If you work in design, illustration or publishing you tend to need new fonts frequently, even if you have a few favorites. It’s always nice to discover new fonts as you might find a design that you particularly like and that you can use for a specific project. In my opinion, the best fonts are the ones created by independent designers, who take time to really craft something that stands out from the rest. But it’s not always easy to find them. Let’s face it, most font packs also have to be bought, because you know somebody has spent some time and effort creating them. That’s why it’s always great to find lists of free fonts to download.

I found one today, on Free Mac Fonts, which is organized alphabetically and easily has hundreds of fonts to download. All are saved as .sit files, which can only be opened up on Mac. Instead of downloading like crazy until you don’t know which one is which and where to save them all, I suggest you download a font manager to handle them. Luckily there are a lot to choose from.

Typeset is great to preview and print out lists of fonts, FontAgent Pro has Photoshop CS3 and handles large sets of fonts while Suitcase offers its own Font Doctor repair tool and auto-activation with FontSense. Try them out and see which one you feel more comfortable working with. Once you’ve made up your mind, you can start grabbing those fonts online.

Think your wallpaper looks bad? Wait till you’ve looked at the selection Macenstein came up with. I’ve rarely seen a bad wallpaper on a Mac, first because the default ones generally look pretty, and second because Mac users tend to be very concerned with the general appearance of their machine.

Lack of taste, yet, is everywhere. Macenstein’s list is a perfect example. Among the 21 different wallpapers chosen, you’ll find a strangely ’swastika’ looking crop circle, a seedy casino billboard, and a PowerMac surrounded by two ladies in bikini. Some have gone for the celebrity endorsement style, although in a very awkward way, like you’ll see with the Jake Gyllenhaal and the Dawson’s Creek wallpapers. Worst of all though are the wallpapers that fit in an Apple motto or logo with an image that has absolutely nothing to do it with such as Superman, an Indian chief or a picture of Nelson Mandela and a ‘Think Black’ motto.

I hope you are not twisted enough to actually dare use one of these wallpapers. If you really want a beautifully designed desktop background, I suggest turning to UsingMac’s list of 90 wallpapers, all which are discreet variations on the Apple logo itself, with varying colors, viewpoints and contrasts. The bottom of the list pays hommage to the Leopard platform with different takes on the feline creature. A universe apart from the ones mentioned before. With the hordes of Apple crazy designers out there you’re guaranteed to find great looking material from people that love the operating system. It’s hard to pick out a favorite, but my preferences probably go to the Apple Vortex, Crashed Apple and Flaming White Apple.

Anyway, take a look at both lists and see if there’s any wallpaper you’d fancy putting up on your Mac.

Windows: If you want to keep your system in perfect shape, look no further. Mz Ultimate Tweaker features a complete collection of tweaks and tools you can use to improve the computer’s performance in many different aspects with a minimum effort: tweak Windows, boost CPU and RAM, optimize the Registry and more!

Mac: Need to erase a program and all associated files? Easy, just drag and drop the application onto the AppDelete icon. This application will find all associated files for you, after which it’s just a case of selecting what you want to keep or not. And so you don’t commit mistakes AppDelete keeps a log of everything you’ve removed.

Pocket PC: If you cannot stand to be away from your digital illustration tools then check out this fabulous Pocket PC application. Vspainter lets you transform yourself into some sort of 21st Century Van Gogh, allowing you to accessing advanced design and illustration tools from the palm of your hand. The customisable interface makes it very easy to set up your own workspace.

Windows: I guess you already know GIMP, the popular open-source image editor. The good news is that now you can take GIMP anywhere with you with Portable GIMP, a special version of this powerful photo editing software that has been specifically developed to be installed and run from a removable USB memory device.

Mac:  After playing around with WireTap Studio for a while I’ve found it to be an excellent application to record anything on your Mac. The program captures any hardware or software sound and includes a basic yet intuitive editor to clean up your tracks. You can save to any popular audio format and then send the track to your iPhone or iPod or share via email. Highly recommended.

