Author: James Thornton

You often see lists of the top ten or top fifty babes in glossy magazines, professing to rank the world’s most beautiful women. However, to get an idea of who the average person deems the hottest babe you only need take a look at the download stats in Softonic’s ‘Women‘ desktop wallpapers section. Here’s the full run-down of the most popular models, actresses and singers on the site:

1. Jessica Alba
2. Elisha Cuthbert
3. Angelina Jolie
4. Tara Reid
5. Vida Guerra
6. Paris Hilton
7. Adriana Lima
8. Josie Maran
9. Katie Price (Jordan)
10. Jennifer Love Hewitt

In the interests of equality, we also have a ‘Men‘ wallpapers section, where Vin Diesel and Bratt Pitt prove the most downloaded.

Large e-mail attachments have long been the preserve of things like ‘hilarious’ pictures of animals wearing clothes or short video clips depicting an amusing mishap befalling an unfortunate athlete. However, as a means of transferring large files from one person to another, the format has always been hampered by size caps imposed by webmail providers and SMTP servers.

Sending an album of music or anything over a couple of minutes of video footage has always been a no-no, but luckily things are changing thanks to an app which allows you to send files of up to 1Gb (yes, you read it right) via email. Pando automatically converts your attachments into a small file that your friend or relative can simply open to download the original file from Pando or elsewhere. Now Pando is offering plug-ins to work with most Web-based mail services, which traditionally often have a limit of around 10Mb, meaning you can treat your buddies to that hour-long movie of you wallpapering the bathroom. Until now it’s only been available as an Outlook add-on.

Although it’s still in Beta form, the application is pretty stable and a recent update has made it even quicker for users to connect with the service. As a result, it provides a fast and reliable alternative to burning disks and posting them or uploading files to an FTP site.

Computers often get a bad press when it comes to health. How often are we subjected to health and safety rants about the dangers of impaired vision or repetitive strain injury that PCs can cause? While this may be true in certain cases, it’s always refreshing to see developers coming up with solutions that can actually improve your health. We recently came across an ingenious application designed to alleviate the common, yet serious problem of tinnitus, called TinnitusTamerWin.

If you experience regular ringing in your ears (and it’s nothing to do with your boss pestering you on the phone) then it could be due to this aural defect, often caused by exposure to loud noises. TinnitusTramer helps to ease, or even eliminate, the problem by producing sequences of special tones and silent periods to retrain the neural networks in the auditory system of the brain to weaken the feedback loop that produces the ailment. The program is one of a large number within our Health section that can help you educate yourself about staying fit and take positive steps towards overcoming health problems.

So, it seems Microsoft may now not be able to release its Vista RC1 candidate on time due to interoperability problems with existing hardware and software, potentially delaying the pre-release until after the autumn. While we wait for more developments from Redmond’s lumbering software giant, why not give one of the innovative new online OS services a shot?

Web-based operating systems are becoming a great alternative to Windows, as they offer you the ability to work from the same desktop wherever you go – a dream for Net café dwellers everywhere. eyeOS is a new open-source development which treats you to a sweet assortment of features including directories, a competent text editor, messaging, a web browser and an RSS feed reader. You can also download and add a range of applications such as games, productivity utilities, image editors and mapping services. Check out the online presentation (complete with a divine electro backing track) to see why it may be time to say ‘hasta la vista’ to Windows.

For those of us whose sights are trained on a computer screen all day long, reading in-depth articles on our favourite blogs or sifting through long emails is the last thing we want to do at the end of a day at the office. Imagine our delight then when we came across a program that promised to read all this text for us as we give our eyes a well-earned rest.

The beauty of TextAloud is that it not only reads out anything you copy and paste into the voice window but also allows you to save the resulting speech as an audio file. Effectively this means you can transform any web page, email or text document into a podcast to download to your MP3 player and listen to at your leisure. File sizes are kept to a minimum so it’s possible to save entire novels as an audio file of less than 1Mb.

Continue reading “Enjoying the freedom of speech”

An infamous US software pirate has been given a six year prison sentence after raking in $4.1 million from selling hooky applications. Danny Ferrer peddled copied versions of Adobe, Macromedia and Autodesk software on his site, buyusa.com, between 2002 and October 2005.

Ferrer, 37, pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy and one count of criminal copyright infringement following an operation that reportedly cost developers more than $20 million. The crook had amassed an impressive collection of loot which he was made to surrender to the authorities, including two Cessna planes, a Rotorway helicopter, a 1992 Lamborghini, an ambulance, a flight simulator and a 28-foot speedboat.

As tempting as it is for us to sell you ripped off software and buy ourselves an island in the Seychelles, you can download legitimate trials of Adobe Photoshop and Macromedia Flash from Softonic.

Microsoft has installed a panic button into UK editions of MSN Messenger and Live Messenger in order to protect kids from online sexual predators. The software behemoth has linked up with the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (CEOP) to add a special button to the chat service, meaning that youngsters are just one click away from making a report to police if they are concerned their online ‘buddy’ is a sex offender.

“We take the safety and security of young people online very seriously,” explains Carrie Bogner, Senior Director, Citizenship, Windows Live. “People can already control who they do and don’t allow onto their Messenger buddy list – the new CEOP tab launched today is another safety feature that will make Windows Live and MSN Messenger safer still.”

“Behind the ‘report abuse’ button will sit police and intelligence officers who have been specially trained to tackle child sex abuse. We will tell you how to capture information and how to seize online discussions and then proactively do all we can to track down the perpetrator,” he explained.

What’s more, through the icon and link to the CEOP web site, users from anywhere in the world can access the Virtual Global Taskforce (VGT) – an international alliance of law enforcement agencies – of which the CEOP Centre is the UK’s representative. Hopefully this will ensure that more Net perverts are snared and exposed and make using a computer a safer past-time for children.

If, like the Softonic Team, you spent your wonder years in the company of moustachioed plumbers and blue hedgehogs then Console Classix is the perfect vehicle to transport you back to those times. The application puts a new spin on emulators such as MAME by allowing you to download and play games for the NES, SNES, Atari, Genesis and Master System legally, rather than having to creep around the Net’s dirty side streets looking for dodgy ROMs.

Getting into the action takes just a few moments and involves nothing more than loading the program selecting a console then picking a game from the list. The app then fetches the game via the Net and you’re ready to start jumping on mushrooms or punching aliens. The list of games is immense and you could have hours of fun just reading it and recalling those nights spent button-bashing in your bedroom.

Ultimately, the downside of Console Classix is that you need to pay a $5 per month charge to access Genesis, Super Nintendo and Master System games. However, if you’ve ever owned a NES or an Atari 2600 then you’ll realize that this isn’t such a problem due to the massive back catalogue of classics such as Paperboy, Super Mario Bros and Duck Hunt. Of course there are a few stinkers on the list (Back to the Future should never have been made into a game) but finding the long-forgotten gems makes using Console Classix a real dream.