If you thought it had been a little quiet around here of late, that’s for a very good reason. We’ve all been hard at work implementing and testing a new codebase for Softonic English which makes the site smarter and easier to use, as well as adding some great new features for users.

The homepage, while appearing quite similar to its previous version actually includes numerous changes and enhancements, including a new high-visibility zone for blog posts like this one; much better category listings; dynamic charts which show whether programs have moved up or down since last week and a smoother, cleaner design.

Our program page has also undergone some important changes. Apart from some cosmetic adjustments and enhancements, we’ve also made it much easier to interact with programs, meaning that the tools that let you rate, review, bookmark and track your favourite software are always easily accessible.

But the biggest new feature for the site is our new user profile page. Visitors to the Spanish Softonic will already be familiar with the features available in the new profile page. Now you can pick an avatar, visit other profiles, see your visitors and more. We’ve also got the Soft-O-Meter, a popular feature on the Spanish site which shows your level activity on Softonic.

Finally, we’ve launched Softonic Deluxe - a premium edition of Softonic designed for true fans of software. Deluxe members get access to a special edition of Softonic, free of advertising and with 100% guaranteed high-speed and secure downloads. For more info about Softonic Deluxe or to get a free trial, click here.

We’re always working on more features and already have loads of exciting new stuff in development… but we’ll let you know about that later. For the moment, take a look at the new, improved Softonic. And as always, please let us know if you’ve got an opinion on the site or an idea for making it even better!

There’s nothing more annoying than a router signal that’s constantly fluctuating and cutting off your internet connection. It’s always at that crucial moment when you’re saving something or sending an e-mail that the darned signal goes and you’re left in limbo until it reconnects again. So why do router signals fluctuate so much?

The main factor is quite simply, distance. The further away you are from your router, the more problems your wireless card will have holding onto the connection. The range of your router very much depends on the model, the specific 802.11 protocol it uses and whether there are any major obstacles between it and your PC. According to About.com, the average range of a router using the 802.11a, 802.11b and 802.11g protocols (the three most common) is 150 ft (46m) indoors and 300ft (82m) outdoors. However, as they point out, there are differences between the protocols and the way they react to different obstacles:

Obstructions in home such as brick walls and metal frames or siding greatly can reduce the range of a Wi-Fi LAN by 25% or more. Because 802.11a employs a higher signalling frequency than 802.11b/g, 802.11a is most susceptible to obstructions. Interference from microwave ovens and other equipment also affects range. 802.11b and 802.11g are both susceptible to these.

The problem is that the routers that Internet Service Providers give you when you sign up are invariably quite cheap and not very powerful. There’s no way that my router has a range of almost 50m - I struggle to maintain a connection when any further away than less than half of that. But the weirdest thing of all is, even when the router is next to my laptop, the signal still fluctuates wildly although at least I suffer less broken connections. The answer I’ve found is to use a better router. Linksys and D-Link are known for their signal strength and if you’re looking for something really powerful (and expensive) then check this out.

If changing the position and model of your router haven’t helped, then it’s most likely that the wireless card on your laptop or PC is at fault. Before throwing it out though, try testing your wireless router with an external wireless card. This plugs into your PCMCIA slot and will prove whether it’s your machine that’s at fault. It’s better to use a PCMCIA card rather than one that plugs into your USB ports because they are generally better at picking up signals.

If none of the above have helped, then Microsoft have a good 10 point plan for improving your wireless network including a few extra tips such as replacing your router’s antenna, adding a wireless repeater, changing your wireless channel and updating your router firmware.

Though many Flickr users seem to be against the presence of videos on the popular photo sharing site the truth is that you can already find a bunch of short movies of all kinds. Now the question is whether there is a way to download them to your hard drive, and the answer is yes, though you need to install Orbit Downloader first.

For those of you who don’t know this program, Orbit Downloader is an excellent download manager that handles all your downloads in an easy, convenient interface and is compatible with all main browsers. So once you have Orbit Downloader on your PC, browse to the Flickr video you want to download and you’ll see a tiny gray arrow on its right top corner.

