Freeware World

Windows: It started as a handy app to download videos from YouTube, but aTube Catcher is now much more than that. You can still download online videos from various popular sites, but also record your screen, convert videos from one format to another, capture streaming videos and create custom DVDs. All of this, for free!

iPhone: What better way to warm up for the World Cup than a game of X2 Football 2010? Just like Pro Evolution Soccer did on consoles and home computers, X2 Football has gained cult status among iPhone gamers. In fact, the game even looks and feels a lot like Pro Evoltion Soccer, only a little scaled back, of course. This Lite version of the game allows you to train and take penalty shoot outs.

Mac: eBay has been one of the Internet’s big success stories and it’s still going strong today. It’s probably the most effective way to find cheap stuff and, of course, get rid of things yourself. There can be few better tools for posting and tracking items on eBay than the newly updated GarageSale either. It’s beautifully presented, easy to use, and brings all of your bids and items under one convenient umbrella.

Windows: Are you planning to redecorate your home? Before your start moving furniture around, take a look at Sweet Home 3D. This great interior design app lets you create your new flat or house and then decorate it with all sorts of furniture without any hassle. Once done, you can even take a virtual your around your home!

iPhone: The FOX News app for iPhone gives you access to the latest news stories from the channel in the palm of your hand. You can use FOX News to check the latest headlines, stream live video of breaking news, listen to FOX News Radio, browse photo galleries, and watch FNC videos for free. It all comes packaged in a neat little interface - or rather two neat interfaces.

Mac: When editing, converting and even managing images on a Mac, the obvious choice can tend to be to use iPhoto, Aperture or Lightroom. GraphicConverter X (now updated to version 6.7.2) is not as much in the limelight even though it proves to be a more than worthy alternative. GraphicConverter X comes with two browsing views, which let you dig in deep into your folders and find your pictures.

In case you hadn’t noticed, summer is on its way (at least, it is here in the Northern hemisphere). This means barbecues, beaches and burnt bits. Or at least, that’s what we hope.

If you want to make the most of the good weather then you can turn your PC or laptop into a personal weather station so you know exactly when to plan your outdoor pursuits. There are scores of weather forecasting programs available for Windows, and some are more reliable than others. Here’s our top five:

The Weather Channel Desktop is a comprehensive desktop weather station with a bevy of prediction tools. You can get hour-by-hour, weekend or 10-day forecasts, including information about ambient temperature, air pressure, humidity and wind direction. The Weather Channel Desktop minimizes to the taskbar, displaying just the current temperature. You can then open it by double-clicking, or right-clicking to navigate the menu.

Meteo Fusion is an altogether simpler weather forecasting tool. The widget-style application stays open on your desktop at all times, showing you the current conditions outside and giving you an up-to-date outlook for the coming days. You can pimp the app with different themes and change the transparency of the interface, so Meteo Fusion looks really cool even when it’s baking outside.

YoWindow is by far the most attractive weather app on the block. YoWindow features a colorful, fully-animated window that displays jaw-dropping landscapes, and changes according to actual weather conditions. It displays the current situation, plus temperature, wind, pressure, and humidity. All these conditions are reflected in an customizable animated background – which you can replace with your own photos.

My Free Weather allows you to view the sky in any city in the world and track local weather. You can track a moving storm & weather patterns via satellite and radar. Naturally, you can also view daily and detailed forecasts, local time and date for any location worldwide, plus alerts for severe weather. It also shows other information such as wind speed and direction, humidity and visibility.

Global Weather 3D is the most scientific-feeling application out of the bunch. Instead of displaying the usual geographic map with weather symbols, the program makes use of an attractive, zoom-able, three-dimensional Earth to show the current position of clouds on our planet, marking their density with a color code. You can display geographical textures, day and night zones, and countries’ names.

Windows: Microsoft has released a new trial version of its popular productivity suite, aimed at professionals. The new Microsoft Office 2010 Professional Plus includes all the Office apps (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Access, Publisher, InfoPath, Communicator, SharePoint Workspace and Outlook), which you can try for 60 days.

iPhone: Looking for an iPhone game with a bit more depth than the norm? Dark Raider is a top-down action adventure game, where you play an outcast scientist searching a dangerous fantasy world for the key to immortality. The story may be clichéd, but Dark Raider is an enjoyable title, and unusually long for the iPhone, which has tons of casual and lightweight games.

Mac: eBay is one of the best trading sites on the net but keeping track of items can be a full time job. AuctionSieve helps you rapidly filter through auctions in eBay searches or categories. AuctionSieve is ideal for collectors of a particular item or topic that needs to get past all the small worthless items and target items of major value. You can monitor as many search terms as you want and instantly organize them for a quick overview.

Windows: Do you miss the traditional 80s shooters? With Hero Core you now have the chance to play a retro shoot ‘em up like the ones you played 30 years ago. Though the 8-bit graphics may not be everyone’s cup of tea, a huge map with lots of screens and a varied collection of bosses are sure to provide great fun for all nostalgic gamers!

iPhone: FIFA World Cup is the official game of the World Cup in South Africa. The game challenges you to qualify then go on to the finals and attempt to win the greatest prize in soccer. FIFA World Cup is fully licensed by football’s governing body, meaning that all of the teams and players are real. The format and schedule of the World Cup finals is set up exactly as it will be in real life, and all the stadiums have been realized in the game.

