JaBack 8.17-Back up your files with ease

Backups are increasingly important in an age of huge hard drives and large amounts of data that if lost, could be disasterous.

You can automate backups of your important data, files and folders to be saved immediately into ZIP format. The advantage of this is that you don’t need any special software to unzip backups - simply use WinZip or WinRAR. Alternatively, the program supports the backing up of files to a remote location via FTP or options to Email it to your mail server. You can schedule backups so you don’t need to worry about remembering to backup your more important data. The danger of this is that if the backup fails, you may not be made aware of the problem. Fortunately, the program e-mails you if this happens so you don’t have to worry about bad or half done backups. You can change the date and time of filenames for archiving plus also copy files and directories using wildcards on schedule. This is useful if you need to specifiy a specific date for a backup that has to be performed on the same date or day every week or month.

Scheduled backups and compressed output files that can be opened in any ZIP application, JaBack is a solid backup solution.

Download JaBack 8.17 in Softonic

PhotoME 0.79R17-Clearly view all the EXIF information from your photos

This summer, I went crazy with my digicam and took more than a thousand photos in a two month period. It’s great to record so many memories, but when it comes to remembering when I took the picture, where I was, what time it was and who I was with, etc. I struggle somewhat. PhotoME is designed to alleviate this problem by giving you a platform to easily view and edit the meta data in your image files (i.e. the information that your digital camera automatically create whenever you take a picture).

The app reads photos in JPEG, TIFF, and RAW formats, and is enough to cover most modern cameras thanks to RAW support for all the major manufacturers. The program provides a solid interface for reading and managing this data, although the sorting capabilities don’t quite match up to the likes of ACDSee or Irfanview, in my opinion. I really liked the ability to export EXIF information in different formats though, and this feature is perfect for putting detailed information about your shots onto the Web.

Download PhotoME 0.79R17 in Softonic

Creative 1.0-Easily apply a sketch effect to any image

You don’t always need a massive app like Adobe Photoshop to apply a certain effect to your pictures. Sometimes it’s enough with something like Creative.

Creative is a simple tool that lets you apply very original effects to your photos, in such a way that they look like outlined sketches. The effect not only achieves an eye-catching result, but also turns bitmap images into scalable drawings that can be easily printed in large sizes to use on posters, t-shirts and the like.

All you have to do is open up any image in Creative and the effect will be applied immediately. You can then use the built-in sliders to adjust the settings and fine-tune the result. Creative also lets you easily colorize the image, and includes a wide color palette for that aim. Finished graphics can be saved in a variety of formats: PDF, GIF, PNG and even SVG.

Creative is easy to use and produces attractive results, but the program still has room to improve, especially in usability. There’s no option to undo changes and images are hard to manage within the interface.

With Creative you can apply and customize a nice sketch to any image and transform it into a scalable graphic.

Download Creative 1.0 in Softonic

EditPlus 3.10-EditPlus text and HTML Editor for Windows

Download EditPlus 3.10 in Softonic

LimeWire Basic 5.0.11.0-The world’s fastest P2P file-sharing application, updated

This is the review for the latest release of the most popular peer to peer filesharing application. Current LimeWire users will notice the radical redesign, bringing it aesthetically up to date.

Like Vuze before it, LimeWire appears to be encouraging legal downloads with the LimeWire Store. The library is so far a little limited compared to competitor download stores, but we expect this will expand.

Otherwise it’s business as usual on LimeWire, but with a much simplified and cleaner interface. Because it’s a new release, there are still some bugs, but the basic file sharing functions as well as ever. The new design makes scanning your search results much easier, and downloading files is totally intuitive.

The inbuilt player is still unintrusive and useful for checking audio and video files, but no more. LimeWire goes out of it’s way to check you are aware of the legal implications of illegal filesharing, on installation you have to agree no to infringe copyright, and if you download a file for which LimeWire can’t find a license you will be warned and can stop or continue at your discretion.

The friends function has been much improved. You can sign in with your Gmail, Jabber or LiveJournal accounts, and share files between any of your friends there who are also on LimeWire. This is much easier than tapping out IP addresses, and if enough of your friends use LimeWire, it could become great community sharing tool.

LimeWire searches remain within the P2P network, but you can open torrent files with it, and it functions very well as a torrent download client. This is not the most advertised feature of LimeWire, which may a way of keeping legal challenges at bay, but it’s a shame that you can’t search for torrents within the program.

The official release of LimeWire 5.0 makes for a much improved P2P experience.

Download LimeWire Basic 5.0.11.0 in Softonic

VMware Workstation 6.5.1.126130-Want to have several operating systems working at once?

