1.4.0

Annoyingly addictive introduction to the Angry Birds series

Unless you've lived in a cave with no connectivity for the last few years, you've heard about Angry Birds. Angry Birds Free is the introduction to the series and acts as a teaser for the paid app. Angry Birds Free downloads and installs with no problem.

The goal of Angry Birds Free is to launch birds from a slingshot, aiming them at structures with green pigs scattered about. The birds, some of which have special capabilities, knock over the building structures and kill the pigs. Wipe out the pigs and you pass the level. Sounds simple (and to … Read more

Shoot those evil pigs

Angry Birds Seasons Free stays true to its name: it is a theme-oriented tweak of the original ABS game, with those themes being seasons. First-time players will be greeted by a well-designed user interface introducing them to the world of Angry Birds, which has found its way into the hearts of millions of people all around the world.

When you launch the app, you'll need to select a season, which includes not only specific seasons like winter, but also holidays like Halloween and Valentine's Day. You'll then receive some quick visual help to give you the basics … Read more

Defrag your disks with Disk SpeedUp

Glaryutilities' Disk SpeedUp is a free standalone utility that analyzes, defragments, and optimizes your disk drives or individual folders. It offers manual and automatic defrag options as well as automatic shutdown after defragmenting finishes.

Like many system utilities, Disk SpeedUp has a colorful interface with large, clearly labeled buttons and tabs labeled Defrag Show and Settings. The Defrag Show tab showed our two disk drives and their capacity, free space, status, and percentage of fragmentation. In the middle was a standard defrag map, while at the bottom of the interface, Disk SpeedUp displayed tabs with our three partitions, each with … Read more

Virtual filing cabinet

For many people, Windows Explorer and its hierarchical folders work well enough for organizing documents. Those who regularly deal with large quantities of documents, however, may find that they need a means of organizing files that's a little more robust. Benubird PDF is a unique program that lets users organize PDFs and other files into collections that are easy to navigate and work with.

Our first question about Benubird PDF was whether its collections simply linked to the original documents on our hard drive or created new copies that it stored within its own directory. We were concerned about … Read more

Sweep it up

Virtually everyone who's ever used a computer has played Minesweeper, the classic Windows game in which users must strategically locate and mark mines hidden on the board. Mines-Perfect Portable is nearly identical to the original Windows game, but it's made to be portable and has a few cool extra features.

Mines-Perfect Portable is indeed meant to be installed on mobile devices, and the installation process reflects this; users have to specify the installation location, and there are no desktop icons or Start menu items. The game's interface looks almost exactly like that of the Windows version, and … Read more

Frustrating media downloader

TubeMaster Plus seems like a good idea: find video and MP3 content, download it, and convert it to different formats. But the program's poorly thought-out interface and application instability will likely frustrate everyone but the most persevering.

TubeMaster Plus comes with numerous settings, such as an autostart feature, size restriction (helpful for excluding small downloads that are more likely to be advertisements), language, and browser monitoring. You can set the video codec to be used as well as the MP3 quality and default multimedia player. The program is organized into four tabs: Media Surf (a Web browser), Media Download … Read more