Mac: Creating useful, readable Help manuals and guides is an essential part of designing and authoring programs. HelpLogic allows you to do so easily in a logical and defined way. HelpLogic works via three tools - a Visual Table of Contents (TOC) Builder, Project Workshop, HTML Editor, and Link Manager to quickly generate Web-based Help, Apple Help, Microsoft HTML Help, UniHelp, and PDF files.

iPhone: PewPew is an arcade shooter that uses dual thumb controls to move and shoot around neon vector graphic arenas. There’s no shortage of so-called dual-stick shooters like Geometry Wars on the iPhone, but PewPew manages to stick out from the crowd by being both free and featuring four varied game modes that require different skills to succeed.

Windows: From the creators of GOM Player, here comes GOM Encoder, a comprehensive video conversion tool. It helps you convert videos from and to a wide array of formats and devices, including many ready-made conversion profiles and support to create custom profiles as well. Conversions are surprisingly fast, even when you’re working with HD videos.

Mac: After many months of anticipation, Steam for Mac is finally here. Like the Windows version, it allows you to buy and download any of Valve’s games like Left 4 Dead 2, Steam also has a huge library of titles from other big developers, as well as free demos and videos. The list of games is ever increasing, and it also supports non-commercial things like game mods.

Windows: For those of use who need to take dozens of screenshots every day, SnagIt is a must have. This awesome screen capturing and editing tool includes everything you need to take screenshots in a variety of ways, annotate them, add effects and filters and share them online. The latest version, SnagIt 10, includes new capturing profiles and effects.

iPhone: Ever hear a song you like on the radio, on TV or at a party but don’t know what it’s called? Install Shazam on your iPhone and you can find out. Whenever you hear a tune you dig, simply hold your iPhone’s microphone to the speaker. Shortly after, as if by magic details of the song will appear in the Shazam interface, including the name of the song, the singer, and the album it appears on.

Mac: Mac fans can now try the newly updated Google Chrome for themselves. After many months of developer releases, the fully functional beta version is finally here meaning extensions, bookmarking (including sync) and the Flash player are all fully working. However, note that it only works on Intel Macs and some applications or add-ons - such as 1Password for example - still don’t work with it.

Microsoft launches Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 officially today. Unfortunately the online event they’ve prepared to celebrate is already a bit too crowded and it seems I won’t be able to get in:

So meanwhile, I thought it would be a good idea to start getting used to the famous Ribbon interface in Office 2010. This special design was already introduced in Office 2007, but many people will face it for the first time if they switch directly from the 2003 version to the most recent installment of Microsoft Office. The Ribbon interface is not difficult to use in itself; however, as many tools and functions are reorganized and moved to a different menu, it can be a bit confusing at first. Luckily there are a couple of tricks that help you get used to the Ribbon interface fairly quickly.

The first one is using Microsoft’s interactive guides to locate your favorite Office 2003 commands in the new version of the suite. There are guides for all Office apps, except for Outlook, Access, InfoPath and Visio, which will be published soon.

To browse one of these guides, simply click the name and it’ll open right in your browser. Notice you’ll need the Microsoft Silverlight plug-in to use it – you’ll be prompted to install it if you don’t have it.

Once you have Silverlight installed, the selected interactive guide will open up in your browser. The guide displays an Office 2003 mockup where you can select a specific command or tool, and learn where to access this same feature in Office 2010. Also, clicking the command will display an Office 2010 mockup and play an animation that shows how to find this same tool in the new Microsoft Office.

If you think you’re going to be using these guides a lot (especially during your first days with Office 2010) your best option is probably downloading them to your hard drive, so that you can easily access them any time, without even having an Internet connection. Simply open the guide you want to download and hit the Install link on the top right corner.

For those of you who prefer a more traditional way to learn new commands, you can use the Office 2010 reference workbooks created by Microsoft to ease the transition to the new version of Office. They’re available as Excel documents (XLSX) and include lists with all the command equivalences between the 2003 and the 2010 Office versions, organized by menu.

Last week I had the chance to attend the official presentation of the Adobe Creative Suite in Barcelona. People from the Adobe headquarters in Spain showcased many of the new features in all Adobe apps, doing live test with sample documents, videos and images. We could see the the amazing effect of content-aware tools in Photoshop, the helpful coding utilities in Dreamweaver and the new online CS Live services.

The new Creative Suite 5 is presented in five different versions: Design Standard, Design Premium, Web Premium, Production Premium and Master Collection - each one of them with different app configurations, aimed at different types of users. CS5 includes 15 updated products, 1 new application (Flash Catalyst), 250 new features and a pack of online services, and it has required 85 million lines of code and 18 months of work.

