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 »

There are several ways to create a collage with your digital pictures: doing it yourself from scratch with Photoshop (which obviously requires a certain Photoshop knowledge), using an automated Photoshop action that does almost all the hard work for you or simply turning to easier, more specific collage-oriented tools like Shape Collage.

This awesome program lets you create completely customizable photo collages in just a few minutes, and without any artistic or technical skill required. As long as you know how to select photos from your hard drive, and tweak a few simple configuration settings, you’re good to go. Shape Collage is completely free for personal use, and works on Windows, Mac and Linux.

But if you’re the kind of person who prefers not to install software if there’s a web app that does the same job, we’ve got good news for you: Shape Collage has just launched an online version! Shape Collage Online is a stripped-down version of the desktop app, with less options and reduced functionality, but it works perfectly fine for the occasional photo collage. Just select the photos you want to use in your collage (they must be all online, either as standalone photos or photo galleries), pick a shape for your collage and hit ‘Create’. After a few seconds, your collage will be ready!

Gretel and Hansel is a surprisingly macabre and grizzly take on the classic Brothers Grimm tale. You play Gretel, who becomes alarmed after overhearing her mother planning to send the children away into the dangerous forest!

Presented in really pretty water-colors, with a perfect soundtrack, Gretel and Hansel isn’t particularly complicated (and there’s a walkthrough linked on the game page if you get stuck). It does feature achievements, and some of them feature very dark humor! It’s not a cute kids game, this one.

Check out Gretel and Hansel here.

[Via: IndieGames.com]

The Unity plug-in has produced some impressive browser games, but maybe Lego Star Wars the Quest for R2D2 is the best so far.  It’s basically a 3D hack and slash adventure, but has great graphics, is really smooth and of course has everyone’s favorite Star Wars sound effects. Pressing F puts you in full screen mode, and then you won’t even notice it’s a browser based game. Not so long ago, a game like this would have been perfectly acceptable on a home console, and it’s incredible to see this for free running in Firefox! Play Lego Star Wars the Quest for R2D2 here. The Unity plug-in is available for Windows and Mac.

Ad-Aware has traditionally been a very popular anti-spyware utility for Windows. This is why every time they launch a new version, news spreads quickly over tech blogs across the Internet. Today Lavasoft announced the release of Ad-Aware 8.1 in three versions, two paid ones (Pro and Plus) and one for free, which doesn’t have as many features as the other two, but works perfectly well for basic on-demand malware scanning.

Ad-Aware 8.1 Free protects you from spyware and and rootkits. The program scans your system (with three varieties to choose from: Smart scan, Full scan or Profile scan) and quarantines, removes or repairs any suspicious elements. Scans must be started manually – that is, the Free version doesn’t support scheduling. Besides system scanning, Ad-Aware Free also includes the so called Ad-Watch Live!, which protects your computer in real time, focusing on three main areas: active processes, Windows Registry and Network. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s Friday again and we’re celebrating it with our traditional time-waster. CycloManiacs is a fun bicycle racing game with an easy gameplay and many elements to make races more challenging and competitive.

You start off by riding with a cute robot on a shabby bike, but as you progress through the game (and you have quite a handful of levels to beat) you can obtain new drivers, better bikes and hidden tracks. Each race charges you with a series of challenges – such as finishing in the top five places or gathering a minimum number of items – and if you complete them you’ll be rewarded with new unlockable stuff. Jumping is also important, because it’ll give you points to boost up your bike’s speed and overtake any other competitors.

CycloManiacs is controlled with the usual WASD or cursor keys combinations (plus the spacebar or X key to jump). The game is complemented by a nice background soundtrack.

Operating system, web browser, office suite, media player… Microsoft had everything covered, except for a security application. A few months ago they surprised us with Microsoft Security Essentials, their first attempt at developing a stand-alone security application for home use. Today, Security Essentials has come of age, leaving the beta stage behind and launching its first final version.

It seems that the three months of beta testing have been as calm as a millpond. At least that’s what you infer from the differences between the beta and the final versions, which are basically none. Microsoft Security Essentials features the same clear, easy-to-use tabbed interface and pretty the same tools and functionality.

