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Captain FTP might sound like some kind of swashbuckling, seafaring FTP client but ignore the name – it’s actually a really good client.

Captain FTP is an intelligent client because it uses what the developer’s call “Sync Browsing”. This means that if the local and remote directory structure match, users can browse folders locally and the remote folder will automatically follow the local folder. Captain FTP supports all major protocols such as SSL and SFTP and it even has presets for those that upload to Amazon S3 and WebDav uploads.

The interface of Captain FTP couldn’t be simpler. It features simple navigation with Quick Connect, supports drag and drop, supports virtual folders, Growl alerts and built-in internal viewers for movies, pictures, sound and PDFs. Captain FTP also supports scheduled transfers, accelerated transfers, resuming, auto-reconnect, synchronization, Applescripts and much more than it should do for a such a simple client.

The only downside is that the largest file it will transfer is 2GB although that will surely be enough for most people’s FTP needs.

Captain FTP is an excellent FTP client that will satisfy just about every conceivable FTP need within a compact but powerful package.

Download Captain FTP 6.1019 in Softonic

Coming from the developer of the excellent Acquisition search tool, we’re bound to expect a top notch program. The Xtorrent client does not disappoint.

This Bittorrent client offers a powerful search tool, reminiscent of Acquisition, and a great way of organizing your different downloads. These will be separated by type (image, video, audio) and can be stored in different groups. Once a file is downloaded you can have Xtorrent automatically store it somewhere, such as place audio files in iTunes.

Torrents can be managed individually and Xtorrent offers both a progress bar and bottom information window to keep you updated on all the stats relating to the torrent.

I enjoyed the torrentcast feature, which is ideal to download new episodes of a file being released regularly.

If there’s one thing that’s missing from Xtorrent, it’s the ability to create your own trackers, a feature now available in most torrent clients. I also felt the interface could get a little crowded with many downloads running.

Overall though, Xtorrent is a clever torrent client with a great search tool and a cool torrentcast feature.

Download Xtorrent 2.2 (v82) in Softonic

Do you feel like brightening up your desktop? Changing the icons is an easy way of giving it a new look.

This icon set, Must Have Icons is a pretty comprehensive collection of 50 icons, each in four different sizes. They can be used in Windows or OSX, and instructions available from the developer’s site. There are XP and Vista only instructions included.

The icons are all high quality, and have a clean, modern style to them. They are not radically different, and are more utilitarian than stylish, but attractive none the less. We would have liked to see more unique folder icons, as the included folder icon is pretty dry.

For a free collection, Must Have Icons is impressive. It features pretty much every icon you might want for your desktop environment.

Download Must Have Icons in Softonic

Want to finally create that website you’ve been thinking about? Don’t worry you don’t actually need to be an expert designer or programmer to build your own. Applications like RapidWeaver make it easy to create and publish websites.

RapidWeaver offers a very clean GUI from which you can easily pick out what elements to create for your website such as a movie album, contact form or styled text. The application comes with 40 different themes, and you can easily find hundreds more created by users from the developer site. Just click on one of the themes from the bottom half of the interface to select it. If you have some coding knowledge you can also work with the xhtml and css to tweak themes to your liking. The application also includes its very own open RapidWeaver Sandwich file format so you can work on your website outside of the program.

Publishing is really simple in RapidWeaver. Once your page is saved, just enter the login details for your FTP or .Mac account and pres publish. Thanks to the preview button at the top left you can also check how your pages will look in a browser before publishing.

Although you can work with the PHP, XHTML and CSS some more advanced users might find it too basic.

However, thanks to a clean interface, lots of themes and easy publishing, RapidWeaver makes it easy for anyone to have their own website online in minutes.

Download RapidWeaver 4.3 in Softonic

Although Postbox has clearly been inspired by Thunderbird, it features many useful tools that make organizing and tracking your e-mails a real pleasure.

Postbox is designed as an alternative e-mail client that quietly works behind the scenes to catalog everything in your email. That means every single bit of text, contact, address, link, picture, document and attachment. The great thing is Postbox is a lot simpler than Thunderbird and getting your webmail – such as Gmail or Yahoo e-mail onto your desktop – is extremely quick and painless. It can even retrieve your Facebook messages for you using a simple setup wizard.

