Anysoft Flash SlideShow Maker is a tool to create a simple but attractive Flash slideshow from your photos that you can upload to your website to share with your friends and family.

It has several different slideshow themes to choose from, as well as background music and optional effects like dropping leaves, snowflakes and more.

It’s freeware, but to remove the “Produced by Flash Slideshow Maker” screen that gets added at the end of slideshow, you’ll have to order the pro version.
It’s a pretty cool program that’s easy to use , you just select the template you wanna use and the transition effects etc and which pictures to add, that’s all there really is to it!

So if you want to make a simple flash slideshow for your website or blog, with or without background music, this gets the job done easily with pretty good looking results, unless you’re a bad photographer of course!

You can download it free here.

There’s a lot of RSS reader programs around. Here’s one that caught my attention. It’s called GreatNews and has an impressive array of features. GreatNews is optimized for the fast and efficient reading of all your favorite web feeds. You can choose from various different view styles, including a newspaper view, that one allows you to read a group of feeds arranged in newspaper-style page layout without the hassle of having to click through individual feed items.

It also supports custom labels, email and blog integration as well as custom keyword alerts (news watches) so you can automatically find articles of interest to you and have them available in a special category. Other features include import/export feeds from/to OPML and XML files, the automatic cleanup of old items, browser integration with popup blocking and more.

GreatNews is a small, fast and very efficient RSS reader – it doesn’t require any installation either, so just unzip and run.

This is one good RSS reader worth grabbing while it’s still freeware and you can do that right here.

eBuddy is a free web-based messenger that enables you to chat with your MSN, Yahoo and AIM buddies.

It requires no downloads or registration, so it’s perfect for when you’re on the go, such as at a friends computer or in an internet cafe. To use it, all you need is a java enabled browser, that’s almost all browsers these days, so you’re good to go from almost any computer. It even works from behind a firewall.

The cool thing about eBuddy is you can use it from a cellphone or any mobile device that supports xHTML or WAP , this includes Cell Phones, PDA’s, even Sony PSP and Nintendo DS!

You can go here to use it anytime you’re at a computer and need to keep in touch with your friends without having to mess around with instant messaging software.

EclipseCrossword is a totally free program that enables you to create crosswords. So if you’re a big crosswords fan you’re sure to love this thing!

It has a very easy to understand interface with a useful help system, although you’re unlikely to need it! It has several different printing options,they enable you to easily include a crossword in newsletters, etc, with or without answers!

But the cool thing is it also enables you to make your crossword as a webpage so that visitors to your website can easily play your crossword, this is done through either page scripting or a java applet. You can make crosswords as easy or advanced as you want or on any topic you want. Any crosswords fan would be hard-pressed to find a better crossword generator program than this one and you can grab it totally free from the homepage here.

Tibia is a free online RPG (Role Playing Game). You can join guilds, kill monsters, cast spells, make friends and enemies, and generally have a fun time. Ok, I’ve seen better graphics, but at least it’ll run well on low end systems. Some people like the old “Super Nintendo” type graphics anyway.

Gameplay in Tibia is simple, you start out on Rookguard, you go around, kill stuff, etc. Left click to move, right click to use (or bring up a menu with the new controls), pretty basic stuff. Talking is achieved by just typing, there’s no windows you have to select, just type your sentence then press enter. Skills are achieved by doing the particular action.

You want shielding? Equip a shield and get hit. Like swords? Equip one and watch your sword skill grow as you kill more monsters. It’s very simplistic, so you get the idea. This game would appeal most to fans of old school games that were similar to this, except this is online and you can interact with other nerds! : )

You can find out more info at the homepage here.

Yet another WinZip clone? There’s more to IZarc than just being yet another unzip utility.

IZarc is an archiving tool that supports many different types of archive formats like: 7-ZIP, A, ACE, ARC, ARJ, B64, BH, BIN, BZ2, BZA, C2D, CAB, CDI, CPIO, DEB, ENC, GCA, GZ, GZA, HA, IMG, ISO, JAR, LHA, LIB, LZH, MDF, MBF, MIM, NRG, PAK, PDI, PK3, RAR, RPM, TAR, TAZ, TBZ, TGZ, TZ, UUE, WAR, XXE, YZ1, Z, ZIP, ZOO.

