Microsoft have finally launched a first Beta version of the much anticipated Microsoft Office 2010. You can download it from the Microsoft Office website, as long as you have a Live ID (your Hotmail address or Live Messenger account will do the trick).

Microsoft Office 2010 Professional Plus Beta is available in several languages, for both 32-bit and 64-bit systems, and features a few differences from the Technical Preview we tested last July. First of all, the number of apps included in the suite has grown from seven to ten, with Infopath Designer, InfoPath Filler and SharePoint Workspace – the new name for Microsoft Groove.

Secondly, the interface in all the Office 2010 has been slightly redesigned. They still keep the ribbon toolbar, but in a much clearer, cleaner style. Also, the ‘Office’ button has been renamed to ‘File’ and opens up a different – and I’d say much more complete - information pane.

Another important new feature is the ability to share documents online, something that wasn’t implemented in the Technical Preview. You can now save any Word document, Excel spreadsheet or PowerPoint presentation to your SkyDrive account directly from the Share menu. Read the rest of this entry »

Every now and then, you come across a piece of software that genuinely surprises. Normally, the thing that surprises us about such pieces of software is what it does: features and functionalities. QQ doesn’t really do anything new. It doesn’t contain any particularly ground breaking features. It’s an instant messaging client. What’s surprising about QQ is that its network has over 1 billion registered accounts… and unless you’re in contact with China, you probably never heard of it.

Depending on who you believe, QQ is either the #1 or the #3 most popular instant messaging client on the internet. It’s published by QQ.com, which in turn has an Alexa rank of 11. And yes, the fact that this is such a popular app is what makes it so important.

Apart from the fairly generic functions that you’d expect in any IM client, QQ does pack a few features which you won’t find in either Yahoo’s or Microsoft’s offerings. For example: QQ allows you to resume an interrupted download when you’re sharing files with friends. That may not sound particularly exciting but if you consider the stability of networks in parts of China and plenty of other countries, you’ll see that it’s actually essential. Another cool feature included with QQ is a nifty little screen grab tool which you can use while chatting. It even lets you make small screencasts: great for anyone who’s constantly helping friends out with their PCs.

But does that make QQ an MSN killer? Well the answer is: possibly. QQ is already a better designed and more up-to-date client than MSN. What QQ needs is a way to convince Messenger users to jump ship. One way this could be done would be by interacting with the MSN network: I don’t think that would work. But some promotion on American and European websites could well have a major impact.

You can download QQ Messenger from Softonic here, and don’t forget to check out our QQ review, too!

Today I reviewed Speccy, the lastest utility from the Piriform team (the guys responsible for CCleaner, Recuva and Defraggler, all of them great apps). Speccy is a system information tool, that is, a program that analyzes your system and generates a complete report with all its hardware and software features. But it’s not the only one. In fact, taking a quick look at our System Analysis category, you can find a bunch of tools for that same purpose.

Oh, and don’t get me wrong here: knowing the speed of your CPU, your graphics card brand or the size of your hard drive is not something only computer geeks may be interested in. All those details can help you optimize your system, find the right RAM modules when you want to upgrade the computer’s memory and be better informed when trying to sell your PC - or when buying a new one! Here’s a selection of tools to shine some light on your PC’s insides.

• PC Wizard 2009 - Advanced system analyzer with thorough reports and lots of powerful benchmarking tools.
• HWiNFO32 - Obtain detailed information about the hardware installed on your system. Also available as portable app.
• SIW - This utility generates complete reports for hardware, software and network configuration in your system.
• Winaudit - Quick, exhaustive system analysis that includes virtually every detail of your computer configuration.
• Fresh Diagnose - Get a detailed report about your computer’s hardware and software, and benchmark its performance.

Windows: If you need more space but can’t be bothered to buy another external hard drive, try online storage. With SkyDrive Explorer you’ll be able to access your Live SkyDrive free storage from Windows Explorer, just as it it was one more local drive on your computer. All you need is a Windows Live ID, and 25 GB of online free space will be yours for free!

iPhone: If you’re a interested in space exploration, this NASA app for iPhone is a must. This app basically allows you to follow all of NASA’s missions. The main screen lists the missions you can follow, and touching any of them takes you to a description of the mission with a counter for the time elapsed since the mission started.