When you install Postbox, you’re taken through a very simple setup wizard to retrieve your mail. My Gmail account info was retrieved within seconds and suddenly I had a fully searchable and backed up copy of my e-mail on my hard drive. There are various features of Postbox that make it worth a look. One of them is just the general ease of use and another is the images view which allows you to scroll through every single image in your inbox. You can also view messages by conversation, create to-do items and organize mail into folders. It does not however extract labels from Gmail which is a downside because it means reorganising your entire collection once again.

If Postbox looks and feels a lot like Thunderbird, then it’s no surprise because some of the same development team worked on both projects. However, if Thunderbird has failed to grab you, you should definitely give Postbox a try.

Download Postbox 1.0.0 in Softonic

DivX is the worldwide codec standard behind many of those compressed videos that are legally or otherwise downloaded from the net.

Of course, there are now hundreds of players out there that play DivX but whichever you use, your files need to be encoded in DivX to work properly. The only way to do this is to run them through a converter such as DivX 7 which converts your files to the latest version of the DivX standard. DivX 7 for Mac provides everything you need to enjoy high-quality digital videos including high definition H.264 (.mkv) videos with AAC audio.

The DivX for Mac download includes the DivX Player plus trial versions of the DivX Pro Codec (6-month trial) and DivX Converter (15-day trial). The DivX player is one of the sleekest out there featuring translucent windows, clean play controls and on-demand scrub bar. It will also play Quicktime and other popular formats. The converter is extremely simply to use as it merely requires you to drag and drop files into it’s tiny interface. Conversions can be rather slow though depending on the size of the file you want to convert.

DivX 7 takes DivX to new levels of quality although since so many other players now playback DivX, the price to upgrade may put off many. If you want the real deal with the converter as well though, DivX 7 promises the best and most accurate DivX conversions and playback

Download DivX 7.1 in Softonic

OmniFocus, the Getting Things Done productivity tool, is finally out of Beta and officially 1.0.

With the help of productivity whiz Ethan Schoonover, aka Merlin Man, OmniFocus is an unassuming yet highly effective piece of software. It gives you limitless possibilities to organize and manage your notes. First plan your projects and actions, then set them in contexts, whether by date or by topic. Features can be added, removed and shifted around as you like. The Perspectives feature is great to save all your custom settings a click.

The folks at Omnigroup have really worked on interaction, and integrated OmniFocus to Mac apps like Mail, Spotlight and iCal. The program is also built so that notes taken anywhere, whether in an email, a document or another note taking app, can be effortlessly integrated in OmniFocus. Another handy little feature is SmartMatch. With this method you can quickly access or edit notes or parts of notes in a few keystrokes. Saves you a considerable amount of time.

While OmniFocus is a highly flexible application and even though you can use it whatever your style of project management, it still is very GTD centric. If you don’t particularly like that method then you might not adjust to it. Another point: at $79.95 it’s a pretty expensive piece of software, but considering the level of innovation put into it we think it’s worth it.

OmniFocus is the perfect organizer for GTD afficionados.

Download OmniFocus 1.7.3 in Softonic

Kodak Easyshare is a digital photo organizer which gives you access to your Kodak Gallery and make use of Kodak’s project and print services.

You’ll find it offers what you expect of a digital photo organizer, such as being able to save your photos in albums and show them in calendar view, adding tags, easy transferring from your camera and sharing them with others via email or burning on a CD. You can also create a little slideshow to view albums in full screen.

I did find the application a little counterintuitive, partly due to the color of the interface, which makes it difficult to set buttons apart. A simple action like adding an album, wasn’t easy as it should be.

Although limited, the range of editing tools available was OK. You can enhance your picture, set the balance and add a few effects to make a little snazzier. Both the tips and online guide provided by Kodak are thorough.

You can use Kodak Easyshare without actually having a Kodak account, however you’ll find many places in the application where it encourages you to do so. Your use of the application will also obviously be limited if you don’t have one as you won’t be able to print photos or create projects.

Kodak Easyshare is a digital photo manager that gives access to Kodak services online. Despite its counter-intuitive interface, it boasts sturdy editing tools and lots of help for beginners.

Download Kodak Easyshare 6.2 in Softonic

Download RCDefaultApp 2.1 in Softonic

One of the major innovations in the latest release of iPhoto was the addition of Geotagging to your photo collection.

However, if like me you don’t use iPhoto, you’ll need an alternative way to automatically add geotags to your photos. GPSPhotoLinker adds GPS positioning and location data to your photos as long as your camera has GPS tagging enabled. The latitude and longitude recorded by your GPS unit are linked and saved to your photos. GPSPhotoLinker automatically enters the city, state and country into the metadata.

