Freeware World

iPhone: The USA TODAY app for iPhone delivers the latest news, sports, weather and photos directly to your mobile phone. The free app condenses content from USA TODAY into an easy-to-access interface to help you stay ahead of current affairs on the go. You can check the latest headlines in six different categories (news, money, sports, life, tech and travel).

Windows: Need an app to manage, view and edit images? Look no further: Zoner Photo Studio Free is what you’ve been searching for. This great free app lets you manage photos with ease, fix and optimize them with a set of editing tools, view them in full screen and finally share them online on Facebook or Flickr.

Mac: Worried about what your kids are doing online? OnlineFamily.Norton gives parents the comfort to set their children free online while still keeping them safe and sound. Once it is setup, you will be able to see when your kids are online, what they’re looking it, who they are chatting with and even what they’re searching for.

I’m going to come clean on this one - to this day, I’ve never been faced with a situation where I needed to rename a bunch of files. Judging by the number of file renamers that are downloaded from Softonic every day, though, I seem to be in the minority.

ReNamer is a batch renamer that’s been around for a while. Just because it’s getting on a bit certainly doesn’t mean it’s past it, though. This little application is small, but very, very powerful. If you have a serious renaming task on your hands, I’d recommend you take a look - what differentiates this app from its competitors is the variety of renaming rules you can choose - there’s 13 pre-configured and the option to add your own. Want to change a capitalized file name into lowercase? No problem. Transliterate Russian file names into English? Sure thing. Rename music using meta tags? Okeydokey! ReNamer has it under control.

Admittedly, if you are looking for a simple renaming app, there are better programs out there. Batch File Rename Utility is flexible, but more limited in its options, which keeps things simple. Ken Rename, meanwhile, balances options and ease of use nicely. If you’re not afraid of the awesome power of ReNamer, however, download it now. It will change your life.Well, maybe that’s pushing it, but I promise it’ll do wonders for your files!

Google Translate is a seriously useful tool but it can be annoying having to open a new tab every time you want to translate something. Easy Translator is a convenient desktop client that translates 58 languages and seems to be based on the Google Translate engine although the developers are a little more vague than that claiming that “Easy Translator employs the power of Internet machine language translation engines”.

Easy Translator is easy to use. Simply paste the text that you want to translate, select the languages you want to translate to and from, hit Translate and you’re done. There aren’t many other features apart from standard copy, paste and cut tools but there’s a print feature to print translations.

In test translations, Easy Translator produced the same results as Google Translate. What I really like about this tool is that when you copy the translation and paste it in somewhere else, it doesn’t include the original text attached to it, unlike Google Translate.

I suspect that for most languages, Easy Translate uses Google Translate as its main engine. However, it’s impossible to verify the accuracy of each translation. It’s not clear if there’s a text limit either although there doesn’t seem to be one. However, the more text you paste, the longer it takes Easy Translator to process it. Note that, unlike Google Translate, there’s also no auto-detect language feature for text that’s pasted in.

The GIMP is one of the best free image editing tools for Mac. It’s the closest thing you’ll find to Adobe Photoshop without paying big bucks. However, a frequent complaint by those switching from Photoshop to The GIMP is that the interface isn’t exactly easy to use.

The GIMP has been designed in a rather awkward way, so that anyone used to Photoshop quickly gets confused by menu layout and the different naming conventions that The GIMP uses.

An excellent solution to this problem is GIMPshop.

GIMPshop is a modification of The GIMP which gives it an Adobe Photoshop style interface so that you can enjoy the best of both worlds. All of the functionality of The GIMP remains the same with the bonus of a much easier to use Photoshop style interface.

GIMPshop features menu layouts, dialogs and naming conventions that all Adobe Photoshop users will be familiar with.

However, there are a few issues to be aware of when trying to install it on Mac. Firstly, you’ll need Apple’s X11 to run GIMPshop. Secondly, the main problem that Leopard and Snow Leopard users will have is getting GIMPshop to remain stable. Although GIMPshop is supposed to officially support Leopard and Snow Leopard, the reality is quite different.

It can easily be made to work properly though by modifying a library file. Instructions of how to do so are here and the libraries you need to make it work are here.

Of course, GIMPshop isn’t a replacement for Photoshop but it’s probably the closest thing you’ll ever get for free.

Flight Simulator was one of the first PC games that impressed me. Despite the bland graphics and complexity, here was a game that finally gave you total freedom (as long as you wanted to fly). Released four years ago, Flight Simulator X was the last version, and after Microsoft announced the development team behind it was being disbanded, it was assumed the venerable simulator had been put to sleep.

Today they’ve announced its return with Microsoft Flight. The short teaser on their website hints that ‘Simulator’ has been dropped in favor of creating a more emotive product, as it features the lines ‘when I was a child, I dreamed I could fly’. Software doesn’t come much drier than the Flight Simulator series, so maybe a dash of feeling is just what it needs. Check out the video here.

Whether you like it or not, school is just around the corner. I must admit I liked this time of the year when I was a kid: buying new books and new stationery was exciting, and I looked forward to meeting school friends again after a few weeks without seeing them.

