Designing a great image editor has always been a tricky balancing act. It’s important that the program has real power, plenty of useful functionality, and delivers more than you’d expect in every area. But at the same time, it should ideally be lightweight, easy to use, the kind of tool you can be using productively in just a few minutes.
Most image editors fall short in at least one area, of course, but there are occasional exceptions. And Hornil StylePix is a great example. This lightweight and portable program concentrates on the core editing essentials – transforms, colour and image corrections, painting, text tools and more – so isn’t weighed down with functions you’ll never need. But the features you do get are very well implemented, with a host of powerful options helping to deliver far more control than you might expect from a free tool.



If you need to access an FTP server, perhaps to upload the latest version of your website, then you’ll probably reach for your favourite FTP client. But although that will transfer your files, it’s not exactly a convenient solution, particularly if you need to work with the server on a regular basis.
PC storage space is cheap these days, and if you’ve just bought one of the latest 4TB drives then the chances are you won’t be worried about filling it any time soon.
If you’re viewing a PDF and find an image you’d like to reuse, then extracting it is usually easy enough: just right-click the picture, select Copy, and it’ll be sent to the clipboard, ready for pasting wherever you need.
Deleting files on a PC is normally very easy. But sometimes, just occasionally, Windows will tell you that it can’t help because the file is “in use”. And that can quickly become very frustrating, especially if you can’t see why the file is open, or it’s something you really need to delete (a malware component, say).
Microsoft’s decision to drop the Start menu in Windows 8 has caused plenty of controversy, but fortunately it’s made little difference to the end user. Developers quickly realised that many people really don’t like the new interface at all, and they’ve produced a host of free tools to help make Windows 8 look and feel as much like Windows 7 as possible.
Converting videos from one format to another can be a complicated business, so it’s no surprise that most conversion tools focus on ease of use above all else. But this can also mean the programs lose a great deal of functionality. Encoders such as FFmpeg – the engine behind many free converters – are absolutely packed with features, but the need for simplicity means most of these aren’t accessible to the end user.