Click it and you’ll launch Grab++, Orbit’s grabbing utility. You may be asked to refresh the page - for Grab++ to get all the downloadable elements available on the webpage - so simply press F5 on your browser and go back to Grab++.

Now look for the video on the list. It’s easy to spot: it’s an FLV file and it’s probably the largest in size. Select it, click on “Download” and it’s all yours. Just make sure that the video is actually playing on Flickr (otherwise you’ll get an error message in Orbit) and that you have an FLV player to watch the video once it’s on your system.

As soon as you install this browser you will have a new pleasant experience about web surfing. Every page loads faster and this is something measurable even without having to use a stopwatch, such is the difference respect other web browsers.
In terms of computer resources then, Opera stands out. Compared with Firefox for example, the former uses 30% less RAM, with the same number of web sites and tabs open.

Another immediately visible improvement is the scrolling page function which is much smother when compared with other web browsers. Also the full screen mode (press F11 for this), takes up nearly all of your screen leaving nothing but the web site you want to look at. I also liked the way the browser lights up tabs and query buttons, when you pass the mouse over them.

Among the most important features outlined by Opera you can find:

• Quick Find - type one word of a web site you visited, and Opera finds the page for you
• Opera Link - Syncs your bookmarks and Speed Dial between your computers and mobile phone.
• Speed Dial - set of visual bookmarks you see when you open a new tab. Very effective and useful to keep an eye on multiple web pages, at the same time!
• Stay safe - Fraud Protection is enabled by default, detecting and warning you about fraudulent Web sites automatically.
• Email enlightened - Opera’s built-in e-mail client features improved responsiveness.
• Web developer tools - Supports cutting edge Web standards and the upcoming Web developer tools.

Have you tried the new Opera? If you haven’t, now’s the time!

Open Source software is great when it comes to productivity applications. That’s because many different programmers can see the source code of an application and write plug-ins or suggest improvements to make the application more efficient and improve the users’ final experience. When talking about security though, do you really want hackers to see how your firewall or antivirus software works? Isn’t it a complete contradiction?

Clearly it’s not for some developers, as they believe in the efficiency that open source necessarily has. The advantage of having different programmers who can spot errors or weakness in the code is the great advantage of Open Source, even when it comes to security. As soon as a mistake or bug is spotted, it can be reported and fixed by the main developers who are taking care of the official distribution. It’s the principle of peer review; Open Source software undergoes a process of continuous improvement and frequent updates which leads to a more reliable product. The point Open Source supporters make is that knowing how something works doesn’t necessarily allow you to know how to crack it. Even if we know how a safe works, we will never be able to open it if it’s well designed.

If you want to give Open Source software security programs a try here’s a list of the most famous:

• Clamav
• Moonav
• Killtrojan
• Openantivirus

There are also other free solutions for your PC protection. Here’s the best free software selected for you:
Read the rest of this entry »

Now that Adobe Air is starting to get itself established, there are some really exciting applications based on it coming out and one of them is mooFlair. As more and more applications become desktop based, mooFlair applies this principle to video downloading and viewing by helping you manage and watch both online and offline FLVs videos. But don’t mistake it for just another FLV player because its much more than that.

mooFlair allows you to build your own FLV library of FLV videos both on and offline and save your compilations in playlists. This includes FLV files such as h.264 encoded videos, those on RSS Feeds or those from content providers such as YouTube. If you don’t have time to watch them online, mooFlair can select several videos at once and download them for later viewing while you get on with more important things. Two things were rather annoying in the original release though - it used to hog your memory and you couldn’t watch videos in fullscreen mode but all that has been ironed out in the latest release. The design and feel of mooFlair is excellent too - this doesn’t feel like yet another YouTube downloader - it’s a solid looking application with lots of gloss and touches of class. Searching videos is still a little bit awkward though because the search option has been hidden away in the file menu and you still can’t search several video sites at once. Of course, one other big disadvantage is that you can’t view any of the comments attached to the videos you are watching which for me, is half the fun anyway.