Symbian: Do you ever find yourself constantly repeating things to your friends only for them to turn around and say “yeah, but you’ve told me that before”? Total Recall allows you to record mobile phone calls with the push of a button, saving them as audio files in either WAV or AMR files, so you never forget a conversation again!

Windows: If you’d like to create your own 3D animations but it seems too difficult for you, Houdini Apprentice is the tool you’re looking for. This application lets you design and create professional-looking animation, thanks to its wide array of tools and effects.

Mac: Are you a big fan of the GTD management method? EasyTask Manager allows you to handle your tasks and projects the GTD way. The application offers a clear interface and all the GTD terminology so you can collect, process, organize, review and do what you need to do in the shortest time possible. Beware though, once you get into GTD, you’ll start to see the world as tasks!

Phones: Everyone’s favorite mobile phone game is back, yet this time packed with more features. CrazySoft Snake Deluxe serves up great graphics, new enemies and more levels that you could ever wish for. If you want to compete with other users, there’s even an online mode available. A classic, and well worth having on your phone.

It was always on the cards that a software giant like Adobe would eventually launch themselves into the world of online Desktop Publishing, especially in view of their pioneering development of Web 2.0 in for form of Adobe Air.

Acrobat.com is a new set of office applications recently launched by Adobe to get a foothold in this rapidly expanding software field currently dominated by the likes of Google Docs and Windows Office Live (Incidentally, why do Microsoft now have to tag anything new they come up with as “Live”? Can they not be a bit more creative in the naming of their online office apps?).

When you enter the site, it’s clear that Adobe have decided to base their suite on Flash which as we all know, can be very cumbersome and slow sometimes but it certainly looks slick. You are presented with a collection of online apps including Buzzword (for word processing), Adobe Share (for file sharing) and Adobe ConnectNow which allows you to share your screen with anyone. In fact, ConnectNow is a brilliant online conferencing app that assigns a room for all users to log on. On the downside, there doesn’t seem to be any presentation or spreadsheet tools such as PowerPoint and Excel and so it’s safe to say that Acrobat.com seems to be aiming more at helping people share and collaborate on projects rather than produce original pieces of work.

There are some definite reasons to be impressed by Acrobat.com. Buzzword gives you a generous 5GB of space for sharing documents and PDF conversions are so quick and easy that I’d never use a third party app for that again. The PDF converter can convert up to 5 files of 200MB each at the same time and it’s lightning fast. If they do choose to add a presentation and spreadsheet application, Google and Microsoft may well find themselves with a major player to contend with.

Windows XP includes three color schemes you can choose from to customize the system’s native visual theme, namely blue, silver and an olive green that nobody I know has ever used. But what if you grow tired of this theme? You can download additional styles from many different online resources, and use them to give your XP a fresh look.

The problem comes when these themes don’t come from official Microsoft sites and are not signed by the Redmond firm. This doesn’t mean they’re dangerous at all; it’s just that they have been created by third-party designers who don’t work together with Microsoft. These themes therefore are not signed for Windows, and don’t work properly: they show glitches, dark spots and shadows that end up ruining the final appearance.

So if you want your newly downloaded themes to look perfect on Windows XP, you need to patch the uxtheme.dll file first. Simply download the UXTheme Multi-Patcher tool and run it. Your Windows theme will go back to a basic, gray design and you’ll eventually see this window:

Press the Cancel button (and the Yes button on the following dialog window), go back to the UXTheme Multi-Patcher interface and click on OK. Then restart your system and you’ll be ready to apply whatever visual theme you prefer, signed or not. See how my Windows XP looks like with the Vistamizer style!

Windows: after months of development, a bunch of betas and a couple of RC versions, Firefox 3 is finally here. The latest version of this great browser includes many exciting new features: a revamped interface, an optimized bookmark manager, a powerful address bar with search capabilities and greatly improved managers for downloads and add-ons.

Mac: To this day Azureus, now also known as Vuze, still remains one of the best Bittorrent clients for Mac.  Multiple downloads, advanced seeding rules and adjustable disk cache are just some of the many many features that it offers. If you want to get your hands dirty with Bittorrent, Azureus is the client to have.