According to Adobe, the Creative Suite 5 has been developed with two kinds of customers in mind: independent developers and designers, and for the first time, companies. Their purpose with this new CS edition is to remove any creativity boundaries, help you be more productive and accurate, and also make core processes in design and editing easier and faster.

Let’s take a closer look to all the exciting features and enhancements included in the new Creative Suite 5.

Photoshop

Photoshop is undoubtedly the one app that everyone is looking forward to with every new release of Adobe’s Creative Suite. The all new Photoshop CS5 has met all our expectations, including new tools that simplify difficult, repetitive tasks and make photo editing easier for everyone. Some of the new features are an enhanced selection tool (with improved edge definition parameters), the amazing content aware setting in the Healing Brush and the Fill tools, the new Puppet warp functionality, a whole new set of brushes that behave and react like real-life brushes dipped in oil paint, an enhanced Camera Raw module to work with RAW images, and an improved HDR management utility. If you want to see more, don’t miss the preview of Photoshop CS5 we wrote a few weeks ago.

Dreamweaver

Adobe’s coding editor doesn’t have as many new features as other apps in the suite, but they’re all quite important ones. Generally speaking, the program is now lighter and more reliable. Dreamweaver CS5 now can work with HTML5 templates, as well as with dynamic webpages based on CMS such as Joomla!, Drupal or Wordpress. The “Live Code” option lets you browse the code and the document as it would be displayed on a web browser. Dreamweaver also makes use of the new online services in CS Live, especially the Adobe Browser Lab - a web app that lets you check the appearance of your website on different browsers and operating systems. A nice touch in the templates included in the editor is the use of the template’s own instructions as sample text, instead of the traditional lorem ipsum.

Flash

Adobe has decided to make Flash a lot simpler, in order to broaden its target audience. The new Flash CS5 includes many new tools and features that noticeably improve workflow and is fully compatible with InDesign. Among other characteristics, you’ll find support for special languages like Arabic or Japanese, a bunch of helpful tools to create animations more quickly and easily, possibility to save files as XFL (which lets you edit the FLA and make last-minute changes without losing work) and a set of new decorative brushes with which you can create trees, flames and thunder - among many other items - in a few seconds. The new Flash CS5 also includes a script library and a simpler working environment for ActionScript.

Illustrator

If Photoshop is the quintessential photo editing tool these days, Illustrator is an industry standard in vector drawing. The new features in Illustrator CS5 are mainly focused on make frequent tasks lighter and easier to complete. Perspective design has also been improved, with vector objects adapting automatically to the perspective wherever you place them. You’ll also be able to edit strokes in a much simpler way, thanks to all the improvements applied to stroke-related tools.

InDesign

Compared to all the other programs in the Creative Suite 5 - and bearing in mind the growing popularity of ebooks -  it’s surprising to see that InDesign CS5 remains pretty much the same as the previous version, including only common new features that have been applied to all the apps in the suite. Still, there are a few new features worth mentioning, such as the possibility to add motion, sound and video to documents, simplified selection and editing tools, and integration with Adobe CS Review, another CS Live service that lets you share documents and work on them collaboratively in a much easier way.

Fireworks

The new Fireworks CS5 fixes more than 60 bugs from the previous versions, most of them thanks to the feedback from users. This version lets you export documents to more formats and devices (including mobile phones), has improved startup time and includes a bunch of new design templates which you can edit and customize any way you like.

If you’ve got World Cup fever and you’ve got an iPhone, then here are 5 top downloads and applications to celebrate the beautiful game and the biggest footballing show on Earth:

Just like the ‘real’ FIFA 10, FIFA 10 for iPhone is a fully licensed simulation that lets you play in competitions from a wide range of World leagues, ranging from the Scottish Premier League to the Brazilian League. There’s also a wide selection of international teams, and you can compete for the ultimate prize, the FIFA World Cup.

While FIFA 10 may have the name and brand, many may find that X2 Football 2009 has the gameplay. This excellent soccer simulation looks and feels a lot like Pro Evolution Soccer, only a little scaled back, of course. The control system in X2 Football 2009 will feel very comfortable and familiar for anyone who has played a football game on their console. Note that you’ll have to upgrade to the full version to play matches.

It’s hard to imagine a mobile version of the game could be anything like as in-depth as the original, but Football Manager Handheld 2010 offers a surprisingly rich management experience. You can take control of a team from a choice of 34 leagues across 11 different countries. You get to set tactics, pick formations, issue team and individual instructions, organize training, scout players and make transfers.

If you’re simply interested in following the real thing, then ESPN 2010 World Cup is one of the best ways of following the World Cup live. The sheer amount of information it offers is staggering. In fact, if you try to read everything on it the World Cup would probably be over by the time you’ve finished. The main screen lets you browse different categories, including: Teams, News, Fixtures, Venues and Tournament History.

If you want something even closer to the action, then how about the Southafrica2010 World Cup Soccer Cup Tracker. SouthAfrica 2010 is specially designed to provide you with moment-by-moment coverage of all the games. The app features something called Gamecast which delivers all the essential and crucial moments during a match as it happens. News is delivered via all four official FIFA RSS feeds so you’ll be the first to know.