Installation

The installation file is 28 090KB and the installation is done in just a few easy steps: fist you have to select the default language, then either choose easy or custom install, with the latter allowing you to choose the files that Miro will handle, and the last step is agreeing to the terms and conditions and leaving the “make Ask.com the default search” option selected and agreeing to install the Ask.com toolbar. After you have installed Miro, you will have to set it up: choose if you want Miro to run every time you boot-up and if you want Miro to find all media files on your hard drive; after that you can start using the application.

Ease of use

The application is easy to use and navigate; on your left you will find all the buttons and access all the functions of the Miro guide – you can search for media files and legal torrents, add or remove video and music files to your library, subscribe to podcasts, etc. Although the creators of the application intended to make watching online videos as easy as turning on your TV, we found out that this is not exactly the case – the search is very slow at times and there is no progress bar that indicates that the applications is actually performing any operation, the videos cannot be streamed, but have to actually be downloaded before you can watch them, and the online Miro audio guide requires registration, which is also quite frustrating.

You can easily configure and customize Miro – click File from the menu, then Options and after that open any of the six available tabs if you want to change the default settings.

Miro is a freeware and runs on works on Windows 98, Windows 2000, Windows 2003, Windows NT, Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7, OSX and Ubuntu

[ Download Miro now ]

Installation

The setup file is tiny – 1 968 KB and the installation is quite easy – you can add or leave out some of the options and in less than a minute you will have Google Desktop running on your computer.

Ease of use

Once installed, Google Desktop appears as a side bar on the right hand side of your desktop, but you can dock it to the left as well, or switch its appearance to deskbar or floating deskbar. Right clicking on the sidebar gives you access to all the operations that you might wish to perform as well as the options that you might want to change.

The interface is pretty easy to use – you can search Google right from the sidebar – simply type in the search phrase and press Enter and this will open your default browser with your Google search. You can also add or remove gadgets, configure some of them, turn notifications on or off, write notes that will be automatically saved, etc.

Right clicking on the sidebar and selecting Add gadgets opens a new window with various recommended or Google created gadgets as well as gadgets in different categories such as News, Sports, Technology, Finance and other groups of interest. If you want to use your entire desktop you can minimize the sidebar with a simple click and then bring it back up by right-clicking on the Google Desktop systray icon and selecting the Sidebar option. Google Desktop allows you to change and save your search preferences, your Google account features, and the display options.

Google Desktop is a freeware and runs on Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7

[ Download Google Desktop now ]

Installation

The installation file is quite small – only3045 KB, but Yawcam requires Java Runtime Environment (JRE) 6, Direct X 9 and Windows Media Player 9 or later to be installed on your computer. Once you get that out of the way, the installation is a smooth sailing.

Ease of use

The interface is very simple and therefore easy to use and the most widely used options can be found under the “file” submenu; many of Yawcam’s settings are configurable – you can change the default language, select camera, change the output folder, configure the FTP server settings, add password, enable the FTP upload scheduler, and tweak many other options; from the application menu you can also access the online help via your web browser.

Since Yawcam has a streaming feature, motion detection and built-in HTTP server, it can be easily used as a security application by streaming real-time to the web or uploading still images, captured with your cam, to your FTP server at a given interval; Yawcam supports three image file formats – JPG, PNG and GIF, can add time stamps to the captured still images and has been translated to more than 15 languages.

The application works well with all Direct X compatible webcams and video devices, which pretty much includes all the latest USB cams. If you want to be able to use some of the advanced options, you might have to change some of your router settings; the application can be minimized to the taskbar and when the motion detection is on, you can even make its icon hidden.

Yawcam is a freeware and works on Windows All

[ Download Yawcam now ]

Installation

Vuze is easy to install, but the latest release comes with a few add-ons such as toolbar, Outlook plug-in, and a default browser search option, which you might wish to omit from your installation. Depending on your firewall settings, you might get a prompt right after the installation letting you know that some of the program’s features have been blocked – make your selection from the two options (private or public computer) and click the Allow access button in order to enable them.

Ease of use

Vuze comes with a built-in browser, which lets you search for, download, and play media files; the interface is easy to use and navigate and a simple three-step guide will show you how to use software right away. The Vuze’s own HD network can be accessed from within the program with a single mouse click and will give you access to comedy and music videos, TV shows, games and other torrents. All features that you might be familiar with in other bittorent clients such as queuing, assigning priorities, starting and pausing the torrents downloads and IP filters can be found here as well. The advanced users and independent content producers, who wish to share their media files, can take advantage of proxy use, different seeding and downloading management rules, trackers, torrent creation wizards and other options.