Symbian: Why not do something a bit special with the pictures on your phone today? PanoMan allows you to make and view panorama images on your mobile phone. The innovative, fully automatic stitching-algorithm of PanoMan composes the captured photos to an impressive panorama, in realtime and up to 360°!

Gimp is one of the most popular free open source image editors around and quite rightly - it’s remarkably powerful and easy to use for a free image editor. However, those Mac users used to the the luxurious surrounds of Photoshop probably have a hard time a) using a program called “Gimp” to edit their work and b) using the rather amateurish interface and weird naming conventions that Gimp uses.

If you wish you could combine the two in someway then you should definitely checkout Gimpshop. Gimpshop emulates the look and feel of Photoshop remarkably well and changes all those weird Gimp labels such as “convolve” and changes it into the more familiar Adobe Photoshop term of “blur/sharpen”. In fact, the program renames and reorganized almost all of GIMP’s tools, options, windows, and menus to closely resemble Adobe Photoshop’s menu structure and naming conventions. In addition, many of the menu options and even whole menus have been recreated to faithfully reproduce a Photoshop-like experience.

Of course, Gimpshop is no replacement for Photoshop in terms of functionality but it does a pretty impressive job looks wise. At the moment, the latest version is only available for Mac and Linux but the developer assures that a Windows release is imminent. However, Windows users can still enjoy older versions of Gimpshop here.

Windows: Photoshop is surely a great photo editor, but when all g you want to do is some basic image retouching, then Pos Free Photo Editor is probably a better choice. This free, easy editor lets you enhance your pictures in a snap, mainly changing focus and color. You can also create amazing collages on paper and share them to show off your photos.
Mac: Gluestick is a little graphics editor perfect for creating your own icons. The app comes with a very complete set of Mac icon templates and lets you add both text and image layers. You’ll be able to work with color, shadows, zoom and set the position and size of your icon. Gluestick comes with a wooden background but you can change it to any other picture of your choice.

Pocket PC: If you want wireless but don’t fancy buying a wireless router, or if you’re trying to establish a connection away from home then get a load of WMWifiRouter. As the name suggests, the program transforms your Pocket PC into a mobile router for wireless Internet access. The free software utilises the UMTS or EDGE protocols to link up with others connected via wireless devices.

Windows: Are you tired of your music playlists? Try online radio instead! With Phonostar you can tune in to more than 4,000 free online radio stations and podcasts worldwide and enjoy many different kinds of music and other content. The program includes a powerful search tool and even lets you record whatever you’re listening to as MP3 files.

Mac: PTLens is an excellent application to correct distorted images. The program will allow you to apply fisheye effect, modify perspective, chromatic aberration and vignetting. PTLens also lets you correct barrel-pincushion distortion on a wide range of camera models. Although it comes as a standalone app you also get plugins for Photoshop and Aperture and an external editor for Lightroom in the installer. Essential for photographers!

Windows Mobile Smartphone: Bored of the same old mobile puzzle games? Then get hold of Shift, in which you have to join up the colored faces to score points. The interesting difference between this one and games like Tetris, is that all the blocks move in one lump, making for a challenging experience.

Windows: eMule is a great program to share files but it’s not that good when it comes to managing torrents. This is why Torenkey was born: to provide an eMule clone created by the same developers, but which handles torrent downloads in a more convenient way, also achieving a higher speed.

Mac: Want to have your own website but don’t know anything about design or coding,? Don’t panic. Using RapidWeaver you can get your own site up in minutes. Choose one of the great themes available, enter your own text and images and publish to your own FTP or .Mac account. RapidWeaver offers a simple interface and flexible customizing of PHP, XHTML and CSS.

Pocket PC: If you’re a fan of classic games like Space Invaders or Glaxian, you’ll simply love Distant Galaxies. The game sees you assume the role of a spaceship that must blast other alien craft into oblivion. Watch out, because the amount of baddies in this one is immense. Oh, and watch out for the bosses - they’re mighty tough!

You don’t have to put up with the same old boring icons all the time. In fact, if you look around, you’ll find there are many sites out there where you can find all sorts of original icon sets to freshen up your desktop.

