Flock is a free open-source Firefox-based web browser developed by Flock Inc for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. Just like any other Mozilla-derived software which is always named after animal-centric words, Flock is probably named either after the word that represent a group of birds or perhaps after a genus of flower plants. As an open source software, it is mainly licensed under GPL, while some other components of it are separately licensed under LGPL+MPL.
Advanced SystemCare Free is a system optimization package for Windows. It is developed by IOBit.com who is known for their award winning optimization tools.
Advanced SystemCare Free offers a basic optimization options for Windows system. This 'free' version offers some basic options to optimize the system. More optimization options are available in the Pro version but for average home user and occassional gamer, the free version is adequate to meet their needs.
We tested the software on our Core 2 Duo (mp3 & games infested) office PC with both Windows Vista Ultimate and the good old Windows XP Professional installed side by side. First, we boot to Vista to test it. From the test, we have to say "don't judge this software by it's name". Despite the so-called 'Basic' nature, it managed to give performance gain up to 50% in Vista. Still unable to believe the result, we reboot the machine and now into XP. Since we use XP a lot more compared to Vista, it is no surprise to see the system crawls. However, after running all the available optimizations, we can see significant increase in performace, perhaps around 25-30%.
To put this software to the ultimate stress, we fork out our unused dusty 1GHz Pentium III machine from our store. After ensuring the Windows XP Pro inside up and running after a 5 years hiatus, we install the software and crossed our fingers to see the result. Surprisingly, we managed to get approximately 20% of performance gain! It is really impressive considering that many of the hardware inside have been obsolete in terms of today's computing standard. We even managed to play some resource hungry games of past years such as The Sims 2 and Sid Meier's Civilization IV smoothly without having much problem on the same machine, thanks to the optional tool named Game Booster that can be downloaded separately and integrated into this software.
Advanced SystemCare Free offers better system optimization tools than those Windows built-in defaults. The utilities are are well categorized and all of them are reliable. Most of them are very useful and usually found only in commercial software. IOBit did a good job for offering this software for free and there are even utilities we didn't expect to be bundled in this free package. Our final words? Highly recommended not only for those who want the most out from their system, but also for those who want to keep their old machines run at their top peak performance.
Download Andvanced SystemCare Free here:
http://www.iobit.com/advancedwindowscareper.html?Str=download
Avira Antivir Personal is a free antivirus software developed by Germany-based Avira GmbH. It is available in various major computing platforms like Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and Solaris. Avira Antivir Personal is currently in version 9. From version 9, the free Personal edition comes available with antispyware and antiadware which was only made available in Premium and Security Suite version before.
For those who are familiar with the Avira company for a long time, you should know that today's Avira Antivir is an evolved version of the previously known as just 'Antivir'. Before adopting the Antivir name, the antivirus was weirdly named "H+BEDV Datentechnik GmbH"; may sound like a technical stuff to many.
AS its name bears, Avira Antivir Personal is free for personal use, and any new scanning engine comes with one year license, of which renewing is just a matter of installing software updates; a very simple license renewal system for an antivirus software. So far, we found no annoying restrictions for the software.
Other than the free Personal edition, the antivirus also have two other versions, namely Avira Antivir Premium and Avira Security Suite, which is targetted at commercial and business user and of course, comes with more extensive crucial features for people in this field. The free Personal version is on the other hand, is adequate for the basic, day to day home use.
Avira Antivir Personal is one of the best free antivirus software. The downloaded installer package for Windows is roughly 33MB in size, small enough in today's standard. Upon installation, it only occupies double of that size and only utilize slightly more than 10MB of system resource when running in the background, even with the AHeAD (Advanced Heuristic Analysis and Detection) enabled. The heuristic behavior scanning ability is important to detect the virus based on behavior, should they passed the traditional first level virus signature check.
In our test, it even beats some of well-known commercial ones. For example, our office which is using the regularly updated PC-Cillin OfficeScan antivirus solution fails to detect the surprisingly common SPR/AutoIt.Gen, TR/Patched.GY.3, TR/Crypt.ZPACK.GEn and JS/Dldr.Agent.VG! This is quite humiliating for a commercial antivirus software but then it shows how good this software is as it managed to detect all four. We even comparing it with 3 other 'big name antivirus software' but those software only managed to find 1, 2 and 3 respectively. Shocking, ain't it?