All the torrents that are currently being downloaded or seeded are neatly organized in a Media Library, giving you quick access to any of them – right clicking on the torrent will show any additional information that you might need such as elapsed time, estimated downloading time, download speed, number of seeds, etc. The Vuze community forum and blog can be accessed from the main menu and so can the help files, the configuration wizard and tools such as My Tracker, Consoles, Statistics and Transfer Bar.

Vuze is a freeware, cross-platform application and runs on Windows 2000, Windows 2003, Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Windows 7

[ Download Vuze now ]

Installation

Installing the editor is easy, although it takes a while; the wizard will give you an option to choose which components to keep – in order to save some disk space, you might want to deselect the numerous language packages, if you don’t have use for them.

Ease of use

After launching the editor you might get intimidated by all the toolbars, menus and buttons, but the environment is no different than the one that you are likely to find in other similar applications.

The tools are grouped on the left and mouse-over tips will help you figure out what each one of them does, although you should be able to guess their functions by their icon’s shapes.
incscape4

With a few mouse clicks you can open the built-in tutorials or read the online documentation, which will help you understand how to use the editor.

Incscape has all the features that you are likely to ever need: Object creation, Styling Objects, Object manipulation, Operating on paths, Text Support, Rendering, XML tree editor, and many more. However, text support needs to be improved.

Each release of Inscape tries to follow the GNOME Human interface guidelines, which means that the user can use common keyboard shortcuts in order to perform familiar operations, such as Copy, Paste, and Open, Save and other file options. Inkscape uses quite a bit of memory, but so do most vector-based graphic editors.

Inkscape is a freeware and works on Linux, Windows and Mac OS X

[ Download Inkscape now ]

Installation and Setup

Because NoScript is a part of Firefox it’s hard to tell exactly how much disk space and resources it uses, although as we’ve felt no noticeable difference we’d say the anecdotal evidence points towards ‘very little’. NoScript will require some setting up depending on the level of security you want it to provide, and like any Firefox extension, installation will require a reset of the browser, but not the operating system.

Ease of Use

NoScript works by disabling JavaScript and Java, blocking it from your browser before it executes rather than waiting for you to download before scanning like most virus checkers. The obvious problem is that there’s plenty of JavaScript around on the net and the vast majority isn’t malicious.

Luckily, NoScript does everything it can to strike a good balance between security and usefulness. Firstly, there’s an online maintained list of sites it doesn’t block at all, featuring well known email systems as well as most search engines and Wikipedia. Even if a site isn’t listed though, you can permanently or temporarily allow access with the push of a button thanks to NoScript’s action bar that sits on the bottom of your screen.

Although Firefox is generally considered to be a very safe option when it comes to browsers, that doesn’t make it invulnerable. NoScript alone is capable of blocking many of these exploits and for this reason it’s more than recommend you give it a try. Viruses have moved on from disk and email attachments and now any site could potentially cause you a major headache. NoScript can prevent this from ever happening, and for the amount of time it takes to download and install, it’s a very powerful piece of software.

[ Download NoScript Today! ]

Installation and Setup

Launchy installs to around 12MB of space and uses around 10MB of ram. It can be called up using a hotkey of your choice, although generally it’s quite happy to run in the background. If you plan on using the program a lot however, you can get Launchy to run at start-up. This is generally the best way to use the program as having to search to run it certainly defeats the point.

Ease of Use

Launchy provides users with a quick and easy way to find program files. The idea is that you simply type the first few letters of the name and Launchy quickly searches through all your files to find the most relevant program.

Launchy goes beyond that though. The program also searches through your IE and Firefox bookmarks, popular sites and also has a built in calculator. If Launchy doesn’t find what you’re looking for, it will turn the search into a Google search instead. This might seem like it wouldn’t work that well, but the program is actually very intelligent and doesn’t often get things wrong.

The program comes with a variety of skins from the functional default to some great looking, more interesting designs. For such a simple program Launchy comes with a huge array of different options allowing you to control where and what is searches and how it displays on the desktop.

If you’ve got Windows 7 and indexing turned on, you might find that Launchy doesn’t do a lot more than Windows can already achieve. For everyone else though, Launchy is a must have application that could save you a lot of time and effort.

[ Download Launchy Today! ]

Installation and Setup

TightVNC comes in two flavours, the client and the server. The server will need to be installed on any computer that you want to access. You can set it as a Windows service if you don’t want to worry about starting up the program each time. You can also set an individual password. The viewer is installed on each computer you want to be able to access the server.

TightVNC normally uses up about 40-80MB when in use. Both programs combined take up about 2MB of space.

We also recommend downloading the DFMirage driver which will improve TightVNC’s ability to display special effects and generally speed up the frame rate.

Ease of Use

Business users might look past TightVNC as it’s not as fully featured as its commercial peers, but TightVNC is actually a very stable program that’s great for remote administrating — providing you stick with basic tasks.