Mac: Renaming files can be an absolute nightmare if you’re faced with a batch of wrongly-named ones, or recovered files which have had their IDs corrupted. A Better Finder Rename (now updated to version 8.37) is a comprehensive file renaming solution for Mac and can rename huge numbers of files in seconds. A Better Finder Rename allows you to do just about everything you need to rename files.

Lets leave the ‘why would you read a book on your PC?’ question to one side for a moment, and take a look at Amazon’s new free eBook reader:

What you can see is everything Kindle for PC can do. You can insert bookmarks, but not annotations or highlights (like you can on the Kindle device). The library system is basic, although clear and there’s an amazon button that takes you to the shop via your browser. The presentation of text - the important bit - is minimal. You can’t alter font, but can change size and the width of pages. There’s no option to mess around with color or background at all. I was pretty unimpressed with the text, as there are tiny apps like Gargoyle (unfortunately not an ebook reader) that present text in a much more readable form. This just looks like text in MS Word! You can use out-of-copyright eBooks from the Gutenberg project, though, which is good.

Dedicated desktop readers aren’t very common, but there are other options. Check them out after the break - I’ll start at the bottom!

Read the rest of this entry »

Google Reader is the only RSS reader I’ve ever used – except for the ones I’ve had to test and review for Softonic -  and I wouldn’t change it for any other. I simply love all of its features: it works really well, it’s available everywhere as long as you have an Internet connection, it has extensive support for keyboard hotkeys and best of all, it includes some handy sharing features that enable you to easily share interesting articles with friends, workmates or even readers of your blog.

Sharing articles and blog posts in Google Reader is as simple as clicking the Share link below each one of them. If you want to add a personal comment as well, click the Share with note link instead.

These shared items will automatically be added to your public page, a website automatically generated by Google Reader that updates with every story you mark as shared in your feeds. To check all the items you’ve shared so far, simply click Shared items in Google Reader’s sidebar.

But there’s more to this Shared items feed than just displaying a list of selected blog posts. From here you can check how your public page looks like (by clicking the little blue arrows beside the feed’s title), view and edit your Google profile, and also tweak some sharing settings. These settings enable you to decide who can access your shared items, customize the appearance of your public page and find more people to share items with, to name a few. Read the rest of this entry »

Windows: do you need help handling your downloads? Then jDownloader Portable is made for you. This powerful download manager doesn’t require installation and makes the whole process of downloading from file sharing websites much easier and faster. No more pop-up windows, waiting times and hidden download links. Let jDownloader Portable will take care of it!

iPhone: The default battery indicator on the iPhone looks pretty, but it doesn’t really give you much information other than a general idea of how much juice you have left. About Battery delivers a more powerful and advanced way of monitoring battery life on your iPhone. Rather than just give you an overview of the remaining power, the program breaks it down into calculations of the remaining time you have left for certain tasks.

Mac: There are basically two options to run Windows on a Mac - using Boot Camp which involves installing Windows on a separate partition and rebooting it in Windows or, running Windows in a virtual environment such as the one that Parallels Desktop provides. Parallels 5 presents more than 70 new features which allow users to define how much or little Windows they want to see, a new Crystal view mode.

It’s not everyday you get six free Mac applications for free but the team at MacHeist is offering software worth a total of $154 for absolutely nothing over the next 3 days. The applications on offer are ShoveBox, WriteRoom, Twitterific, TinyGrab, Hordes of Orcs and Mariner Write. Note that Mariner Write will only be unlocked once 500,000 users have taken up this special offer so the more that sign-up, the better it is for everyone.

The MacHeist team have become famous for their giveaways. Here’s a quick look at the current offer:

• ShoveBox A clever application for remembering all the things that you don’t have time for while you’re application whether it’s web pages to visit later, PDF’s for later reading or a To-Do list of your daily activities.

• WriteRoom Miss the good old days of typewriters? WriteRoom provides a distraction free writing environment that ensures you focus more on your writing and less on distractions such as Facebook, IM clients and YouTube.

• Twitterific Possibly the pick of the bunch on offer. If I didn’t use Tweetie than I’d definitely consider switching to this slick and well crafted Twitter client which stands out for it’s high level of customization.