The only bad thing we found about Antivir is it keeps alerting us about some of legal hacking tools found in our system, even after we choose to ignore it for several times. It's not really a bad thing though as it only show that how good the "Luke Filewalker" engine (a pun for Luke Skywalker?) in doing it's job. Other than that, it keeps telling you to purchase the other 2 versions whenever you run the update, though this only occur once in a day, or once every 3 days, if you choose to update in every 3 days, that's it.
Personal home user will have to bear with the unavailability of webguard (against maliciously scripted webs), antispam (for email), rescue system (should things go haywire), firewall, backup, game mode and some more though. However, you can always opt for many other free tools available on the net to cover these absences. In conclusion, this software is highly recommended.
Download Avira Antivir Personal for free here:
http://www.free-av.com/en/trialpay_download/1/avira_antivir_personal__free_antivirus.html
Safari is a free web browser for both Mac and Windows PC. It is developed by Apple Inc. and is currently in its 4th version. THe browser is made based on Apple's own WebKit webpage rendering engine, of which was developed based on Konqueror's KHTML (in the form of WebCore) and KJS (in the form of JSC). Since both KHTML and KJS are open-source, WebKit also has been made open-source as well (under GNU Lesser GPL), allowing 3rd-party software developer to use it for instance, to develop another brand new browser, just like in the case when Netscape source-code was made open-source thus gave birth to Mozilla Firefox. However, some parts like the GUI elements of the software continue to remain as Apple's proprietary.
For most people, Safari is just yet another web browser. This is true to some extent though, as it shares common notable features with other modern browsers such as tabbed browsing, built-in pop-up blocker, integrated major search engines, spell checker, auto web form filler, feed reader and many more. However, Safari do have some "Safari-only" features like the "Keychain" password manager, Web-Inspector (a DOM Inspector-like utility), iPhoto integration as well as Apple Dashboard integration, where most of them are like some sort of rebadged similar features often found in other major browsers like Mozilla Firefox and Opera. They also usually only benefits Apple-esque web.
The first public release was in 2003, where it was only made available on Mac OS X. A Windows-ported version was only released in 2007. On that time, Safari is already in it's 3rd version. From various unofficial sources on the net, it appears that Windows users has been requesting for a Windows version of Safari, although those requests are made solely for the purpose of "satisfying the geek thirst". In real world application though, performance wise, Safari itself has never been a better browser actually, as it is always at average with other browsers.
The most notable controversy about Apple Safari is Apple's official web browser comparison chart which was publicly displayed on the company's corporate website sometime back in 2004. On that time, Safari was compared with other browsers with the fast browser reputation like Opera and Mozilla Firefox, of which both were already in their 8th and 2nd version respectively. However, surprisingly, Apple used Opera 7 and Firefox 1.5 to make the comparison. This biased and doubtful comparison was seriously offending that it resulted some European and Asian countries banned the advertisement of the software. Some long time Windows users admitted that this was expected because for them, "this is not the first time Apple tells us a lie". Even the more recent comparison still compares Safari with Firefox 2, as if Firefox 3 does not exist. A group of Firefox fans have been mocking about this on the net but there is no official respond from Apple so far (probably because they are eating back their words?). To make it worst, Apple still self-proclaimed Safari as "the world's fastest browser" although they are constantly being confronted by professionals for such false claim. In fact, even the Apple official website sometimes may took ages to be fully loaded when browsed through Safari, especially on first visit (upon first install or cleaned cache/cookies) while Firefox or Opera never really have this problem when visiting there.
Since version 4, Apple has included major changes and revamped around 25% of the interface of the software. It now somehow resembles the Mobile Safari, the iPhone version of Safari. It also support native Windows look for Windows version. There is also a 'CoverFlow' (like the one found in the iTunes) for browsing the history and bookmarks. The JSC engine also has been superseded by SquirrelFish, a new JavaScript engine. Apple, just like Google on Chrome, emphasize heavily on speeding up the JavaScript execution process. Both Google and Apple claimed that this greatly speeds up internet browsing experience, though this will only has significant impact if the website is heavily scripted with JavaScript (which only a fractionof websites do).
Still, despite in version 4, Apple still stubborn (or stupid) enough not to include a pulldown menu button in the addressbar, where this feature has been proven extremely useful in all other browsers. With this feature, user does not need to retype addresses or opening the history just to browsethe previously visited website. Not only that, Safari shares the same flaw with Google Chrome, where it can only recognize the first few letters of a typed URL in the address bar in order to suggest the previously opened URLs. Firefox and Opera are much better in this, where both browsers will suggest any previously visited URLs if the user only typing the 2nd level domain of a URL or even the sub-page URL.
