Cyril Roger - Softonic English

Windows Live out of Beta

In an attempt to gain back strategic ground from Google, their main competitor, Microsoft has officially moved Windows Live Search (previously known as MSN Search) out of Beta. The new search engine lets you find news, RSS feeds, images and videos. Local Search has been improved in terms of imagery and mobile integration and you can get answers to all your questions via the new QnA service. The new interface is sleek and customizable, so you can select what information will appear everytime you visit Windows Live, like adding weather information, sports updates and entertainment news. The menu from the top left icon allows you to check out your favorites, get a safety scan from Windows OneCare, save images in your gallery, trade and buy with Expo and Live Shopping and chat and blog on Spaces. Effectively, Microsoft aims to jump onto the web 2.0 revolution by encouraging users to carry out all their computer activities online.

According to the Redmond firm, image processing and search results should load faster, thanks to a new algorithm and “extensive feedback” from beta testers. Will Windows Live dethrone Google? Just how successful will the new platform be in changing users’ online experience? If you haven’t tried them yet, take a shot at Windows Live Messenger, Windows Live Toolbar, and Windows Live Writer.

Weather programs compared

Planning a trip for the weekend? Well you’d better make sure the sun is on your side. There’s a good number of weather forecasting applications around. We’ve taken two relatively popular programs and compared them to see which one fared best.

Weatherbug is free and discreetly fits into your deskbar. You can also choose for it to appear in your browser bar so you get weather info while you’re on the net. Unfortunately, the program is limited to the United States and you’ll realize this when you set it up, because you’ll need to enter a ZIP code. If you’ve forgotten it, you can easily browse for your location in the program. Weatherbug includes a cute little chirp sound alert to inform you of new weather updates. What we liked most was the wealth of features and maps like live camera views of key metropolitan areas (good for traffic updates), the severe weather alert notification and fun weather games and quizzes. On the downside, you’ll need to register Weatherbug when you first start it, and it will install adware (an extra search bar) in your browser.

On the other side of the ring we have Weather Watcher, a free application that also fits in the deskbar and includes sound alerts. Unlike Weatherbug, this application takes its data from the Weather Channel, meaning you can check out any place in the world. The satellite imagery is very basic however and there’s not much information you’ll get out of it. The real asset of Weather Watcher is a clean interface, with hourly meteorological cycles and regular updates. Weather forecast details appear as you roll over data on the screen.

So to our verdict. Even though Weatherbug is limited to the States, it has many more maps and features and an overall fun user experience. Weather Watcher offers detailed worldwide meteorological data but it just doesn’t have that spark of user attractiveness. That said, you’re best trying them out and choosing the one you like most.

Broadcast yourself on the net with Sopcast

As we wrote in reviews for PPLive and TVU Player, television via streaming P2P is part of the future of broadcasting. The two previously cited programs are good examples of the technology yet in Sopcast they might have found a more than worthy competitor. This streaming P2P television application offers a wide choice of channels in a very sleek looking interface, whilst letting you broadcast your very own TV program over the Internet.

Sopcast’s interface is easy enough for any type of user. You can register yourself on Sopcast, a prerequisite if you want to broadcast your program but if you just want to view TV, you can log in as an anonymous user. We found that Sopcast probably offers the widest choice of channels of all P2P TV streaming applications, and organizes them via categories like sports, news or gospel tv. To view a channel all you have to do is double click the one you want and it will open a Windows Media Player side window. This truly separates Sopcast from the rest of the P2P TV streaming applications. By playing the channels in Window Media Player it allows you to set the size of the screen, adjust sound levels, keep a history of channels viewed…basically everything you can do with the famous media player. Furthermore, Sopcast is the only P2P streaming TV application we encountered that allows you to configure settings like port selection (extremely useful to maximize the use of your bandwidth and get better quality playback) or select among 12 different languages.

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Labeling your photos in Picasa

Picasa is our favorite photo album manager, because it’s free and incredibly intuitive.The first time you launch it, it’ll scan your PC for all available pictures and organize them by folders. When you connect a digital camera it’ll recognize it and allow you to create a new album inserting date, location and adding a small description. The chronological structure in Picasa is a good way to keep your collection organized, but better yet, we encourage using labels. Just right click on one photo or a selection and choose “create new label”.