The interface of the program is a little tricky as it relies mostly on some rather vague buttons and hotkeys. Luckily there isn’t that much that needs to be configured. After the first few uses you can load TightVNC, input a password and have the remote computer appear full screen on your desktop without having to worry about any further configuration.

There were a fair amount of visual anomalies in the program, especially when doing things like dragging the mouse and scrolling using the middle mouse button, but overall the result was good and we were easily able to browse the web, check emails, change settings and install programs from another computer using the program.

TightVNC could be even better if a few bugs were ironed out, but overall it’s great for light home use.

[ Download TightVNC Today! ]

Installlation and Setup

MozyHome Free offers 2GB of backup space for free, although you do have to sign up with the service using a valid email address. You’ll also need to give out a small amount of personal information. Once this is done, MozyHome uses about 20MB of RAM on idle. When it’s transferring, you can adjust the program however you want to control the speed of your backups and the amount of resources it uses to transfer them. MozyHome takes up around 20MB of space, fully installed.

Ease of Use

MozyHome offers quite a complete package for system backup, something that has been both expensive and complicated in the past. Generally, most software that offers backup does so only to other fixed media, like another hard drive, a portable drive or a optical media like DVDs. Mozy transfers your files to a secure server that uses encryption to protect your data. You can then easily transfer them back if anything goes wrong or files are accidently deleted.

MozyHome offers a very simple startup wizard that quickly scans your system and recommends what to back-up. On our test sytem, it didn’t catch the majority of pictures and documents outside of the ‘My Documents’ and ‘My pictures’ folder, but you can add any files you wish to backup manually, as well.

Uploading takes varying lengths of time, but we’re pleased to report MozyHome quite easily maxed out our upload speed of 10 Mbps without breaking a sweat.

Offering a free 2GB of space — which is enough to protect hundreds of your most valuable documents and many of your favourite pictures — means there’s no excuse not to give Mozy a go. You never know, one day you might be thankful you did.

Differences Between Free and Professional

MozyHome works in exactly the same way as the free client but offers you unlimited backup space for just under $5 a month. There is also a professional version of the software available, aimed at businesses.

[ Get Mozy Online Backup - 2GB Free ]

Installation and Setup

7-Zip will install in seconds and use only 3MB of space, which is perfect for a program that you’ll likely keep on your computer at all times. Idle, 7-zip uses virtually no resources, although it uses a fair about of CPU and RAM when it’s extracting or compressing files. This is to be expected though, and the program doesn’t use significantly more or less resources to work than any other leading compression programs.

Ease of Use

7-Zip – like most compression formats- make bigger files much smaller. It can also combine several files into a single file to make transferring them easier. For example, if you had two word documents, a presentation, 20 pictures and music file, you could convert all the files to the 7-Zip and come out with a single file that’s smaller than the others combined. That file can then be extracted later. The compression works best on things that haven’t already been compressed, so files like MP3 and JPG that already use compression won’t be reduced in size as much as others.

7-Zip offers a variety of features including Outlook integration, Password Protection and Multi Volume support. You can also integrate the program with Windows which means you can access the programs features through your right click menu in explorer rather than loading up the program each time.

The interface is nothing outstanding but the overall design of the program makes sense, and due to its integration features you’ll likely be using the program combined with Windows rather than on a standalone basis, at any rate.

Various sites around the world offer files compressed with 7-Zip, so why not give it a go?

[ Download 7-Zip Today! ]

Installation and Setup

Thunderbird doesn’t suffer from the same memory usage problems as Firefox so it’s actually a very lightweight program. In our tests it required around 50% less RAM than Windows Live Mail, another popular free client. The program installs to around 24MB of space. It can import details from other popular email programs such as Outlook, which will save you time during the initial setup although adding new accounts is a fairly quick process regardless.

Ease of Use

Thunderbird 2 can function as simply as you need it to and if you just want a program that can receive and send emails using HTML or plain text formatting, download attachments and create folders, it’s as good as any other program. The difference in email clients is similar to that of browsers however; it’s their unique features that really make or break the program.

In this arena, Thunderbird seems well equipped. You can tag your messages not only with standard ‘important’ tags but with your own customized options, so you can set which emails are from work or home, which ones have to do with a certain project and which ones you need to deal with later in the week. If you get a lot of emails or use the same email address for your work and personal life, this can be a very useful feature.

Another intelligent feature is quick access to popular email services that mean you can setup an account in a few seconds if you use Gmail or .Mac – Hotmail is absent from this list due to the way Microsoft run their mail servers and not due to any oversight from Thunderbird.

There are plenty of other features available that we don’t have space to run through, but even if you’re not happy with the default feature set you can always download different extensions and themes to increase the programs functionality and appeal.