Take deviantart. One of the most vibrant online communities for artists it showcases all sorts of works, from icon sets to photography, flash or artisan crafts. deviantart is a great place to go and pick up a new screensaver, wallpaper or icon set, as most of the things you find are also completely free and made by extremely talented artists.

You could really spend hours digging around in all the categories that make up deviantart, especially giving that new items are constantly being added. If you’re looking for top notch icon sets I recommend taking a look at the selection made by Noupe. The online resource for web developers has built up an impressive list of 40 amazing icon sets.

You’ll find many icons specifically for Mac, such as those for the iPhone or for Leopard, but their selection also includes a few sets for Adobe products, with many stunning adaptations of the sober icons that Adobe released with their CS3 series. I also quite liked some of the more original sets like Oxygen, which consists of bubbles covering very minimalistic icons, or the Yoritsuki set of Japanese styled logos. For PC users, I recommend the Windows Icons V1 set, with its rounded, shiny and bright new icons that could actually make a Mac user envy your XP or Vista PC.

Following the trend of other software companies that launch their new products in beta before the final version arrives, Adobe has published the first betas of their upcoming CS4 suite.

Unfortunately not all the Adobe-Macromedia applications are available at this point. Only Dreamweaver CS4 (Windows/Mac), Fireworks CS4 (Windows/Mac) and Soundbooth CS4 (only Mac) have been released to the public in order to let users test the new functionalities and, at the same time, provide some feeback if necessary.

The three new betas offer quite an array of new features. Dreamweaver for example now includes integration with Subversion support for Adobe AIR authoring and a new code navigator - all perfectly wrapped up in a totally revamped user interface – together with the so called Live View mode, with which you can view your web pages under real browser conditions while still having access to the code.

Fireworks also boasts a redesigned interface as well, along with CSS and image export, PDF export and AIR authoring as well to create your Adobe AIR apps in Fireworks and deploy them directly to HTML, CSS or Flash.

Last but not least, Soundbooth features support for multitrack sound editing, plus the ability to preview MP3 compression settings before saving and an enhanced Soundbooth Score workflow.

Unfortunately there’s a catch: these CS4 beta versions let you test the programs only for 48 hours (way too strict, in my opinion). This ridiculously reduced trial period can be extended up until the final version comes out, but only if you’re a registered CS3 user. Otherwise you’ll have to make good use of those 48 hours if you want to fully test the new Adobe CS4 betas.

Firefox is known to be highly customizable, but that doesn’t just go with add-ons and search engines, as you can also set up all sorts of themes to make it look a bit more snazzier. Although I’m happy enough with the default Firefox look (and I really like the new one in version 3), I admit I’ve tried quite a few over all the years I’ve been using the Mozilla browser. A while back, I talked about the top 30 Firefox themes and listed some that we really enjoy here at Softonic.

This time, and after reading a post from CyberNet, I thought it would be nice to talk about the different Mac themes you can find for Firefox. The best ones are listed on the Firefox Add-ons page and you don’t need to have a Mac to install them, as the majority also work on PC. Most of them look pretty slick and offer the clear, grey feel you will find in a Mac desktop.

There are 50 different Mac themes for Firefox to be found on the Add-ons page, so I thought I would cut out the hard work for you and select the best ones. One excellent theme designer I found is Aronnax, who develops the GrApple series, in which you will find Delicious (Blue), Yummy (blue) and Eos Pro. These offer a very similar design as that of Apple’s Safari, but with little tweaks here and there.

Another one I enjoy, this time from another user, is Leopardstripe-Revised. As the name suggests this theme has a Leopard feel to it, so you can pretend you have the latest Mac OS even if you don’t. FoxDie Safari is another smart theme and which comes in three tones: dark, grey and white, with, like for the GrApple series, a look very reminiscent of Safari. You should also check out iFox SMooth and its rounded corners and light grey tones. macfox II graphite also offers a clean aqua-style look.

Finally, if you can’t wait having Firefox 3 yet worry about the stability of the current Release Candidate (RC1), how about setting up Proto for Mac OS X 1.0?