Microsoft Security Essentials includes three types of scans: Quick, which scans those areas in your system that are most likely to get infected; Full, which scans your whole computer; and Customizable, which lets you select which specific folders and files should be scanned. Read the rest of this entry »

Windows 7 is scheduled to be launched in less than a month, and in anticipation of this important date, many developers have been working hard on new versions of their programs that take full advantage of all the enhancements included in Microsoft’s new operating system. One of them is WinZip, which announced the release of WinZip 14. The popular archiving and compression tool is now available for downloading as a pre-release beta version that lets you have a sneak peak at all its new features and check how well it works with Windows 7. And you know, I just couldn’t resist the temptation!

WinZip does look great on Windows 7. But it’s not only about visual appearance: it also takes advantage of all Windows 7 special features. You can, for example, access the most frequently used tasks in WinZip from the Jump lists in the Start menu, or the taskbar. Read the rest of this entry »

The problem

The more digital content we store on our computers, the more important reliable backup solutions become. For example, my iMac has about 50GB of music and photos on its primary disk drive. While much of the music could probably be replaced, any photo not yet uploaded to Flickr would be lost forever if that disk failed. So, like many other Mac users, I use Time Machine to maintain a secure copy of all my files, albeit on a potentially unstable portable hard disk in the same room as my Mac.

It was this potential unreliability of my Time Machine disk that got me interested in online backup options. What could be better than being able to backup to a remote server, safe in the knowledge that should any disaster befall my Time Machine disk, everything would still be OK. At least, that was the theory.

Solution found!

After some research and a little help from OnSoftware, I settled on Mozy - generally regarded as being a great online backup tool. I signed up for the $4.95/month unlimited backup plan: I thought (and still think) that $5 a month is a pretty good price point for total piece of mind. After setting up my account - a really simple process - and installing the Mozy desktop client - also a breeze - I let Mozy get to work on its initial backup. It was about eight hours after this that I spotted the main flaw in Mozy’s design: you have to complete an entire backup in one go right at the beginning, without any interruptions whatsoever. You can’t go restarting your Mac (not that I did), and you can’t lose connectivity for even a short time, which seems to have happened to me.

Around this time, my Mac was acting a little weird. I’d narrowed the problem down to a graphics driver error, but the truth is that my Mac was freezing from time to time. This meant that every time the driver error reared its ugly exception, I’d have to start from scratch on the Mozy backup. That’s not Mozy’s fault, nor is the occasional eccentricity of my ADSL connection. But Mozy could come up with a way of resuming backups, even for the initial backup process.

In order to be fair, I tried running Mozy after I’d fixed the driver issue and done a clean install, to see if it performed better under optimal conditions. Left overnight, I expected Mozy to be up to about 25% when I checked it in the morning. Unfortunately, Mozy had failed for some unknown reason at some point during the evening… all I could do was start it again. Then it failed again during the day. So I canceled my account, disappointed by a product that I’d been planning on loving.

Two things Mozy could do to win me back

Find a way of resuming backups. When backing up 100GB of data, it’s just ridiculous that an interruption causes the whole process to be canceled. Building a decent file index at the beginning of the backup operation should allow for Mozy to pick up where it left off, and then look for changes after the initial backup is complete.

Clearer error messages. One of the biggest problems I found was that when Mozy’s backup process failed, the information available about what had happened was very limited. More information, on the web side of the user interface, if necessary, would make it easier to diagnose and fix problems preventing the backup from working properly.

You wake up in some kind of chamber, naked next to a tiny bicycle. As you come to your senses, you see another chamber, but the occupant races off on a motorbike almost before you can see them. That’s how the lovely Icycle begins.

You guide your naked cyclist through barren, but beautifully painted and animated landscapes, in pursuit of the mystery biker. Using the cursor keys to accelerate, brake and jump your way is pretty easy to grasp, although you can’t go backwards at all. You need to learn the events of some areas to beat them - timing your jumps to avoid falling rocks, or cracking icy floors. It occasionally gets trciky. The gameplay is simple, but it looks absolutely fantastic, and you’ll certainly want to play through to the end!

Play Icycle here, which requires Flash.

Do you think the Aviary suite is all about online graphic tools? Well, you’re wrong. This week saw the birth of a new member in the Aviary family: a complete audio editing application called Myna.

Don’t get me wrong here: Myna is nothing like as advanced as Adobe Audition or GarageBand. But for audio editing newbies like me, it’s the perfect tool for some quick audio mixdowns that can add the finishing touch to a video, a photo slideshow or any other personal creation.