They work like tags so you can add an infinite number of labels, like “camping”, “school”, “friends”, “party” and create specific albums. And if you’re registered on Hello, you can send an album to friends in just a few clicks. Take the time to label all those photos, it’ll give you all sorts of original photo albums.

Softonic’s Tip: Maximize your iTunes

Have you ever wanted to manage your iTunes music library, but though of it as too much of a hassle? To modify track info and organize playlist data, you can download and launch scripts, found on Doug’s AppleScripts but compared to the choice for Macintosh users, the offer for PCs is sparse to say the least.

That’s why we’re using this opportunity to put forward a few Windows applications that complement the iTunes experience. The iTunes Album Artwork Locator will finally allow you to pick up all the cd covers you’re missing and insert them in your iTunes. MyTunes is one of Softonic’s favorites, because it’s a cheeky little program that will finally allow you to share and copy (yeah really) tracks from other users’ iTunes libraries. eTunes is the program of choice if you have a massive collection of tracks and you just want to get all the information in the ID3 tags sorted quickly. Then there’s PodPlus to transfer all kinds of information like pictures, RSS feeds, forecasts or notes to your iPod. Who says life ends with iTunes?

The sports fans have it all

Have you heard about Yardbarker? Apparently it’s the sports equivalent to Digg whereas you can post your articles, rate others and come up with relevant news for your favorite team or player. The Internet and web 2.0 are changing the way we interact with the news and this is illustrated via all the exciting sports-related software out there.

If you don’t have cable TV, you can use TVU Player to watch it streaming over internet. This application uses P2P principles to allow users to connect to channels from all over the world. That’s how I got to see some World Cup games last June. I also recommend installing SpyderBar, a customizable ticker, to receive your constant dose of sports news. For all the statistics die hards out there, League Pad is what your looking for. You can download results, standings and team information for football and soccer teams in the States and create whole sorts of statistics out of it. Little league coaches will take a liking to MotionClip!. The best way to use it is to record your team’s game, upload some sequences on your PC and use the application to analyze player movements, reactions and set pieces. At least it’s a cheap and modern way of working on your strategy, like a pro.

Fighting off botnets

A story today from Arstechnica reveals that 21 year old Christopher Maxwell received a 37 month jail sentence for launching a botnet which, according to the source, allowed him and his friends to reap as much as $100,000 dollars. Not all hackers out there have an evil mind bent on wreaking havoc and anarchy in government and institutional networks, but the truth is they sometimes don’t realize the consequences of their actions. Maxwell’s botnet caused Seattle’s Northwest Hospital to switch to its “disaster plan” and teachers from Colton Unified School district “lost crucial instructional time”. Maxwell did measure how far his actions could take him when the sentence came down though .

As institutions rely more and more on networks and computerized information, we’re bound to see this type of news more often and probably at a greater scale. That’s why it’s essential to remind time and time again that you need to protect your PC. You can’t go without Lavasoft’s Ad-Aware or Spybot’s Search and Destroy. Both these solutions are free, easy to use and analyze your PC fairly quickly.

Wordweb: Find those synonyms

If you write many articles, you probably know what a pain it is to have to regularly skim through a heavy dictionary to find the word you’re looking for. Luckily there’s a whole batch of lexicon applications that’ll send it back to the shelf (or in the trash can) forever. WordWeb is the perfect example of this type of dictionary and thesaurus combo in a hands-on interface.

What you’re looking for in a dictionary application is something you can open in a click, paste your word, and immediately get the results. You get that in Wordweb via system tray integration, and a Ctrl+Alt+W hot key combination. On install WordWeb will ask you the English locale you will use, such as Australian, Canadian American or New Zealander. The program keeps a history of your searches and you can quickly access them via the side arrows. You can refine your search by selecting word category like nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs and decide to show pronunciation, usage and offensive or vulgar words. WordWeb isn’t associated to any world famous reliable dictionary like Webster’s ,preferring its very own online source, comprising of more than 240,000 words and updated regularly, according to the developer.

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Top 10 Productivity Tools

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.

Author: Cyril Roger