• TinyGrab A super quick way of sharing screenshots or funny images you’ve just found on the net. Just select the portion of the screen you want to share, drag it to your menu bar and you instantly receive a URL for sharing it.

• Hordes of Orcs A challenging Tower Defense game where the aim is to defend your village from starving Orcs. If more than 20 make it through your defenses, the Orcs will be having you for breakfast.

• MarinerWrite Mariner Write is a comprehensive Word Processing package that´s simple to use and can even open and edit documents in Word format. If you don’t have Word, it’s a great alternative.

You can see a video of some of the apps in action here. Get yours now before it’s too late!

During the summer, Gmail increased its maximum attachment size to 25MB, up 5MB on its previous limit. Great news, I hear you cry - now you can squeeze a few more photos into that email or send an album in 2 parts rather than 3!

Well yes, you can, but does that mean you should?

One thing you have to remember about email is that it’s old. Really old. Although it mightn’t feel it, email has been around for more than 30 years and, unlike other technologies, it hasn’t been updated much. This doesn’t have much of an impact on our day-to-day use, but like they say over at the Google Operating System blog, “…sending a large attachment via email is relocating using the U.S. Postal Service as your moving company. It is painful, limited, and expensive.” It will get the job done, but it’s not the most efficient way.

So what’s the alternative? Well, if you are in physical contact with your recipient, you could just put the file on a memory stick. Once you follow the basic security principles, it’s a very simple way of transferring data. Obviously, this only works if you are geographically close to the recipient. In fact, email’s ability to overcome this problem is one of the reasons it became so popular. Just because it’s popular, though, doesn’t make it the best, so have a think about using free web hosting services instead. Don’t worry if it sounds complicated - you’ll get the hang of it quickly.

Go to a free hosting site - Mediafire and Hotshare are two well-known ones - and upload the file in question, just like you would attach it to an email. With 200MB of space usually available, it has a significant advantage over the now elderly email. Once it is uploaded, the service will give you a link, which you email to your friend. Your friend clicks on the link, and downloads the file that you uploaded. If it sounds complicated, it’s only because I have detailed every step - do it once or twice and it will become second nature.

Even though it’s not the most efficient way, you might still have your reasons for wanting to send larger files by email. If you do, you’ll need to make them smaller, and there’s two ways of doing this. You can compress (or ‘zip’) them, or divide them into smaller files. Either way, you’ll need a tool to do this, and the recipient will need a similar tool to decompress or re-join. IZArc and 7-Zip are two reliable - and free - file compression and decompression utilities. Likewise, in the area of file splitting, you’ve got plenty of choice. Even though they’re not pretty (and show little imagination in the name stakes), HJSplit and Gsplit are both fuss-free methods of chopping those unwieldy files down to size.

Windows: Do you need to convert any audio or video file? Oxelon Media Converter is the perfect tool for the task. This simple app can convert multiple media files simultaneously, and it works surprisingly fast! Oxelon Media Converter supports dozens of formats and is perfectly embedded with Windows Explorer, which enables you to convert files with one click.

iPhone: Halloween is upon us once again, but if you haven’t got the money or the inclination to go trick or treating this year then check out Spooky Photo Free. This app allows you to make scary scenes out of your photographs. For example, you could put a zombie into a wedding picture, make bats appear in the sky above your house, or add a menacing pumpkin head onto an image of your dog.

Mac: Keychain on Mac does a pretty good job of managing passwords but once you’ve tried 1Password you’ll probably never look back. If you’re tired of making up passwords to access sites or worried that your passwords are not secure enough, it really is invaluable. 1Password creates strong, unique passwords for you, then remembers and restores them all within your web browser.

USB sticks, flash drives, memory keys, pendrives. It doesn’t really matter what you call them, memory sticks are extremely useful creatures. It’s precisely this usefulness, though, that leads to their major weakness: most people use them all the time without a second thought. They swap them between colleagues, lend them to friends and stick them into unfamiliar computers. Is it any wonder they are a major security risk?!

If you are an occasional user of a memory stick, it might be enough to run a context menu scan when you plug it in. Of course, this option has to be facilitated by your regular anti-virus, but most of the top ones, AVG and Kaspersky for example, offer this tool. Just find the memory stick in My Computer, right click, and chose ‘Scan with…’.

