Like it or not, the season of sales is upon us. Whether the shiny new computer that's soon to be encased in gift wrap is a present for you or for someone else, you should know what to do with that laptop, desktop, or Netbook when the time comes to boot it up. You're in luck--we've laid out the best freeware apps for 2010 in our freshly-updated Windows Starter Kit.
Our top picks include the browsers, image editors, utilities, and social networking applications that you should consider downloading before you fill up your computer with anything else. We don't want to give too much away, but if you're looking for a multimedia player, find out why The KMPlayer gets five stars. See also which nine essential system utilities have made the cut, including the disk-space visualizer WinDirStat.
If it's security software you're after, we have that ground covered in our Security Starter Kit. Antivirus suites, spyware removers, and firewalls are just part of the puzzle. We also suggest freebies to help protect you while surfing (like LastPass Password Manager), and to encrypt your sensitive data. You're welcome.
This last week has seen updates to two of our favorite fee Windows applications.
The first is photo organizer favorite Google Picasa, which adds facial recognition in its update to version 3.5. The new feature uses technology that was first implemented in Picasa Web Albums, the product's online sibling for storing and sharing photos online. To make a long story short, Picasa for the desktop now scans your photos for recognizable faces. After you link a name to a facial structure, the app gathers those photos together in each person's album. So, after labeling your sister, you'll be able to search for a picture of her on vacation by looking in her personal folder, not just the vacation album.
Read up more on Picasa's new photo facial recognition features here.
In the meantime, RSS reader FeedDemon has also bumped off its beta and updated to version 3.0. FeedDemon now syncs with Google Reader, instead of with its once-proprietary syncing engine. FeedDemon's interface includes a redesigned home screen for viewing subscriptions, and a much expanded view of your Twitter stream. See our hands-on review of FeedDemon 3 for more details.
Welcome to this week's special edition of the Download.com newsletter. There have been some new developments in the world of Windows software that we wanted to share, starting with the arrival of iTunes 9 (for Windows and Mac).
Apple released iTunes 9 on Wednesday (that's version 9 on 9/9/09--oh, the symmetry) at a special music-themed event in San Francisco. On top of enhancements like some new navigation tabs, Apple has expanded the content that can be distributed through iTunes, including bonus content packages you get when you buy movies or whole music albums. iTunes 9 also offers a new feature called Home Sharing, which allows you to share the songs you buy across authorized computers on a home network. The gist is that you can drag songs from one library to another, and even automatically sync newly purchased songs across the computers.
In addition to all this, Apple has also made improvements for iPhone and iPod Touch owners, both within the iTunes 9 desktop application and on the devices themselves, with an update to the iPhone operating system. Read more on these enhancements to the iPhone 3.1 OS, and find further details about iTunes 9 in our First Take write-up.
In other news, since we last wrote about security, a new player has sauntered into the field of updated security suites for 2010. Symantec's two premium Norton apps--Norton Internet Security 2010 and the lighter Norton Antivirus 2010--approach potential malware intrusions from a different angle. We've got the deeper story on Symantec's two Norton security offerings here. If it's more standalone security applications and security suites you're after, check out our security category on Download.com and our Security Starter Kit.
We have a real treat for you this week: a sneak peek at Microsoft Office 2010. Although Redmond doesn't have plans to release its mega productivity suite for more than half a year, but Microsoft did invite us to take a spin around the technical preview of upcoming versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook. We've passed the goods along in a First Look video, a slideshow of screenshots, and a First Take review. Pay special attention to the 'conversation view' planned for Outlook, which operates similarly to Gmail's threaded conversations. We'd also like to direct your gaze to the "backstage view," the new envisioning of Microsoft's file menu.
In other news, Google announced last week its intention to base an entire operating system around its Chrome browser. Two characteristics define it at this early stage--the fact that it will be Web-based, and that it will be released for free. Chrome OS will be integrated into some Netbook computers in 2010, optimizing Web access for users, according to Google. Read all about it here, and why Google says it stepped out in this direction.
Last week Redmond offered alert PC users a proposition: a limited beta test of its latest security application, called Microsoft Security Essentials to the first 75,000 fast-acting users in the United States, China, Israel, and Brazil. We hardly have to tell you that spots for the freeware antivirus tool that will replace Live OneCare were snapped up less than 24 hours after we posted our story.
If you weren't quick enough to join the testing herd, or if you live in one of the 191 other countries worldwide, Download.com Senior Associate Editor Seth Rosenblatt has all the information you need to get a feel for the Microsoft app's pros and cons. In addition to delving into the hands-on review, you can tune into this First Look video for a live-action peek.
All eyes may be on Apple this week as the Cupertino, Calif. company is set to release its iPhone 3.0 firmware and iPhone 3G S phone. But unless you number among the 10 percent of smartphone owners who actually has an iPhone, there's little reason you need iTunes, especially to organize your digital music. MediaMonkey is an excellent freemium jukebox that handles large collections especially well. Just updated to version 3.1, its ID3 tags, CD and DVD, and full-featured encoder are just the beginning. A $20 upgrade gets you, among other things, on-the-fly file conversion to your personal media player of choice.
Other alternatives, like the free, open-source Songbird and aTunes, are also definitely worth your time and attention. CNET Download.com Editor Seth Rosenblatt explains what differentiates them here.
IM fans, jot this down
After three years of development, Cerulean Studios has finally flung open the doors to Trillian Astra beta, the latest in its all-in-one chat application. We shared our viewpoints on Trillian Astra while it was still in closed beta (here and here); now it's your turn to tell us what you think. Oh, and if you're still opening multiple IM applications to talk to different groups of friends, waste no time downloading Trillian Astra beta now to get the feel of multinetwork instant messaging.
