Not everyone is a web-coding whizz, or wants to learn the intricacies of HTML, CSS, PHP or other web-based programming languages. Xara Web Designer 9 is aimed squarely at those who prefer to design websites using desktop publishing tools, where what you see on-screen is what you expect to see with the finished design. Over recent years, Web Designer has built into a powerful, user-friendly tool that – a few quirks aside – makes designing websites as simple as putting together magazines, newsletters or brochures.

At first glance it looks beginner-friendly: pick a template, import your text and graphics, and build your site page-by-page at a time. But that does Web Designer a disservice, because if you delve deeper, you’ll find it has all the tools you need to design more complex sites that are attractive to look at, easy to navigate and bursting with support for all the latest technologies, from Flash-based animations to interactive widgets.

Read More »

Azureus Software has released Vuze 5.0, a major update of its open-source, cross-platform Bittorrent client. Version 5.0’s improvements and changes have been focussed on its “core functionality”, making the locating, adding and downloading of torrents much easier with this release.

This has been achieved by tweaking the user interface, Sidebar and Library views to make these features more visible, and are joined by other changes, including better tools for accessing Vuze remotely and a new tagging system for managing torrents.

Read More »

If you’ve created a website and want to test it properly, then you could get some web space, upload all your files and see how everything looks. But that’s not always too convenient, especially if you have to make several changes, as you’ll need to upload the tweaked files each time.

The whole development process can be much faster if you run a web server on your own PC, then. And while this can be complicated – especially if you try to download and install each component individually – it doesn’t have to be that way. Especially if you grab a copy of Uniform Server.

Read More »

From docks to desktop gadgets, the Start menu to the Start screen, there are many ways to launch applications on your PC. But most of these are quite bulky, giving you a new interface to explore, and perhaps tying up valuable screen real estate.

If you’re looking for something simpler, then, more lightweight, then you might be interested in a new Firefox add-on called Easy Access.

Read More »

If you’re worried about your PC’s RAM or CPU usage, then installing a system monitor can sometimes be useful. This will usually give you an on-screen display indicating when there’s a high demand for your system’s resources, so alerting you to potential problems as soon as they happen, and perhaps helping you to figure out the cause.

Having this extra on-screen display can be a problem, though. Usually you either have to free up a little space for a desktop gadget, or you’re left to peer at some tiny system tray indicator. So it’s good to see RAM CPU Taskbar take a different route, by using your entire taskbar as a CPU and memory meter.

Read More »

Open-source FTP client FileZilla 3.7.0 and FileZilla Portable 3.7.0 have both been released. The new build now allows users to view the total transfer speed as a tooltip over the transfer indicators, and replaces the depreciated term SSL with TLS.

The update also promises better performance over secure FTP connections and subtle tweaks to the user interface to make the program easier to use.

Read More »

Google has released Google Translate for Android 2.7, a major update of its free translation app. There’s one new feature – support for the website’s Phrasebook feature – and an extension of the app’s camera-input feature to support an additional 16 languages.

The app is basically an extension of the Google Translate website, allowing users to translate both text and speech between more than 70 different languages.

Read More »

Google Fonts is an excellent resource for web designers, with hundreds of top quality open source fonts freely available for anyone to use.

Now, though, you can also easily access and use the same fonts on the desktop – Windows or Mac – just by installing the SkyFonts client.

Read More »

Acronis International has added a new, cut-down backup tool to its roster with the release of True Image Lite 2013 by Acronis. Roughly six months after debuting the beta version, True Image Lite 2013 gets a final release, providing users with a simple tool for protecting specified folders through regular “non-stop” backups.

True Image Lite 2013 offers users two locations for backing up: a local storage device, such as external or network hard drive, and online through the Acronis Cloud, an optional add-on providing 250GB of internet storage for an additional outlay.

Read More »

When you need to distribute a particular set of images – or perhaps reconstruct some scanned pages into a digital version of the original document – then being able to combine those JPGs into a single PDF can be very useful. There are commercial tools which will handle this for you, but if your needs are simple then there’s no need to spend big money; the free (for personal use) JPGasPDF could provide everything you need.

The program is compact (a single 572KB executable), with a basic straightforward interface. If you’re in a hurry you could just click the Add button to select your images, the Create button to save the finished PDF, and, well, that’s it – your document will be saved right away.

Read More »

Mobile VoIP provider Viber has broken new ground by releasing Viber for Desktop 3.0 for Windows and Mac, extending its existing mobile service beyond the mobile-only Viber 3.0 app to desktops and laptops.

The new desktop build provides all the functionality currently enjoyed on the mobile app, including free voice calls, photo messaging, text chat and location-sharing with other Viber users, but also adds support for desktop-to-desktop video conferencing too.

Read More »