If you are a more frequent user, you might want a specific anti-virus that targets memory sticks and USB drives. The trial version of USB Disk Security only offers one option, but it’s a good one - real-time monitoring of your computer for security risks from USB devices. It sits in the taskbar until you connect USB stick and lets you know if it there’s a problem. Read the rest of this entry »

Windows: The quintessential optimization suite for Windows is back! The all-new TuneUp Utilities 2010 has a new redesigned interface and a bunch of new features and improvements that make it even better: Turbo mode, Live optimization, TuneUp desktop gadget, Optimization report and support for Windows 7 in both 32-bit and 64-bit versions.

iPhone: Aside from a jellyfish attack or a sudden downpour, another guaranteed thing to a ruin a day at the beach is an attack by the entire Japanese Imperial Navy. Blood Beach puts you in the unenviable position of a soldier who must take down the entire Japanese WWII fleet alone. You’re holed up on a thin stretch of beach in the Solomon Islands and must take down the waves of planes, boats and foot soldiers landing on the beach.

Mac: Renaming huge numbers of files can be a real pain, especially when you only need to make a few minor changes. Renamer (formerly known as Renamer4Mac) makes it easy to rename a huge number of files at once, in several different ways. One possibility is to search and replace certain components or words, much like using a word processor. Alternatively, you can simply insert or copy over a chunk of text to multiple files.

TuneUp Utilities is one of those programs that improves with every new release. We were particularly eager for its latest version, TuneUp Utilities 2010, because it offers full support for Microsoft’s brand new Windows 7 in both the 32-bit and 64-bit versions. But this isn’t the only new feature in this excellent program. Let’s take a look at all the new functions and improvements we can find in TuneUp Utilities 2010.

Redesigned Interface
The Start Center in TuneUp 2010 has been redesigned. A quick glance is enough to learn about the system’s current status and find out if there’s any problem. A cleaner, more minimalist style makes the program more comfortable and easier to use.

Turbo Mode
When you’re playing your favorite game, you need your computer to offer the highest performance possible. Turbo Mode can help you with that, disabling all superfluous Windows services and background applications with a single click. Read the rest of this entry »

Tom and Elena have already explained how to stream movies from your Mac to a PS3 and an XBox. To complete the series, I’m going to explain how to stream movies from Mac to your Wii. The good news is, it couldn’t be simpler using a nifty little app called Wii Transfer. Wii Transfer not only allows you to stream movies to your Wii, but also photos, music and it even allows you to backup your Wii profiles.

Here is how to in 3 easy steps.

1. Download the Wii internet channel

Fortunately, Nintendo have seen sense and stopped charging $10 for it. The browser is now available for free. Just go to Wii Shopping on the main menu to download it.

2. Convert your videos for streaming

In the main interface, click on the “Movie” tab in the left-hand menu and drag and drop your movie files into it. Wii Transfer will then convert your films into a format the Wii can read so you may have to wait a while for this.

3. Setup sharing

Go back to the “Sharing” tab. You’ll see an IP address like: 10.0.1.197:9000. Enter this into your Wii internet browser. Read the rest of this entry »

In this brave new world of the internet, the planet, we have been told, has shrunk. Yet for Google, it seems old geographical realities still hold true.

Google Voice sounds wonderful, but I’ve heard so much about this amazing service I can’t use that I’m beginning to hate it. And Onebox music search - it sure is lucky no one in Europe listens to music, or we might be a bit annoyed at Google’s new search feature we don’t have. Thanks for making these tools available everywhere, except in Asia, Australasia, Antarctica and Europe. What’s this all about? When did the US become the world?

North America only accounts for 15% of internet users, so when are the majority going to get some of this stuff? Europe’s a bigger market, and just as developed as the US. I’m surprised that a music search service should need any local restrictions - with streaming services like Spotify there are licensing issues, but search?

With Google Voice, obviously there will be differing telecoms law, but Google has presence everywhere and there seems to be no movement at all. As we follow events around the world with complete ease, the idea of waiting months for something just doesn’t fit. So come on Google, there’s a whole world out there, and we don’t like being ignored! One day, you might wake up and find we’re all using Bing.