Download VMware Workstation 6.5.1.126130 in Softonic

Tag Clinic 4.3.8.6-Tag editor/file renamer for MP3, WMA, OGG, APE, FLAC, MPC, & VQF files

The idea behind Tag Clinic is simple; a program that will make editing or reformatting your MP3 tags a quick and painless experience. In truth though, what you get is an excellent solution that has been so packed with features that at times it is unnecessarily complex to use.

Although it’s far from bloated in terms of the strain it puts on your processor Tag Clinic loses points for the sheer quantity of options that are presented to the user on the main interface. The design of the interface does you no favors either and the glut of buttons littering the three-windowed menu only serves to confuse you.

Once you finally manage to find the directory containing your music you can begin to experience the powerful features of Tag Clinic. There is a huge number of options for interacting with tags, the most advanced of which must be the auto-extract feature, which will look at the file name and use any details from it to fill in the ID3 tag information for titles, artists, albums and tracks. Formatting the text is also a breeze with options to capitalize the first letters or eliminate any spaces from between words.

Although this is a program for editing tags, it seems to be incomplete because of the lack of an internal player and if you want to preview files you must open your default player. We would also like very much to see some kind of CDDB integration that would pull relevant information about albums from the internet repository.

With its direct editing of tag entries, Tag Clinic does offer a very efficient way to edit your music library’s details; However it could do with a major interface re-design and a few more MP3-relevant features to make the experience that bit more user- friendly.

Download Tag Clinic 4.3.8.6 in Softonic

Toribash 3.69-Innovative fighting game where you make the moves

It’s nice when once in a while, a platform fighting game comes along which challenges conventions and adds something a little more interesting to the equation.

Toribash does this and a whole lot more by putting you in control of the type of moves you want to make. This addictive game features everything from Sumo to Kick Boxing and Sword Fighting to Judo. Just about anything is possible in a game where the characters look more like Lego men than real action figures but the amount of moves they can perform is literally infinite. The graphics in fact are a downside in that they’re not exactly very attractive but the gameplay more than makes up for it.

Note that this may not be a game suitable for kids as heads and limbs break off with alarming regularity. The basic aim of the game is to fight an opponent and score points for the amount of damage you inflict. This basically means breaking them into smithereens! The more limbs you break, the more points you get. To gain more points, each joint can be relaxed, contracted, extended or held which is what makes the gameplay so incredibly flexible since there are no set moves. In this demo version, you can only use limited servers plus you can’t earn belts but for $20, you can upgrade to the full version.

If you’re a martial arts fan, or just enjoy breaking limbs, you will love this game but parents should proceed with caution before letting their kids run wild on it.

Download Toribash 3.69 in Softonic

Extra Photo SlideShow Free 6.26-Create custom photo slideshows the easy way

If you want to quickly create a customized slideshow with your favorite photos and nice background music then Extra Photo SlideShow Free is a sound choice.

This program is aimed at people who want to create a nice presentation with their photos, but are not very experienced with software. With Extra Photo SlideShow Free you can create a photo slideshow in three simple steps: choose the photos, pick the background music, select the target format and you’re done.

Of course, there a few more things you can do to customize your slideshow. For instance, you can add a subtitle to each photo, set the time interval between photos, or choose the transition effects from the wide selection offered by the program are some of them.

When your slideshow is ready, you can do a preview before actually producing it. Extra Photo SlideShow Free can save it in different formats (AVI, MEPG, WMV, RealMedia), each of them with various configuration settings. The only drawback is that right after creating the slideshow, the program opens up a webpage with ads about other apps from the same developer – a bit intrusive, in my opinion.

With Extra Photo SlideShow Free you can create fully customized photo slideshows in just a few easy steps.

Download Extra Photo SlideShow Free 6.26 in Softonic

Reallusion iClone Standard 3.03-Create 3D animations with customized characters and environments

iClone is a full-featured 3D animation editor that enables you to create three-dimensional scenes with the program’s library and your own photos.

The program features a slightly overloaded interface that may scare you off if you’re not used to 3D edition environments. Fortunately, iClone includes a few templates and default models you can use in your first projects, while the rest of extra material is only available in the full version.

iClone lets you take control over the whole animation project. You can customize not only the characters and their movements, but also the background and any other objects in the scene, as well as the different camera perspectives and light sources.

All the work in iClone is done through the program’s menus and toolboxes either side of the interface. These menus change according to the tool you select on the top tab bar. Results can be previewed in a handy player, right in the center of the program’s main window. When you’re done, you can easily share your creation because iClone offers quite a few possibilities to export it.

In all, iClone is a complete 3D animation editor, though it may take you some time and effort to learn how to use it and obtain good results.

Download Reallusion iClone Standard 3.03 in Softonic