In its latest beta release last week, Skype received a much more ambitious feature than it did in its most recent major Windows update, Skype 4.0. In addition to bringing back birthday reminders, Skype 4.1 beta introduced screen sharing.
While choppy transmission and the limitations of broadcasting your screen to one contact at a time makes the feature best for casual desktop demonstrations rather than for serious collaboration or intense troubleshooting, screen sharing in Skype's free VoIP application is nevertheless one more engaging way to connect to friends and colleagues across the miles. Since the application is a beta build, you may find the occasional bug or stability issue. Still, the frequent and adventurous Skype users among you will want to tinker around with sharing the screen using this popular Internet calling software. Here's our hands-on review of what to expect.
Skype will need some time to bulk up its screen-sharing element before it's ready for widespread adoption. Until it does, there's no shortage of robust screen-sharing applications out there fit for professional and interpersonal use. We've rounded up four notable programs in this screen-sharing collection, including Yuuguu, which handily employs IM protocols to swap screen views and has a Skype plug-in; and TeamViewer, which also integrates remote access and presentation modes, file transferring, and VPN.
As always, we welcome you to pitch in your own opinions about screen sharing, Skype 4.1 beta, Yuuguu, and others. Happy downloading!
A browser upstart like Google's Chrome must have some cleaving edge if it's to hack its way into the marketshare predominated by Microsoft's Internet Explorer, and to a far lesser extent, Firefox. Since Google Chrome doesn't yet have the add-on capabilities that have earned Mozilla's browser rabid support from open-source circles as well as from the browsing community as a whole, Chrome must best it in some other skill. Google's browser is certainly headed towards supporting add-ons, but what it can deliver now is speed.
A page-loading boost of 30 percent is what Google claims it's brought the latest browser update, version 2.0.172.28. And it has (see our stats). Ironically, the lack of extensibility is one factor that may help keep Google Chrome skipping along. The more Firefox extensions in play, users lament, the draggier performance becomes.
In addition to back-end work on the JavaScript and Webkit browser engines in part responsible for Chrome's acceleration, Google has added a smattering of new features. The ability to delete thumbnails from appearing in a visual history when you open a new browser tab is one; full-screen mode and the ability to store and autofill your passwords, name, and other commonly recurring data into Web forms are two others.
Seemingly not to be outdone, Mozilla has also announced this past week a project to improve the way it currently handles add-ons, and Mozilla-based browser publisher Flock released an update to its browser aimed at the social networking crowd. Flock 2.5 reveals new support for Twitter (including searching), for Facebook Chat, and for cross-posting photos and blog posts to Facebook that you originally create in the browser for another service also integrated into Flock.
The take-home message is this. While neither Chrome, Firefox, Flock, nor Opera or Safari can currently claim more than a modest fraction of the Windows browser market, the ones proactively gunning for a larger slice of the pie understand that in an increasingly browser-based computing world, the battle of the browsers is more about establishing a lasting platform of computing authority than it is about creating a neat alternative app. In other words, watch out, Mozilla and Microsoft. If past trends are an indication, Google is slowly building up its browser and will soon integrate its numerous online Web apps and services to do what it does best: play for keeps.
There's a terribly messy line I recall from a movie preview, in which Drew Barrymore vents to her friend the frustrations of communicating with a potential date. "I had this guy leave me a voice mail at work, so I called him at home, and then he e-mailed me to my BlackBerry, and so I texted to his cell, and now you just have to go around checking all these different portals just to get rejected by seven different technologies," her character says. (Or something like that. It's from "He's Just Not that Into You," if you hadn't guessed.) Beyond the thick, gloopy cheese of the line is a bony kernel of truth: the greater our flexibility to communicate through voice and text on multiple devices, the greater the demands to manage these separate portals.
With instant messengers, at least, the solution is clear cut: multinetwork chat clients, which gather your IM accounts into a single program window, letting you contact friends on Yahoo, AOL, Google, ICQ, and Windows Live Messenger IM networks (and often even more). We've taken a fresh look at six multinetwork IM apps. Some, like Trillian Astra, Digsby, and VoxOx--all beta programs--integrate Web mail notifications and social-networking features alongside their considerable visual attentions. The plainer-looking Pidgin and Miranda messengers are the kindest to your PC's resources, and the best choices for those uninterested in being bogged down by more than the chat basics. Palringo, in the meantime, is known for its omnipresence on desktop and smartphone platforms, including BlackBerry, iPhone, Symbian, and Windows Mobile phones. If your contacts are dispersed between two or more of these networks, you can't go wrong switching to an all-in-one chat app.
In updates news, one of our favorite analogs to Microsoft Office, OpenOffice.org, has received a few tweaks that notably improve the way it handles images, in addition to enhancements in the word process and spreadsheets applications. Google's speedy Chrome browser also received some attention after a developer's version was released that brings the browser alternative closer to accepting the kinds of add-ons responsible for Firefox's fame.
On a final housekeeping note, you may have noticed that the face of our Windows newsletter has changed. We'll continue to adjust its look in the upcoming weeks until we're happy with it, and hopefully you will be, too. We're listening, so let us know what you think we're doing right and wrong with the newsletter's layout. Click the 'Read More' link at the bottom of this story, then leave a comment. You'll need to be logged-in to comment. If you're not registered with CNET, going through the comments process will prompt you to sign up for a free account.
Happy downloading!
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