAC, AMR wideband and narrowband).

On the audio side, SUPER allows you to select your language from individual tracks, but audio is limited to one channel and one sampling frequency (8000). It seems the program is more suited to video conversion. Luckily the program includes recognized encoders such as ff mpeg or mencoder, ensuring a decent conversion process for both audio and video.

Use the buttons at the bottom of the interface to play files and check their quality after having converted them. The ’Player Options’ button gives you the chance to tweak video features such as aspect, saturation, hue, brightness and contrast. All files converted or waiting to be converted are visible in a list and you can verify the streaming link and the output status.

In SUPER, we found a very open media converter that even the klutziest of users will get to grips with. If you watch a lot of videos and movie clips and would like to be able to enjoy them anywhere and on any device, SUPER is a program you’ll need to get your hands on.

Download SUPER 2008.30 in Softonic

As a recent switcher, I'm slowly discovering all the little wonders of MacOS X and starting to understand why the Apple OS has so many faithful supporters. However things are different at work, where I must still work with a PC on a daily basis. Luckily there are apps that bring a pinch of Mac taste to Windows users.

This is the case of WinLight, a Spotlight clone for Windows that enables you to search for files, folders and apps in a much easier, more comfortable way. WinLight is slightly similar to the original Mac Spotlight tool but still has a long way to go.

To begin with, results are not classified into categories as the original Spotlight. Also, it doesn't show a drop-down menu with results but just completes the word – only if you have written it before - and then opens a window instead, which is not quite as useful.

While WinLight may be a good replacement for the old-fashioned Windows standard search tool, I'm afraid it's not as good as the original Spotlight.

Download winLight 0.8 in Softonic

The big news at the end of Steve Jobs’ Keynote at the WWDC, was the release of Safari 3 for both Mac and Windows. Observers were quick to note that Apple’s aim was to stake its claim to a bigger share in the browser market. As Steve Jobs also pointed out, Safari will be the iPhone’s browser, so offering it for Windows feels like a natural step to take. Overall, a number of improvements were made to this latest version of Safari. However, it’s fair to point out that this is still a Beta and a number of issues can still arise until the official release. Let’s take a look at Safari 3 Beta.

Apple hails Safari has the fastest browser, both in terms of launch time and html and JavaScript performance. We did find however that it took much more time to load under XP than Vista. The classic dark grey interface will be immediately recognizable to users, but its Mac-ishness might slightly put off new users. It certainly stands out from the rest of your applications. We really liked the new tab functions, and how they can be smoothly dragged around your interface. You can also drag a tab out to view it as a separate window, or move tabs from window to window.

By clicking on the RSS tag in the URL bar, you can get a view of all the posts in a feed, which you can present chronologically and get a detailed or a title view. We were also impressed with the “Inline Find” function. Click CTRL+F to reveal the find bar under your bookmarks bar. Once you type a word in the find bar, the whole page will immediately turn a shade of grey except for the word itself. If there is more than one iteration of the word, you can scroll through them thanks to the arrow buttons on the find bar.

Safari claims to be one of the safest browsers around and supports SSL 2 and 3 and TLS as well as the basic set of proxy protocols like HTTPS or streaming proxy (RTSP). We found the name of one of the security features, “Safe Browsing”, misleading. Instead of actually upping the security of your Safari it instead limits the features of the browser by disabling history, autofill or searches. Perhaps it should have been called "Private Browsing" instead. Another element that left us frustrated was the search bar. It effectively works with Yahoo and Google but as of now doesn’t let you add any more search engines.

We experienced a number of crashes while testing Safari, particularly on XP, and noted that the browser does use up a significant amount of memory at start-up, around 60 MB to be exact. Also, we found that some popular pages (like Google or Digg!) do not render properly with Safari; a case of not being totally standards compliant perhaps? While it’s great to finally open up Safari to the PC crowd, the unstability of the browser makes you wonder if it wasn’t rushed out for the WWDC. Some interesting features, but on the whole, Safari is no match for the fully armed Firefox on PC yet.

Download Safari 3.1 in Softonic

Are you tired of typing all your e-mails or are you just a slow typer and don't have time to reply to everyone?

