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Staying organized, getting on top of things, multitasking, managing your workflow…the list of reasons to increase your productivity can go on and on. There’s a whole range of applications in our Productivity section, but we wanted to outline the ten Windows software we think really matter. So here goes:
What are your favorite productiviy tools for PC? Let us know by leaving a comment.
Pirates and spammers beware, there’s been a new breakthrough in information encryption. Researchers of the University of Queensland and the Australian National University have been awarded the prestigious Eureka 2006 Scientific Research award for their use of quantum physics to encrypt information. Their research consists of using “laser beams to generate entangled photons” thus making it virtually impossible to mess with the transmission of information. According to the Australian Museum Eureka Prizes press release however “quantum computers could also crack the mathematically-based codes we rely on for personal and commercial security on the web”. So much for user privacy.
We’re not there yet however, and it’ll surely be ages before we get any closer to home-owned quantum-powered PCs. Most programs available to protect your data consist of solid yet not totally invincible, 128 or 256KB AES encryption. There’s a good number of applications you can find on Softonic to keep your precious files from prying eyes. AxCrypt is a quick encryptor/decryptor for your files, while Cryptic Disk handles your hard drive and disk partitions. It’s a good idea to make a backup encrypted copy of your files once in a while.
She may now have retired, but Mavis Beacon is still fondly remembered at Softonic HQ. The badly-rendered typing guru has always been regarded as the digital equivalent of a favorite aunt and is part of the reason why Softonic’s blog posts are written so quickly.
The application was designed to help you learn to touch-type or improve your typing speed and accuracy. The original version taught you by displaying the layout of a keyboard along with transparent fingers to explain where your hands should be hovering. Mavis would then bark orders, getting you to type what she was saying, and gradually getting faster.
The idea was that after a few hours in Mavis’ company you’d be able to touch-type with ease. It didn’t do a bad job, but typing tutors have evolved a lot since Ms Beacon’s era. For instance, MaxType Typing Tutor allows you not only to test and practice your typing skills with any *.txt file, but to print out test ‘diplomas’ statistical data, which will give you the information about 20 parameters of your typing and even replay the mtr-record file of your own typing. For younger users, the wonderfully silly Tux Typing is full of enough fun and games to keep kids’ fingers tapping for a long time.
So you’re back from vacation, you’ve downloaded all your photos to your PC, but you’re not convinced by the quality of the images. What you need is to retouch them, adjusting colour balance, eliminating red eyes, setting sharpness and removing noise. While it won’t equal a great picture at first try, at least it’ll get you rid of all the imperfections. Corel Paint Shop Pro (PSP) is a hands-on and complete photo editor that intermediate users will take to their liking.
We instantly fell in love with PSP’s easy-to-handle interface. Select the tool panels you need and drag and drop them into the main window. The best way to work with PSP is via the left hand panel, a descriptive menu of all the actions you can undertake, like printing, retouching, collage, or adding text and graphics. Clicking on one option will give you access to a sub-menu with more choices. You can always go back to the main menu by clicking on the house icon. If you have multiple images opened you’ll be able to access them in no time thanks to the tab-browsing feature. The only element that we didn’t like was the image browsing pane at the bottom of the interface, which we found to be pretty cluttered.
Are you a news junkie? Do you find yourself checking your favorite newsites every 10 minutes to get that headline adrenaline? If so, you must know about Really Simple Syndication (RSS). RSS allows you to keep up to date with all new articles or posts that your favorite site puts up. Here at Softonic we mostly use the inbuilt RSS feature from Firefox, but if there was one to recommend we would go for Blogbridge. This stand alone rss application allows you to search and add the syndication feeds from a url and lets you set tags and ratings. While it is mostly destined for blog fanatics, you can also use it to follow up on normal websites. What we like in Blogbridge is also the interface, with the main window to read your post, and the left side of the interface revealing your list of feeds, a thumbnail for each of them and a short description. If you’re hooked on RSS, what feed reader would you recommend to other users and why?
So Skype is the reigning king of the VOIP but what viable alternatives are there at hand? German company Betamax offers three different versions of the same application: VOIP Stunt, VoipBuster, and VoipCheap. The difference between the three? Not much, to tell the truth, apart from the interface. They all offer the same rates, simple features and a promotion for free PC to phone calls when you sign up (and buy 10 Euros of credit). What really makes one stand out from the others is the different countries to which you can make free calls. Choose wisely and you’ll be able to chat endlessly for free!
Have you ever dreamt of flying a Top Gun jet when you’re sat on the bus? The new game, Sky Striker aims to provide you with just that experience: a complete combat flight simulator with good graphics, tricky physics and multiple weapon options.
Having managed to get the game to run (by deleting everything else from our test phone’s memory – Sky Striker’s a real resource hog), the first thing we noticed was that it overrides your phone’s profile settings. Even on a phone set to silent, the game starts with full volume music. This irritation isn’t unique to Sky Striker but it’s an irritation all the same. Developers ought to design games which work with your phone’s current set of options, rather than completely ignoring them.
Continue reading “Sky Striker: Top Gun combat on your phone”
A new version of Poker-Spy has been released today and the premise of the program sparked dollar (well, Euro) signs flashing in our eyes as we heard the ker-ching of cash registers ring out around the office. The application boasts a patent pending alert system and game tracker designed to help you constantly monitor online card games and pick up on your competitors’ playing habits, thus enabling you to choose your hand more wisely and gain a competitive advantage.
Now, if you strolled into a Las Vegas parlour with such a piece of technology, you’d more than likely end up being driven out to the desert and bashed over the head with a bat by Joe Pesci. However, in the Net’s many online casinos this form of “real-time player profiling” (or “cheating” as it’s often known) is apparently rife.
Here at Softonic we download and test up to 30 programs a day, so having a download manager on our PCs definitely makes our life easier. Flashget is considered by many to be the best download manager out there, but does it really deserve this reputation? We gave it a test drive to uncover the features that make it such a widely-coveted application.
Flashget takes charge of your downloads, automating the whole process from start to finish. Among the essential features of a download manager is batch downloading of multiple files, well handled by the program. Flashget also lets you schedule downloads to start at particular times. This is good when you have a long list of files waiting to be downloaded but you want to avoid sucking up bandwidth. You can schedule them to download one after the other, or at times when you will not be using your PC. What makes Flashget a particularly valuable tool is the speed of its downloads. You can cut up a file into various parts to download it faster and can optimize the speed according to your connection. When tested out, Flashget definitely revealed higher performances than the in-browser download managers included in Internet Explorer and Firefox.
It seems somewhat ironic that Internet Explorer’s reign should be undermined by Firefox. After all, this is a browser that rose from the ashes of the team that developed Netscape Navigator, a program which IE ousted to claim the monopoly on the web.
It’s somewhat bizarre that a non-for-profit developer should be in a position to strike fear into world’s biggest software producer, especially while still in the 1.x stage of development of its product. Yet, as many predicted, this eagerly-anticipated release represents a real threat to Microsoft’s dominance of the browser market, with the Mozilla team pumping plenty more into the program and thus upping the bar for IE7.