Even if you’ve never used an audio editing tool before, you’ll immediately feel at ease when launching Myna. The program’s interface follows the traditional design of audio editors, with a library of pre-made clips at the bottom, and a top working area with a timeline that features ten different tracks. All you have to do is select the appropriate clip and drop it on the timeline.

You can also drag them around for adjusting or trimming, copy and paste them via the context menu, and even record your own sound samples with a microphone. Myna includes not only a wide variety of audio samples you can use for free in your creations, but also a bunch of special effects such as fades, reverb, flanger, pitch and more. After saving you mix – which requires a free user account on the Aviary website -  you can save it right away and also share it online with your friends on several different social networks

Want to learn more about Myna? Check out this video from Alan at Aviary, and see how powerful this awesome tool can be.

Break Stuff! It’s unclear why the Dad in DadGame likes to break stuff, but he does, and he does it well. In this browser based carnage filled platform game, take control of Dad on a hilarious, but very destructive adventure.

Featuring great cartoon graphics, animation and brilliant story cut scenes, DadGame seems fantastic even before you are let loose at the controls. Thankfully, the gameplay is also really good. It’s chaotic for sure, but as your main task is just to break stuff, using your fists, swords, throwing objects, it’s enjoyable chaos. Creating carnage increases your carnage meter, and when you reach 100%, Dad goes on fire! When on fire, Dad is invincible, and has a range of cool attacks including, of course, lasers coming out of his eye!

What’s not to like?

Being a big fan of Monopoly, I was keen to give Monopoly City Streets a try. This online strategy game is a ‘live’ version of the classic board game, allowing you to trade real life properties using Google Maps. The game proves to be both easy to play and a whole lot of fun.

To get started in Monopoly City Streets you just need to search for a street and you’ll be able to see if it’s been built on or not. If the street is available you just need to pay the face value of it to the bank. If it’s already been bought by someone then you’ll need to make them an offer they can’t refuse. Once you own a street you can start building properties on it, just like in real Monopoly. There are different types of buildings you can construct, ranging from simple houses to huge tower blocks. During gameplay you’ll occasionally be dealt a ‘Chance’ card, which could mean one of your building’s is about to be demolished, or it could give you the chance to destroy another player’s property. Ultimately, the game is just an elaborate marketing vehicle for the new Monopoly City game. However, City Streets is still great fun to play and can prove highly addictive, as you try to hustle your way to the top of the online leaderboard.

Following the success of the Monopoly/Google Maps crossover, perhaps we’ll see more tie-ins between classic board games and today’s top web sites. Here are my suggestions, feel free to add your own:

Facebook Guess Who - Who’s that psychotic-looking gentleman who sent you a friend request

Firefox Buckaroo - Keep opening new tabs and see which page will cause Firefox to crash

TechCrunch Hangman - How many letters does it take for Michael Arrington to crucify a site?

Bing Risk - Will Microsoft become the World conquer the World of Search?

Google Trivia Pursuit - The only quiz game with all the answers

Welcome to the Gap

Fifteen years ago, I was 15 years old, ambitious and filled with dreams. Most of these entailed the creation of those fictitious worlds that sucked me in. Adventure games presented me with both worlds of magic (far, far away), as well as dystopian, grim representations of OUR world. Beneath a Steel Sky (1994) belongs to the latter category.

With references to Nietzsche, Huxley and Orwell, BASS came packed with intelligence, leaving us disconcerted by… hiatuses of thought. Of course back then, in The Netherlands, all we got from our English reading list was Watership Down. Don’t get me wrong: I felt sorry for those rabbits. However, I felt even sorrier for those who did not get their hands on a copy of Beneath a Steel Sky.

Your quest

The game takes place in a post-nuclear world, divided in an outside - the Gap - and an inside - a hierarchical city. Or is it the other way around? Robert Foster is a child of both worlds: he finds himself growing up in the Gap, yet feels something from the inside pulling him in.

What or who this is and what happens next, are catalysts in Foster’s quest. Find out who you are, where you come from, who put you there and how exactly that fits into the bigger picture. Kind of like ordinary life, wrapped up in a shiny iPhone port of a classic adventure. Read the rest of this entry »