Then why not speak your responses? Free TalkMail enables users to long, high quality voice emails for free to any email address around the world. The e-mails can then be played back on any PC, Mp3 player and replies can be made for free. It's an ideal tool for mobile professionals who are not in the office regularly and have to shoot off a few e-mails on the move, to college students who just want to have a bit of fun online. The big drawback with this program is that the files are often very large - I don't understand why the developers couldn't have given the files a higher compression ratio or included a small compression utility. The other downside is the interface which looks very archaic. It looks like something out of Windows DOS and there's certainly no scope for changing the skins. Then again, this is not the kind of program you use just to look at - it's designed especially to do one particular function which it does well - the sound quality is good and it's very easy to use.

A useful little utility but it's a mystery why the files are very large and there's no way to change the rather ugly interface.

Download Free TalkMail 1.0 in Softonic

The Google Desktop application allows users to search their desktop content quickly and easily. Praised for its ingenuity and criticised for its intrusiveness, Google Desktop brings the power of Google’s search engine technology to your PC.

After installing the application, you’ll have to give it some time to index the files on your PC, including emails, photos, chats, contacts and calendar events. Google Desktop will index the first 10,000 words in the first 100,000 documents on your PC. The application supports the majority of file types and you can decide which ones to index, or omit protected files, using the preferences menu.

In its latest version, which is compatible with Windows Vista, Google Desktop has been given a new transparent look, providing a pretty sleek feel to your PC. Your search results will appear in your browser (in the familiar Google web page format) and a small preview button allows you to view results without actually clicking on the corresponding link. Results are as precise as we’ve come to expect from Google searches, however we were slightly disappointed to learn that the application doesn’t offer logical 'OR' support or substring search. On another note, Google Desktop is not limited to your PC as you can cross index content from multiple machines and share some panel items with your friends.

Google Desktop is not only about search, though. Joining a marketplace already occupied by Apple’s Dashboard Widgets and Yahoo! Widgets, Google Desktop can be fitted with any number of little gadgets. These mini apps perform all kinds of functions, from fetching your mail to jotting down notes or checking up on your local weather. There are hundreds of gadgets to choose from to customize your desktop bar. Our personal favorites are: Google Translate, the Skype plug-in to check your credit and call your contacts, “Am I Blocked” to find out who’s blocked you on IM, Workspace to quickly move between tasks, System Stats to monitor your PC and Games, a selection of Flash games like Tetris and Moonlander.

When running, we found Google Desktop to use up around 30 MBs, but that can quickly increase if you add more gadgets to it. The application is also constantly re-indexing your files to incorporate your modifications and new elements. However you should rarely feel your PC slowing due to indexing.

When you’re dealing with Google, however, you know the main criticism will be about security. Because Google Desktop indexes all your documents, you’re basically opening up your PC and all your personal files to the Moutain View company. What some users fear is that Google could one day take advantage of that access or that a bug in the application would allow malicious users to infiltrate your PC and steal information.

While the intrusiveness of Google Desktop will give some users pause for thought on installing the app, Google Desktop is highly effective and simple to use. The gadgets you can add to its sidebar may not all be essential, but many of them are quite fun and original and let’s face it, the sidebar looks good. Give it a go if you think your PC is a mess and you need quick access to anything.

Download Google Desktop 5.7.802.22438 in Softonic

The Windows Clipboard is certainly a useful tool, but software apps like Xpad can make it even better by improving its standard functionality and adding new tools.

Xpad isn't just a Clipboard replacement; it's more of a small notepad where you can save and store multiple text snippets that you copy to the Clipboard, thus turning the single-slot basic capacity into a multiple clipboard tool. You can save as many elements as you want, work with them as you would do with any other regular plain text file and also export them to different formats.

Xpad includes an embedded Clipboard browser to review all the text snippets you've copied so far and also features the ability to paste text automatically by just selecting it. The program worked generally fine during our tests though we found some strange behaviors like copying the same element twice or three times.

With Xpad you can dramatically improve Windows standard Clipboard and turn it into a multi-functional notepad with automatic paste.

Download XPad text editor 3.0 in Softonic

Airfoil is one of those standout applications you come across sometimes.

What it does is allow you to send any audio from your computer via wireless to any other computer (PC or Mac), Apple TV or Airport Express. It works with any application that plays music in your computer.

Syncing is both easy and fast. The clear GUI will list up all the devices that you can sync to, and all you have to do is activate them and set the volume and equalizer. That means you can pretty much listen to your music anywhere. Rogue Amoeba have really succeeded in making a program which is efficient, useful and very easy to use.