However, as a one stop solution for viewing, storing and downloading FLV videos from a variety of sources, mooFlair is one of the best solutions yet and if this is an indication of what is to come from Adobe Air, the future looks very bright indeed for desktop apps. Note that mooFlair currently runs on Windows and Mac but a beta version for Linux is under development.

With Wix, you can build a graphically attractive website in few clicks. This web-based application allows you to create Flash websites for your personal page or small business. Although Flash websites are not the best solution for SEO and accessibility purposes, they can look very nice and thanks to services like Wix, they are also very easy to create, without having to worry about learning coding languages like HTML.

There are a lot of small businesses that pay for basic, rather ugly web sites; with this service at least you can choose from professional looking and more artistic layouts and all for free. Firstly, have a look at the nine sections with the collection of the style you can choose from: Business, Personal, Street Art, Emo, Young, Playground, Minimalist and Artwork. When you have found something that you like, press Edit and start changing the text, the pictures or add new pages to your web sites. The editing tool is not as fast as we would like, because it’s all web based, but generally speaking the design is really nice, and shouldn’t prove too daunting, even to less experienced end-users. Once you’re done, you can publish your fabulous new website at http://www.wix.com/your_account_name and make it accessible to search engines.

Although Wix is a closed beta, we’re pleased to let you know that OnSoftware readers can try the tool using this special invitation. Don’t miss it, and tell us what you think about it.

If there’s one thing I really need help with in my browser, it’s bookmarking. I’m constantly discovering new and interesting sites and pages but rarely have time to organise them in any in any meaningful way. Of course, I have folders for each different subject and topic but I just don’t have the time to go through them all once I’ve decided to add them to my favourites. I just add them to the main menu until my favourites list is now just a sprawl of bizarre links ranging from cooking sites to classic YouTube videos.

That’s why I’m quite excited about the much talked about new bookmarking feature in Firefox 3. There are three main features that disorganised bookmarkers like myself will welcome - Bookmark Stars, Bookmark Tags, and Smart Bookmark Folders. The Star feature is my favourite. It’s similar to the way you can mark items with a star in Gmail. At the end of the address bar, there appears a star that once clicked on, immediately adds the page to your bookmarks - no more going to the time consuming process of the file menu and selecting “Bookmarks - Bookmark This Page”. If you double click on the star, it brings up the bookmark editor so you can easily select which folder you want to put it in or even quicker, just give it a tag (again, very similar to the way Gmail works). Tags allow you to organise bookmarks in a bunch of folders or areas rather than just one - very useful for those bookmarks which don’t fall neatly into one particular category. Finally, the Smart Folders option is a very clever way of keeping your folders always up to date and organised. By creating a keyword for a particular folder, everytime you tag a page with that word, it will be automatically added to that folder with no further action required on your part.

On the downside however, it does seem that the bookmark dialogues and menu take slightly longer to open in Firefox 3 than Firefox 2. So sometimes, you feel like whatever time you save in organising your pages, you lose in loading time. Whether this is just a bug that they will hopefully iron out in the final version or whether it’s something we’ll have to live with for now remains to be seen but for once in my life, my bookmarks make sense again and I’m rediscovering pages I’d bookmarked years ago.

While the prestigious Web 2.0 Expo got underway in San Francisco yesterday, a new report claims that Web 2.0 is set for record investment as it revolutionises business over the next 5 years. Tech research group Forrester claim that around $5 billion will be spent on Web 2.0 by 2013 and it will represent a “fundamentally new way” for companies to do business.

The report claims that behind this drive will not just be developers but multinational giants such as General Motors and McDonald’s which have already embraced tools like blogs, RSS feeds, podcasting and social networking tools. The report analysed seven Web 2.0 categories: blogs, mashups, podcasting, RSS, social networking, widgets and wikis. It found that social networking tools will attract the greatest levels of investment but even that will be dwarfed by the multi million dollar revenues the software industry commands.

