Freemake Video Downloader is a simple tool to help you download clips from online video sharing sites. Unlike most of the competition, the program doesn’t have to sniff out the download link from network traffic. Instead you simply paste the URL for the page hosting the clip – the “www.youtube.com/watch?v=something”…

FireAlpaca is a powerful paint application, crammed with interesting functions and features. At a minimum, you can launch the program, choose a brush and start drawing. Preset brushes include Pen, Pencil, AirBrush, Watercolor, Leaf, Flower, Star, Eraser, Blur, Smudge and more. Selecting any brush displays a preview and – sometimes…

When online you will encounter video which have been encoded using a variety of codecs. If you frequently watch different types of video you will generally have to have numerous different programs installed, each catering for different types of video – this can be an annoyance when you encounter a…

Video editing tools can be both complicated and expensive, but Icecream Video Editor manages to avoid being either. It has a simple, accessible interfaces that, while it resemble the basic look of other similar software, remain approachable and intuitive. The process of creating a project is simple enough. You can…

Any Video Converter Free is a straightforward transcoding tool that will quickly convert just about any video into the format you need. The program can read all main formats: avi, asf, mov, rm, rmvb, flv, mkv, mpg, 3gp, m4v, vob, and many more. And it can output movies in all…

Shooting your own videos has never been easier, especially if you’re equipped with a smartphone. Quality can be variable, of course, but a few minutes spent with Movavi Video Editor will fix many problems and give your footage a far more professional look. The program’s simple timeline helps to get…

It’s amazing how quickly manufacturers abandon support for older hardware devices. This is nowhere more evident than when it comes to scanners. The gradual shift from 32- to 64-bit computing threatens to leave even more perfectly serviceable scanners in the box marked “obsolete”, but there may be a future for…

ShareX is an open source screen capture tool with a very extensive feature list. The program doesn’t just grab individual windows and a full screen, for example. You can also capture rectangles, ellipses, triangles, diamonds, polygons or freehand shapes. There’s support for multi-monitor systems, and even a screen capture tool…

Paint.NET has long been a staple of the free image-editing market. It sits comfortably between the uber-powerful (and complex) Photoshop on the one hand and Windows’ anaemic Photos tool on the other. The program has a beautifully clean and uncluttered interface, using tabs to make it easy to work across…

REAPER is a professional Digital Audio Workstation (DAW). If you’re unfamiliar with the jargon, essentially this means that the program is a high-end and very configurable digital recording studio. You can import any audio or MIDI source, maybe plug in a microphone to record something, then loop, pitch shift, trim,…