Adding geographic information to an item is known as geotagging and if you’re not convinced of it’s worth, check out the developer’s mapped web galleries. There are four main steps to tagging with GPSPhotoLinker. Connect your GPS device to your computer, Choose your GPS receiver type, Download them and finally, “Load” them. All that’s left for you to do is set the Time Zone and to choose a tracking point. Another bonus of using GPSPhotoLinker is that using Spotlight, you can easily search any of the metadata right in Finder making it easier to find your photos.

Considering it’s completely free to use GPSPhotoLinker is an excellent application for anyone that wants to add geotags to their photo collection.

Download GPSPhotoLinker 1.6.4 in Softonic

Download iPod.iTunes 4.2.6 in Softonic

phpMyAdmin is one of the most popular tools written in PHP which allows you to handle the administration of MySQL over the Web.

You can use it to create and drop databases, create/drop/alter tables, delete/edit/add fields, execute SQL, manage user privileges and export data into various formats. Although it’s a remarkably simple SQL database, it’s obviously still beyond the grasp of most novices users, especially those that have no SQL database experience. However, the success of phpMyAdmin has been so great that the developers have even written a book about it!

If you are just starting in php however and can’t handle the complexities of the book, then the developers have also written an easy to use tutorial aimed at programmers, designers and analysts of dynamic websites that want to learn the basics of SQL. Of course, before you start anything you’ll need access to a MySQL server which you can host on any major web hosting platform.

phpMyAdmin is one of the benchmark programs for learning about PHP and SQL programming and it remains a popular choice with beginners and experts alike.

Download phpMyAdmin 3.2.2 in Softonic

Transmission is currently the best torrent client on Mac thanks to a beautiful interface and a simple set of intuitive features.

This new version brings many more improvements to an already solid release. You can set different priority levels for torrents and establish stall limit times. The speed limit mode, represented by a turtle icon at the bottom of the interface, is extremely useful if you’re looking to control the amount of bandwidth you use for uploads and downloads.

Transmission has consistently improved over time, offering many more options to view your torrents. You can now filter your torrent list according to downloading, seeding, or paused. The client can also organize transfers by queue order, date added, name, process. Transmission also allows you to label, filter and sort torrents by groups and total activity. You can also encrypt your torrent activity in case you want it to stay private.

We really like the new interface, which blends in perfectly to the new Mac OS X Leopard. Transmission manages to display all the essential information without actually seeming crowded, which is no easy feat. The only little nag we’d have with it is that it doesn’t offer as many advanced statistics as you’d find in Azureus.

Despite no advanced statistics, Transmission is a beautiful and incredibly intuitive torrent client for Mac.

Download Transmission 1.75 in Softonic

Is your iTunes library a mess? Do you have badly or mislabeled tracks? Rewriting tags yourself can take forever, so TuneUp Companion has been created to help you out.

TuneUp Companion sits next to your iTunes window, and has four functions. First is ‘Clean’, which searches for possible fits to your mislabeled tracks, and then automatically changes the file’s tag. You can also search for cover art in the same way. Drag any album missing artwork into the TuneUp Companion box, and it will find suitable matches, then update your files. If you like the ‘cover flow’ feature on iTunes, this is a great way to make it look good.

‘Now Playing’ finds YouTube videos, Amazon recommendations, Google news and ticket information relating to the music you’re listening to. ‘Concerts’ will list any performances in your area.

TuneUp Companion allows you to clean 500 songs and find 50 album covers, so once you’ve used them up you have to subscribe to do more. The unlimited ‘Now Playing’ and ‘Concerts’ functions might be useful to you, and the YouTube videos are a nice touch.

TuneUp Companion is a nice idea, although the subscription is not cheap for a service you might not need a great deal. I found the program to be a little slow and clunky, and unfortunately its design doesn’t fit that well with iTunes.

If you have lots of files in your iTunes library that need organizing, TuneUp Companion is for you. However, the other features don’t make this a program you’ll want to run all the time, as it is a little ugly and sometimes slow.

Download TuneUp Companion 1.59 in Softonic

Kindle for Mac is a free app you lets you read ebooks on your computer and is designed to sync with your Kindle device, so if you’re reading an ebook on your Mac, you can pick right up where you left off when you’re reading from your Kindle on the train.
Kindle for [...]