I also really like that it can open and convert CD/DVD images – ISO, BIN, MDF or NRG. Normally you’d have to find a separate program to do all that! It also does all the usual stuff, the full list of features is here.

IZArc can integrate into the Windows shell easily to help give you that extra speed when you need to use it suddenly.

It’s even skinnable in case you want to change around the look of it a little. It’s totally free and you can find out more or download it right here.

Empressr is a web application which lets you create Flash-based presentations online. So that the only thing you need is your web browser to create rich media presentations. You can also share the presentations with anyone and access them online at anytime. You can sign up for free and you can create up to five presentations at the moment, although they say this will increase in future versions.

The limits to what kind of thing you can upload are as follows:

• Images-Jpeg .JPG 100 KB
• For Flash-Macromedia Flash .SWF 100 KB
• For Video-Macromedia Flash video .FLV 10 MB

At the moment, presentations can’t be exported to other formats such as PowerPoint, although they plan to include this in future versions.

You simply email your presentation to whoever you want to show it to, they don’t even have to be registered to view it. You can check it out and try an online demo of it at the homepage here.

You know how it is with computers. When you first start using your shiny new computer, its running fast and smoothly, but a few months later its not so fast or smooth. Installing and uninstalling programs can leave leftovers littered throughout the Windows registry, temporary files can use up valuable space, spyware and adware can sneak onto your system wasting valuable resources as well as invading your privacy and security.

Of course there’s lots of various programs to sort out all these various issues that you, the computer user, has to deal with from time to time. But wouldn’t it be great if there was just one program to help you do it all? That’s what Advanced WindowsCare attempts to do, and judging by some of the positive feedback i’ve seen online, and from using it myself satisfactorily, it’s pretty good indeed at what it claims to do!

It has a decent registry cleaner, spyware/adware detector and immuniser, junk files cleaner, privacy sweep, and system analyzer to help to set your computer run at its peak. All this in a simple to use interface. If you upgrade to the pro version, all this can be set up to run automatically at regular intervals!

But you can download the totally free version and you’ll wonder how you got by without this really useful little program that seems delivers it’s promises.

SupervisionCam is software for turning your PC into a video surveillance system. It can compare images from a video camera or from a local or Internet image file, at intervals chosen by you, and starts optional activities when it detects a movement. It can save the images as BMP or JPG files, play a sound, send a message or mail, start a program or create a HTML page and upload this page including the images to a LAN or internet (FTP) server with optional dial-up support.

SupervisionCam can also capture images in a defined time interval, so you can use it as a webCam as well! It offers lots of features – Fast viewer, support for more cameras, surveillance scheduler, static or dynamic motion detection threshold configuration, auto update over internet and a lot more.

This is pretty feature packed program that would suit someone wanting to have a cheap but reliable surveillance camera set up for example. You can download a trial from the homepage here and find the full list of features, but you’ll have to register to get the full version, unless the watermark doesn’t matter to you too much.

I just had the chance to install and play with Nasa World Wind. It proves to be quite an alternative to the famous Google Earth in some ways. This is a program that will allow you to zoom in on any place you want on Earth, but also Venus, Mars, Jupiter…even the Moon.

You can select from various types of satellite map images, this would be very useful for anyone who’s into geology, geography etc. But you can also do much more, such as downloading live weather maps, which would be interesting for anyone into meteorology. It uses Shuttle Radar Topography Mission elevation data and high resolution LandSat imagery. Yes…this is a little more technical than Google Earth!

It has a similiar interface as Google Earth in some ways, such as being able to click and drag to spin the globe to the desired position. You can zoom in and out with the mousewheel,or by double clicking. You can select the map type you’d like to see from a menu on the top. Hint: The landsat one is the one to choose if you wanna zoom in on photo’s of streets, etc.

On many levels, World Wind is good for scientific, educational and research purposes. For driving directions, local information, exploring and other recreational activities, Google Earth might be a better options, as this program might be a little too scientific for most people.

You can check out much more info and download it completely free from the NASA site here.