Thunderbird is easily one of the most flexible and useful programs available for managing, searching, and organising your emails. If you’ve not tried it yet, give it a go – if there’s anything you find the program can’t do, you can probably find an extension that will make it happen.

[ Download Thunderbird 2 Today! ]

Installation and Setup

AbiWord installs to around 20MB and although memory usage will depend on how many documents you have open and the complexity of those documents, we found that AbiWord performed close to what OpenOffice Writer can achieve – certainly more lightweight than Microsoft Word.

Ease of Use

At its heart, AbiWord is a no-nonsense word processor program that offers all of the basic document editing tools that most people will require. It provides a feature set that makes it more powerful than most native editing software but less powerful than the commercial rivals from Microsoft and Apple, although this is no bad thing in many respects.

Visually, AbiWord is probably at its weakest. The interface is clean but rather unattractive and it lacks the style many people have gotten used to from more recent office suites. Although style isn’t important to some, the program does look somewhat dated which is a shame considering that underneath the rather generic interface lays a capable word processor.

All of the important factors such as compatibility with Word documents and the ability to export work in a variety formats are included in the program. It’s worth noting that the newest release of AbiWord isn’t compatible with the docx format used in Microsoft Office 2007, although the format itself hasn’t taken off in many cases due to its own incompatibility with previous versions of Office.

AbiWord offers all of the things you should need in any small business or home word processor such as word count, spell check, headers and footers and much more besides. Surprisingly for a free suite there are also templates available with the default installation.

Although its graphical abilities are lacking compared to other office suites and there are a notable amount of advanced features absent, AbiWord makes up for it by being lightweight and completely free.

[ Download AbiWord Today! ]

Another browser? If you’re like us, you might getting a little disillusioned by all the recent browser releases and update that all essentially look the same and do the same things. Flock is different, however. It actually has a niche that won’t appeal to everyone, but if you one of the millions who enjoys using social networking to keep up with friends, family the world, it could be your new favourite browser.

Installation and Setup

Flock allows you to customise your setup a little but you should have no problem using the automatic install instead. Just watch out as it likes to change Flock to your default browser which might be a step you are unwilling to take when trying it out. Importing your settings and bookmarks from either Firefox or IE is easy and requires and couple of clicks during the install. Memory wise Flock uses about the same amount of RAM and system resources as Firefox and installs to 35MB of space (about 30% more than standard Firefox).

Ease of Use

If you noticed us mentioning Firefox quite a bit it’s because Flock is based on the Firefox 3 core and will function a lot like Firefox as well as keep the main features and speed of Mozilla’s browser. Indeed, one of the main bonuses of Flock is that it can use Firefox add-ons which give it a massive amount of flexibility and power out of the box.

The main idea of Flock however is to provide users with a Firefox that has a distinct focus towards social networking sites like Myspace, Facebook and Twitter. Once you’ve configured all your various accounts and sidebar in the browser integrates all of your social networking sites and lets you keep up with your friends as you browse. There are already several programs that do a similar thing available but most are IM clients – Flock is the first to integrate them into the main framework of a browser.

Flock provides social networkers a great reason to use the browser and if you’re even remotely into the idea of the browser that can watch your facebook statuses and tweets, you should give Flock a try.

Download Flock Now! ]]> http://software-today.com/flock-review-and-download/feed 0 http://software-today.com/vlc-media-player-review http://software-today.com/vlc-media-player-review#comments Tue, 26 May 2009 00:09:40 +0000 Wayward http://software-today.com/?p=614 If you’re tired of Windows Media Player, PowerDVD and all the other resource hungry players out there, you might want to take a look at this next review – VLC is hands down the best media player for Windows and Linux. Not only is it free and lightweight, it supports a much wider range of features and codec support than many of it’s peers. We take a look at everything the player offers.

Installation and Setup

VLC on its standard settings installs to around 60MB, but it depends on exactly the installation options you take. Installation is entirely configurable. When running, VLC uses a fair amount of system resources when watching videos – it’s a fairly intensive task. However, VLC is much faster when watching DVDs and HD material than other players, and it’s far better for the battery life of your system, as well.

Ease of Use

Normally we would do a list of all the various supported formats of a media player but really it seems pointless when it comes to VLC – the program will support just about any format you throw at it. There are some minor exceptions but when it comes to things you might try to download from the net – anything from the common XVID and DIVX files to the more niche matroska dual audio format, VLC will run it without any of the messing around with codecs you have to do on other players.

VLC is also happy to run your DVDs will full menu and 5.1 support without any configuration, doing as a good or better than the software that may have come with your DVD drive or computer. It also has a range of options to control the video and sound itself and works great with subtitles.

VLC is an amazing player that allows you to use your computer to watch all of your favourite movies without any hassle at all. For music you might want to choose something with a few more options but for films and video, VLC is unmatched.

Download VLC Today! or the Portable Version