Now it’s a bit different: going back to work may not sound that thrilling, but hopefully having some time off in summer will have helped you gather all the energy you need for a fresh start. Also, there are a lot of tools that can help you stay organized all throughout the year, many of them based on the popular GTD (Getting Things Done) productivity method.

image by orcmic

So if you plan to start managing your projects and tasks in a more organized, productive way, here’s a bunch of apps that can lend you a hand:

ActiveInbox – A Firefox extension that enables you to apply the GTD method right into your Gmail account. ActiveInbox creates the appropriate labels to identify GTD actions, and a special box to check the list of current projects, references and other elements.

JelloDashboard - An Outlook plugin that organizes your emails in different lists according to the GTD principles. This enables you to focus on what is really important and work on all your tasks, one at a time, without wasting energy or resources.

Doit.im - More like a lighter version of GTD, Doit.im is a productivity tool based that enables you to deal with all pending tasks more effectively. It’s based on Adobe AIR, has support for online syncing, and lets you create tasks with notes, tags and alarm options.

GTD-Free - A basic, standalone app (no installation required) that helps you organize your tasks according to the principles of GTD very simply. Create queues of actions, schedule tasks, assign priorities, follow up projects… all of it in a neat interface.

ThinkingRock - A complete, feature-rich task organizer that faithfully follows the GTD principles. ThinkingRock helps you gather tasks, identify them and organize them into the appropriate list, according to whether they’re immediately actionable or not.

Until Thursday you can get a full version of iSkysoft’s FLV video converter simply by registering your email with them. Go to their website, and they’ll send you a registration code.

Why would you want to convert FLV files? They’re probably the most common video files on the web, but many devices, like iPods, don’t run them. iSkysoft FLV converter makes it easy to convert videos you download from the web into most common video formats, like MOV, MP4, WMV and MKV. You can also change the resolution, to optimize your video for whatever screen you want to watch it on. It lets you rip the audio from videos and save it in MP3, M4A or WMA too.

With a ton of video converters out there, iSkysoft’s FLV video converter isn’t bad at all so grab it while it’s free!

Google Books may be a good source for ebooks, but the browser window is definitely not the best interface to read them. It’s uncomfortable, requires a lot of mouse scrolling and includes distracting elements such as links and ads. Luckily you can now use an alternative tool to read Google ebooks: it’s called GooReader and lets you search, browse and read Google ebooks in a much nicer, more comfortable way.

GooReader reminds a me lot of iBooks,  mainly due to its wooden bookshelf background and the way books are displayed - shaped as ‘real’ books, with covers and bookmarks. You can use GooReader to search Google Books by title, author or Google Book_ID. Results are shown on the bookshelf like real-life books, with color-coded bookmarks: green means you can read the whole book, yellow grants a partial preview and red means the book is not available to read.

To start reading a book in GooReader, just double click the cover. The book will open in separate window, with browsing controls at the bottom. You can maximize the screen, browse through pages (with a nice animation effect), access the book’s table of contents and zoom in and out the text. Note that zooming in a lot may ruin text readability - depending on the quality of Google scans.

GooReader also includes the option to save books as PDF for offline reading, but this functionality is only available in the paid version. The app also lacks the option to add personal bookmarks and create lists with books, but with a bit of luck we’ll be seeing these and other improvements in future versions.

Whether you like it or not, DOC files are a standard for sharing documents online these days. The problem comes when someone emails you a DOC file and you don’t have Microsoft Office installed on that computer. Don’t worry: even if you don’t have Word on your system, there are other ways to open DOC files without Word - and all three of them for free:

1. Google Docs

Google’s online suite not only creates and saves documents as DOC, but also works with DOC files imported from your hard drive. So if you ever find yourself with a DOC file on a Word-less computer, head to Google Docs in a web browser and click the Upload button. You’ll be able to import files from your hard drive, up to 1024 MB - 500 KB per DOC file.

2. Microsoft Office Word Viewer

This handy app lets you view and print DOC files with ease. Microsoft Office Word Viewer has no editing functions at all, but works with documents created with all versions of Microsoft Word, including the latest format DOCX. If you really need to edit the text, you can always use the trick of copying and pasting it into another application.

3. Abiword

This light word processor doesn’t have as many options and tools as Microsoft Word, but works perfectly fine as document editor. Abiword works with DOC files - as well as other formats- and can be easily extended in functionality with plug-ins. There’s even a portable version in case you don’t want to install extra software on the computer.

[Via OnSoftware FR]

2K Games has released a demo on Steam for their mob sequel Mafia II. Set in a New York-influenced city named Empire Bay, it features the well worn mix of narrative and open-world sandbox game that has made the GTA series so popular.

The original game was much drier than Rockstar’s OTT gangster series, and I’m interested to see whether Mafia II can compete with the histrionics of Niko Bellic and the other GTA protagonists.

First impressions will follow soon, once we’ve spent some time in the game. Download the demo via Steam here.