Tired of using Paint or image viewer that comes with Microsoft XP? On the other hand, is ACDSee too expensive a product to spend your money on? Perhaps, FastStone Viewer 2.7 Beta 3 might give you a powerful experience of a fast, stable, user-friendly and personalised image viewer. Besides providing a preview of images, it is also an image converter and an editor, with a bundle of cool features to manage your images, such as photo comparison, red-eye removal, resizing, emailing and colour adjustment.

The full-screen interface provides quick access to EXIF information, thumbnail browser and a couple of other useful functions, via hidden toolbars that appear when you roll your mouse over the four edges of the screen. In addition, the application offers high quality magnification and musical slideshow with over 150 transitional effects, lossless transition, drop shadow effects, and more which you would normally encounter with an image editor.

FastStone Image Viewer supports all major graphics formats (BMP, JPEG, JPEG 2000, animated GIF, PNG, PCX, TIFF, WMF, ICO and TGA) and popular digital camera RAW formats (CRW, CR2, NEF, PEF, RAF, MRW, ORF, SRF and DNG).

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Behold the amazing 9 tools within a package, the Oront Burning Kit 1.2.1. This software product bundles and integrates several important and useful tools that can help you record, erase and copy CD and DVD. Combining the best features of the CD and DVD burners softwares, the Oront Burning Kit is one you should never go without.

Operating under Windows 98/NT/2000/XP, the CD/DVD toolkit provides ease-of-use and flexibility to meet the requirement of any avid users. With minimum resource demands and low disk space usage, the Oront Burning Kit could easily be justified as one of programs in your Windows’ list of Start Program.

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This is the first of the many upcoming contests to be held in Coolest-Gadgest Forums, a (sister-)site related to SoftSift. Over the last one year, Coolest Gadgets has managed to grow exponentially in size, capturing the interest of several gadgets lovers, some of which include software developers as well as architectural designers. To commemorate the first year of Coolest Gadgets, a forums has been launched for the demand of many people who, in one way or another, love the existence of this site.

In conjunction of the official launch last Friday, August 18, 2006, the administrator of the Coolest Gadgets Forums also announced the commencement of their first contest, with over $1000 worth of prizes to be given away, including a Wicked Laser*, 8″ LCD TV, a wireless headset and much more.

The winner of the contest will be able to choose an item from the prize list, with the remaining prizes raffled off between the active members who participate in the forum. Read on to see how this works.

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Getting fed up of using Symantec’s Anti-virus program, or MaCafee’s Anti-virus software? Try out something else then. Kaspersky Lab currently invites users to participate in its beta testing program for one of the best anti-virus program, the Kaspersky Anti-Virus 6.0 Beta 1. Note that, this is still a beta software, therefore it is not advisable to employ it in production machine.

Providing state-of-the-art technology is protecting system against constant virus related attacks, Kaspersky Anti-Virus 6.0 automatically checks for viruses in all incoming and outgoing messages in real-time mode, thereby preventing any potential virus infection on your machine. In addition, the anti-virus scanner provides a comprehensive check of all local and network drives including files embedded deep within a few layers of archive. Powered by a unique integrated technology based on the principles of heuristic searching, Kaspersky Anti-Virus is by no means behind its fellow competitors.

A list of beta testing applications are available here:

• Kaspersky Anti-Virus 6.0 for Windows File Servers 6.0 Beta 1
• Kaspersky Administration Kit 6.0 Beta 1
• Kaspersky Anti-Virus 6.0 for Windows Workstations 6.0 beta 1

Based on the use of advanced scripting and AJAX technology, Writely Beta is now currently available for signing up new users. After acquiring by the search engine giant, Google, new accounts were not accepted until late Thursday due to transition process of the application to Googles servers.

Writely offers document authoring and collaboration capabilities within a Web browser. Some of these features include the ability for multiple people to work on a document in real time, secure storage that saves a document every 10 seconds, and an interface that is easy to use.

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As a plugin for Skype, Skylook 1.5, a combination of both Skype and Microsoft Outlook, offers Outlook users with the capability of calling Skype contacts over Microsoft Outlook. It is basically a unified programs of VoIP, Internet Messaging and email at your convenience.

There are four different editions of Skylook.
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Fed up with your notepad? The latest version of ZuluPad 0.3.8b has been released, since my last post of ZuluPad. This application allows you to jot down class notes, appointments, to-do lists, favorite websites, pretty much anything you can think of. The great thing about ZuluPad is that it combines the best parts of a notepad with the best parts of a wiki, a concept made popular by Wikipedia.

So, why is it considered a Wiki?

Say for instance, you’re a music major, and you’re studying Bach. You’ve taken notes on Bach in ZuluPad, and after a long 16 weeks have finally completed the semester. Sometime after the summer break, you’re taking notes on Beethoven, and your teacher mentions a way in which Beethoven was influenced by Bach. As soon as you type “Bach” into your notes, it’s underlined as a hyperlink. You think to yourself, “oh yeah, I know a few things about Bach”. So you click the link, and you can read all of your Bach notes. While you’re reading your Bach notes, you happen to notice a link to a page about Henry Purcell, and you can refresh your memory about him, too.

ZuluPad is currently available for Windows and Mac OS X, and a Linux port is in the works. The main features are in place, making it a much better “notepad” that you would want to have. There is also a ZuluPad Forum if you want to let your thoughts be known to the community. When ZuluPad development is finished, there will be a free version and a version available for purchase that will include some additional features. More information is available in the forum.

Download
ZuluPad for Windows
ZuluPad for Mac OS X

Némethi László, a computer programmer, has written some cool applications, and one of them here is LaCLock 1.13h. This small little tool allows users to encrypt and decrypt files or clipboard text easily, as you can see from the image (on the right).

Features

• -developed: WinXP, VisualC++6 sp6
• -Rijndael cipher, CBC mode
• -widely parametrizable
• -drag’n drop file choosing
• -extremely simple usage

Generally, LaCLock is a pretty simple tool, but very comprehensive and enhanced. Many features such as “drag and drop”, are supported.

Download LaCLock 1.13h.

A compression tool that gives better compression than Winzip and WinRar, incredible isn’t it? Well, that will be FlexCompress 2.73. This software is a high-spede high-speed compression library developed to provide archive functionality for your applications, and some of the functions include flexible compression and strong encryption algorithms, which allow users to integrate archiving and backup features in your program easily and quickly.

Incorporating their new unique technology, a transaction system, FlexCompression is an innovative solution that gives quick and easy fix to update archive files, providing data integrity, just like a reliable database system.

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Released under the GNU General Public License (GPL), TightVNC 1.3.8 is now released.

Derived from the popular VNC software, TightVNC is a free remote control software package that allows you to connect up to remote systems. The functionality is almost like Windows XP’s Remote Desktop Connection (RDP), but it is connection by a different protocol. With this application, users can see the desktop of the remote machine, and control it as if the machine is right in front of the user. Users can monitor, as well as control, the mouse and keyboard on the remote machine. The slight difference from RDP is that, it does not have the capability to bring the sounds systems from the remote machine to your local machine, and devices including the printer and parallel ports.

Features of TightVNC

• * free, GPL-licensed, with full source code available;
• * useful in remote administration, remote customer support, education, and for many other purposes;
• * cross-platform, available for Windows and Unix, compatible with other VNC software.

TightVNC 1.3.8 is a Release Candidate version, and the stable version will follow shortly.

Download the development version of TightVNC 1.3.8 here:
Tight VNC 1.3.8