Safari still have lots of rooms for improvements, and it would be better if they (Apple) would consider to tend to any kind of complaints regarding this browser. No, we are not asking them to make Safari as "another Firefox" but just want them to properly implement 'proven-useful' features. It is pointless to be different where in fact you are just being bad.
Download Safari for free here:
http://www.apple.com/safari/download/
StorYBook is a free book authoring software. It is mainly developed by Intertec but being an open-source software, many parts of this software are also jointly developed by the open-source community.
StorYBook is pretty much a book authoring software for beginner as it offers adequate assistance for new authors. The interface is neat and clean, almost resembling some other professional commercial book authoring software out there. Anybody can start using this software right away after installation and through the wizard, it will guide you upon the creation of your first project.
Project creation and management is very straight forward. Even a novice writer will easily master it in no time after some practice. For example, you can just write whatever ideas you have in your mind first in separate parts. Then you may manage and edit these parts and see how your story develop. Story writing can never be easier and simpler than this thanks to the ease-of-use of this software.
Technical wise, the story written using this software is stored in the form of a database. Each project will have its own database and starting and opening a project is literally 'connecting' to that particular database. This is what makes it easy to manage your ideas and story. This software also requires Java to run so you have to install Java runtime first before you can use it. Other than that, this software works similar to word processor, albeit without the advanced grammar checking tools.
As usual, no software would come without a single flaw. Despite its easy to use nature, this software is surprising failed in the most unexpected term; version upgrading. Previously, there was no backup option available to backup your project (database) and you have to manually backup them. Only in more recent versions the backup tool has been made present. The actual use of the backup tool is to avoid the deletion of the database when upgrading or reinstalling the software. Yes, you read it right. Even a simple thing as an upgrading and reinstallation of this software will require you to uninstall the previously installed version, putting your projects at the verge of vanishing. In our testing session, we did expect that our demo project is at risk, and it did vanished along with the previous version. The only retrievable thing is the project name (title) and nothing else. This is very much unforgivable sin committed by any software.
Overall, this software is good if we don't need to reinstall or upgrade it but the requirement to uninstall the older versions before we can proceed with software upgrades is a complete turn-off. We have contacted Intertec (via email) right after the incident happened but still no reply from them up until the time of writing of this review. If the software has the mistake as mentioned above, added with the 'unfriendliness' of the main developer, we can just say we couldn't hardly recommend this software for you. We know some other (free) software that do similar thing without this flaw and we will write about them soon. We hope the future version will promptly fix this but until then, use this software at your own risk. Just be sure to have a backup before upgrading it.
Get StorYBook for free here:
http://storybook.intertec.ch/joomla/index.php/download
Flock is currently at version 2.5. What distinguishes Flock from the original Firefox browser is it integrates social networking and Web 2.0 technology into its user interface. Flock supports all common social networking and media services including Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo Mail, MySpace, AOL Mail, Digg, Facebook, Youtube, Photobucket, Picasa, Blogger, LiveJournal, Typepad, etc. With these services built-in interface, Flock users can track updates from friends: profiles, uploaded photos, and more, as long as the service are supported. This is a very convenient feature especially for those who are regularly using these services.
Just like the original Firefox browser, Flock shares many of Firefox's user-configurable optimizations, provided that the user know how to deal with the "about:config" settings editor, though this is not really advised as it might rendere Flock unusable should any misconfigurations happen. However, users always have other options as Flock also supports 3rd party add-ons, just like Firefox. On top of that, Flock supports numbers of Firefox extensions. We tested Flock with all Firefox-recommended extensions and all of them works without a glitch. Our advise: only use Firefox extensions that modify the core settings, not the interface. If you're unsure on what you're doing, you can always ask the Flock developer community.
Since its first release to the public in 2007, Flock has gained many awards due to its usability and functionality. Frankly speaking, we are agreed because we can hardly find anything that turn us off about this browser. So far, we found there is no other way that makes the Web 2.0 user experience very smooth and exciting. It really deserves those awards. If we are really going to give an award to this browser, we could give it "Editor's Choice" or "Editor's Power Award" or "Editor's Platinum Award" or something like that. Enough about the award thingy, we can say from our desk that this browser is 100% recommended. Just hope that Flock can retain this reputation for the future releases.
Download Flock for free here:
http://flock.com/download/