Report analyst Oliver Young told the BBC that this boom will quickly level out however:

Companies are now looking over their shoulder to the business market where even revenues of $50 per user per month are looking increasingly appealing. However, there will come a saturation point and investment will start to slow down as Web 2.0 applications become increasingly prevalent and absorbed into collaborative software packages.

You can follow all the latest news and exciting Web 2.0 developments in the pipeline in the Web 2.0 Expo newsroom here.

Usually, whenever I hear about a new free SMS texting service I tend to be very skeptical. In my experience they either never work, are not available in my country, are limited to a handful of messages or require extensive registration which later involves getting my own mobile bombarded by messages, horoscopes and other junk that I don’t want.

Jaxtr, I was pleasantly surprised to find, falls into none of the above categories and allows you to send an unlimited number of SMS messages to people in 38 countries. The setup process is really easy - just enter a name, user-name, password and e-mail address and you can start sending immediately without any verification required. Jaxtr is mainly designed as a VoIP app but it allows sending texts to mobiles via a small interface on the right of the screen. Even better, you can receive responses on your own mobile phone although this involves verifying your mobile number with the Jaxtr website.

The other good thing about Jaxtr is that it seems to work independently of mobile operators so you don’t have to worry about them intercepting your free messages or putting a stop to it all like has happened in the past to such services. It’s also an interesting alternative to Skype because Jaxtr works with any phone, both mobile and landline. When a member adds their Jaxtr link to their email signature, friends and family can call them from their regular phone from anywhere in the world without paying expensive international toll charges. Family and friends simply click on the member’s Jaxtr link to generate a local number in their own country. By saving this permanent, direct-dial number on their phone, people can call friends and family abroad at the same cost and with the same convenience as calling a friend down the street.

I’m still to meet another person who uses this service despite the developers claiming that over 10 million people in 220 countries use Jaxtr to receive calls from people visiting their social networking pages, to make calls to their friends and family worldwide and to get to know fellow Jaxtr members on café Jaxtr, the world’s largest talk network. Now that they’ve launched free mobile texting however, maybe it will give the site the profile boost it needs.

Skype have announced that from today, they are to offer unlimited international calling from the USA for just $9.95 per month. The offer only applies to U.S. users who will be able to make unlimited calls to landlines in 34 countries worldwide and even cell phones in Canada, China, Hong Kong and Singapore.

Skype have already been offering U.S. users unlimited calls in the U.S. and Canada for $3 a month and is also expanding that deal with another plan for $5.95 per month which offers free calls to Mexico City, Guadalajara and Monterrey. Although unlimited international calling is nothing new - Vonage and cable companies have been offering such deals for a while now - it is the cheapness of the Skype deals that’s really impressive. Such an aggressive marketing move surely has something to do with the economic problems the VoIP service has suffered recently. Skype’s owners eBay have seen $1.4 billion wiped off the value of the $4.3 billion price it was valued at last year due to its declining profitability. As the Financial Times reports, eBay are even considering selling Skype with eBay’s new owner John Donahue saying:

What we’re testing this year are the synergies. If the synergies are strong, we’ll keep it in our portfolio. If not, we’ll reassess it.

To purchase an unlimited calling subscription, simply go to Skype subscriptions for more details. If you purchase one of the new subscriptions for a 3-month or 12-month period before June 1st 2008, you will receive a further 33% discount.

The makers of the excellent FeedDemon for PC and NetNewsWire for Mac also offer NewsGator, an online news reader which can also be used on your mobile phone or integrated in Microsoft Outlook. NewsGator appeals to people on the go or simply to those of you that don’t necessarily want to have a desktop RSS reader. Personally, I use Google Reader to pick up all my news but if I had to change would probably go for NewsGator.

In a move to improve their online RSS reader, NewsGator Technologies have decided to integrate RSSAide’s PostRank filtering technology to it, which should hopefully “offer more relevant news and social search features to users.”

