Paint.net is a free image editor which is much more powerful than Microsoft Paint Application which is inbuilt in Windows Operating System. You can fulfill most of your image editing tasks with it because it offers all the missing features like layers, unlimited undo, effects, history etc. You don’t have to spend money in buying application like Adobe Photoshop for your general image editing requirements. Project Leader Rick Brewster calls it ‘Photoshop for everyone’ & i completely agree with his statement after seeing at the power of this application.

It’s development was started by the Washington State University Students as an undergraduate senior design project in the year 2004. Paint.net is also mentored by Microsoft who otherwise don’t support Open Source applications. It has been downloaded over 2 million times since it’s launch.

Paint.net team is working on it’s third iteration which will offer many missing features already in Photoshop like Merge Layer Down, Gradient Tool supporting linear, radial, diamond, and conical gradient modes. Apart from these features, they are working on bug fixes, work flow improvement & other such areas.

For more info and download, click here.

Adobe Soundbooth is a new audio application by Adobe for Video, Flash and other such visual professionals who are not comfortable with complexity of Applications like Adobe Audition. It will be included in Adobe Video Production Bundle next year replacing Audition. It’s a wonderful application for quick audio editing without going through the steep curve of an advanced Audio application which is basically designed for Audio professionals. But things are changed with the arrival of Soundbooth. It will make it a breeze to edit audio with very intuitive interface which will make all visual designers & audio novices to finish their audio related work with much ease without the trouble of learning the nuisances of complex audio applications which are good for Audio Experts only.

It is integrated with Flash Cue points and exports the markers as XML file. You will see ‘Edit in Soundbooth’ inside Adobe Premiere Features like these will make life much easier for video & interactive designers.

You can quickly do most common tasks like removing noise, rumbling sounds or click & pops which are under ‘Tasks’ tab. Extract Audios from avi, wmv files, apply effects. It can also prove to be a wonderful tool for podcasters to quickly record & enhance their podcasts & reach out to the world.

So, this is a new entrant in the Audio Market which will be launched in 2007 and hopefully, it won’t get cluttered like Advanced Audio Applications in the coming years. It will be interesting to watch the progress of Soundbooth which promises to finish our audio tasks quickly without dealing with complex set of tools.

You can download Soundbooth Beta from here.

Google launched docs.google.com around a week back which is a combination of two Online Google Applications : Writely(Google Docs now) & Google Spreadsheets. Before these two applications were separate but now, all your documents created in either Google Docs or Spreadsheets are shown in one interface which is very convenient feature for those who use (or planning to use) both of these applications. All your documents are stored online which means that you need not fear about power outages and hard disk failure and for editing/accessing your documents you need any computer with a browser and an internet connection.

The best thing about these Google Applications is that they are free, easy to use and you can have collaboration with others which means working on a same document or spredsheet with others at a same time. You can publish your documents as web pages which can be accessible to everyone or you can make them private. Documents can also be published to your blog and the tag assigned to the document will be used as the categor of the blog post. You can save files to your own computer in DOC, XLS, CSV, ODS, ODF, PDF, RTF and HTML formats. (more…)

Mozilla Firefox is a free, Open Source, cross-platform Browser with features like tabbed browsing, integrated pop-up blocker, built-in customizable search bar, built-in RSS reader, extension manager & many such time saviing features.

You can easily import your favourites from Internet Explorer inside Firefox which is called ‘Bookmarks’ in firefox. It’s a most downloaded freeware application for home users and well acclaimed by many media companies like Wall Street Journal, Forbes etc. Although Microsoft is implementing most of these features in their upcoming Internet Explorer 7 but i have found it slow compared to Firefox. Spreadfirefox.com Statistics says that Firefox had 200 million downloads in August 2006. And there are many extensions available which can further enhance your browsing experience. (more…)

Audacity is a free audio editor which offers multi-tracking recording, mixing and applying of effects. It’s interface is very intuitive to use. It supports import/export of file formats like Aiff, Ogg Vorbis, wav, Mp3, Midi and other sound formats but it doesn’t support WMA format and uses the third party Lame encoder for MP3 conversion because of copyright issues. (more…)