The download also includes Airfoil Speakers, which basically turns any PC or Mac into an Airport Express unit which can then receive audio from the Airfoil of another computer.

On the help side, the Rogue Amoeba team is known to offer great support and respond quickly to user queries.

Naturally though, if your wireless connection is poor, then Airfoil will perform poorly, so make sure your WiFi is well set.

Airfoil is a smart and intuitive program, to sync music wirelessly to any computer, Airport Express or Apple TV.

Download Airfoil 2.5 in Softonic

Kompozer is what we call a WYSIWYG editor, that is, a program with which you can build your own website without any HTML knowledge required at all.

Creating a website in Kompozer doesn't feel like coding, but like writing a simple DOC file in Word instead. You can write text, add photos, insert a table and create links and forms, all in a very easy way, by means of small dialog windows and wizards.

The good thing about Kompozer is that if you already have some HTML knowledge, there's always the possibility to show advanced configuration settings for each element, plus the option to create the website by typing plain source code instead of using the visual interface.

The program also offers some extra features like support to open several documents simultaneously, an FTP client to upload the website and a CSS editor. The only thing I missed was some ready-to-use templates to get you started.

Kompozer includes everything you need to create a website, no matter what your HTML knowledge or coding experience is.

Download KompoZer 0.7.10 in Softonic

UFS Explorer is easy-to-use tool that allows you to browse your alternative filesystems and extract files from there. Now it supports user-mode read-only support for Ext2/Ext3 Linux filesystems as well as FAT fs support. It gives you a really efficient way to access your files, located on your disk partitions and disk images (VMWare, RAW) that are not accessible normally.

Key features of the program:

• Read-only access to Linux Reiser/Ext2/Ext3 filesystems
• Read-only access to BSD UFS/UFS2 filesystems
• Read-only basic access to MacOS X HFS+/HFSX and byte-swapped UFS/UFS2
• Read-only access to FAT12/FAT16/FAT32 with LFN
• Explorer-like filesystem browsing
• File search support
• Files recovery/extraction (for files larger then 16k - available after registration)
• Preserve file modification dates
• 3 file views: 'Large icons', 'Small icons' and 'Details'
• Folder/object group extraction
• Hard-disk auto-detection
• Partitions auto-detection basing on DOS/BSD/MacOS partitioning
• Supports Apple Mac OS-style hard disk partitioning
• Partitions probing: detect correct filesystem if partition label is invalid
• Smart filesystem caching
• Symlinks browsing, object properties and other utility features
• Hardware changes re-scan; opened devices management
• Files extraction from disk images! Supports VMWare 3,4,5 hard disk image files, RAW disk image files, both RAW and 'chunked' Apple MacOS disk image files (.DMG) with ZLIB compression support

Download UFS Explorer 3.7 in Softonic

Do you have music files? Do you want to organize your audio collection by artist name, album and songs title? Or you have MP3 player and want to see the correct tags on a display? 1st MP3 Tag Editor can help you!

Our tag processor can edit MP3, Apple iTunes M4a, Musepack MPC, WMA, OGG Vorbis, WavPack, FLAC, APE, WAV files; rename a group of files and folders by tag information; generate tags by filenames and folders path; change capitalization; create Windows Media Player and Winamp playlists; export information to text files and MS Excel; automatically download lyrics and album covers; delete unused MP3-tags.

If your files are without tags and filenames look like track01.mp3, track02.mp3 etc, 1st MP3 Tag Editor can emulate Audio CD header and import songs names from FreeDB. Another great feature is support of Amazon services - just enter artist name and get names of all the tracks from the selected album.

Download 1st MP3 Tag Editor 5.6 in Softonic

QuizFaber, previously known as QuizMaker) is a freeware software for Windows that enables you to create multimedia quizzes as HTML documents. This program simplifies quiz-making in HTML without any prior knowledge of HTML or JavaScript.

The quiz is ready to be published on Internet, in a local network (with Intranet protocol) or on a local PC. It can be fully customize for the choice of background images, colors, sounds and font types. Finally, the quiz result can be saved on a web server or send through email.

Moreover, it allows to embed into quizzes multimedia objects as images, sounds and videos, since it is compatible with the more widespread Internet formats (JPEG, GIF, MID, MP3, AVI, MPEG), also with Macromedia Flash, Apple QuickTime, Liveupdate Crescendo, RealAudio, RealMedia browser plug-in.

Download QuizFaber 2.10.1 in Softonic