Back in January, one of the reasons mentioned by NewsGator for making its RSS readers free was to get more attention data from users. While that statement was a little bit difficult to grasp (what do you mean exactly by attention data?), the integration of PostRank is something much more tangible for us to work with. PostRank “suggest(s) relevant articles and feeds to a person based on the social engagement, article ranking and other interactions with the RSS Reader” according to AideRSS CTO Ilya Grigorik. This sounds exciting when you think of it because it means your RSS reader will continue evolving and adapting to what you receive and read. That is one my main reasons for choosing an online reader over a desktop one. We’ll see in the coming months if more users flock from NetNewsWire and FeedDemon to NewsGator and if the integration of PostRank makes the online RSS reader more relevant than its competitors.

A month ago the Olympic Torch started its voyage from Greece to Beijing, and is now on a world tour via many different cities until August 8th, the day when the Olympic Games are due to start. Meanwhile we can follow its route – and also all the difficulties it’s encountering – on TV news, newspapers and websites, but now there’s also another way to track the torch’s adventures: Google Maps.

Google has set up a special page where you can see the Olympic Torch voyage plan, including a brief history of Olympic traditions and also some information and pictures of every single city the Torch will visit on its way to China. Once there, you’ll be able to also track the Torch’s route along several Chinese towns and villages, until it finally arrives to Beijing.

Oddly enough, the Google Maps Torch relay doesn’t say a word about demonstrations against the Chinese Olympic Games and the several attempts to blow the Torch off.

The latest version of Google Earth has been released (Version 4.3) and features some nice new features including the option to watch the sunrise in selected locations. Just find a location you’d like to see and click the “sun” button in the toolbar. You’re then presented with a timeline graphic that you can just play or slide to watch the day as it starts.

The new release also features a few other tweaks such as improved navigational controls and 3D photo-realistic buildings in major cities. In this release, Google have also integrated the Street View function available in Google Maps which makes sense. All you have to do is click the camera icons and a view at street level will open in a seperate window. The navigational controls seem more responsive and they’ve added a useful “default to North” feature which allows you to reorientate yourself if you’ve been spinning around for a while.

On a slightly different note, Google Earth is a prime example of something I wrote about yesterday - products that are in perpetual beta phase. It’s now surely a few years since Google Earth was released and although they keep improving it, I see no reason why it’s still in beta!

I don’t think many people would dispute the claim that Photoshop is the best desktop photo editing suite out there. Likewise, most people would agree that it’s probably too expensive for the average home computer user. Things are changing though, and there are now a number of viable alternatives to the Adobe package that won’t cost you a penny. In the open source world, projects such as The GIMP and Paint.NET have brought huge graphic manipulation capabilities into the hands of those who cannot afford Photoshop (and who are honorable enough not to download an illegal version).

Things are getting even better too, thanks to the ongoing development of some geniunely powerful online image editing tools. Besides being free, the advantage these Web apps give you is that you can access your projects from anywhere and collaborate with others more easily. I’ve tried three of the most popular ones and here’s what I thought:

• Picnik - Users of Flickr will be familiar with this one, as it’s included as the default image tweaker with all accounts. Don’t worry if you don’t have a Flickr account because you can sign up for free with Picnik and it only takes a few seconds. The first thing that will strike you about this app is its drop-dead gorgeous interface. The quirky green background and translucent tabs make it a joy to work in, and it’s pretty easy to get around too.You can load images into the editor from a variety of sources, including by browsing to your hard drive, entering a URL to the picture, and even directly accessing your Facebook, Flickr or MySpace accounts. Clicking the ‘Edit’ tab will then present you with the main editing interface, which includes basic tweaking tools such as auto-fix, crop, resize, exposure, red-eye removal, etc. Click the ‘Create’ tab and you’ll be able to preview and apply one of a variety of effects to your pictures, as well as inserting text and shapes. Picnik has some pretty decent output options, with the ability to save to one of six formats (including to PDF) and a facility for adjusting the image dimensions.

  On the whole I was very impressed with the design of the Picnik application and it’s very intuitive to use. Unfortunately though, the free version of the service doesn’t include options such as full-screen mode, unlimited photo history, or anything in the way of advanced editing features, such as layer support or drawing tools. Read the rest of this entry »