A download manager is a program solely for downloading files from the Internet. Download managers are a must if you download a lot. Not only do they keep your PC organized, they keep you productive. There are many download managers and today I’ll be reviewing Internet Download Manager.




Internet Download Manager

I’ve personally been using IDM for quite a while now, mainly because its user-friendly, and unlike some other download managers/accelerators – which are bloatware really – it has some really useful features.

Keeps Your PC Organized

In Internet Download Manager, or IDM, you can make categories and select which types of files will automatically be assigned that category. For each category, you can also choose the default folder where such files will be stored.

So, you can make a new category called “Images”, assign .png, .jpg, and .gif files to it, choose the “My Pictures” folder as the default folder, and IDM will download any image automatically to the “My Pictures” folder. You can do the same with any other file format.

As you can see, this keeps your PC organized and you don’t have to go on a PC clean-up mission every now and then.

Download Files Faster & Be Productive

IDM is also a download accelerator. Meaning that it splits the file into 4 or more parts and downloads them all the parts together, thus increasing your download speed. According to its website, it can speed-up download by up to 500%! Of course that’s only true if you have high-speed Internet – over 1 mbps. Otherwise, the download acceleration won’t be much.

Resume Files

Like most good download managers, IDM allows you to resume files. The great thing is IDM saves the file’s parts every few minutes, so you’ll be able to resume a file even if your PC crashed while it was downloading.

Scheduler & Queues

This is one of best features of IDM. IDM allows you to group files in queues so it’ll automatically download all the files in the queue, one after another, after you start the queue. You can also setup the scheduler so a queue will start at a certain time, say 1 AM. And you can even set it up to shut down your PC after the queue has been completed.

Speed Limiter

In Internet Download Manager, you can limit the speed at which files are downloading. This way your normal browsing won’t slow down to a crawl while you’re downloading stuff.

Browser Integration & Video/Audio Downloading

When you install IDM, it attaches itself to your browser. This enables you to download files using IDM in one click only, you don’t have to copy-paste the URL in IDM. So, whenever you click a download link, say a .zip file, IDM will start automatically and then ask you if you want to download it.

Another great thing about this download manager is that it can easily download videos and any audio on the web page. Whenever a web page has a video, IDM adds a “Download this video” button to the top-right of the video. This makes it very easy to download videos off YouTube in one click.



The Site Grabber

Site Grabber is a noteworthy feature of IDM. Site Grabber enables you to rip files from a website. You can download all the image files on the site, or videos, or the whole website itself. Although you won’t use it very often, it can be useful once in a while.

The Bottom-line

Sure, it might cost $29.95 but its well worth it. I’ve tested a lot of download managers – FlashGet, Download Accelerator Plus (DAP), GetRight, Free Download Manager (FDM), you name it. IDM trumps them all. With active developers and a boatload of features, you can’t go wrong with this one.

i think it was the best downloader.. so come and try it.

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Pressure has been building on established MP3 download services like iTunes. Rivals such as 7Digital and Play.com are now offering DRM-free content, and with more set to follow we could soon be seeing the end of audio encryption that restricts the way you use your music.

Easy MP3 Downloader is a new service that allows you to browse a catalogue of over 100 million songs collected from free legal music sources such as YouTube and Yahoo. It claims to be 100 percent legal and to offer clean, verified downloads of tracks, all of which are accessible through a small application you install on your PC.

This is quite simple and uses an iTunes style interface with a search bar at the top and a ‘What's Hot' list of current favourites. After entering some search criteria, results are returned in seconds and we were impressed by the range of tunes on offer. Not only did it return tracks from studio albums but in most cases you'll find B-sides, EPs, live performances, rare material and even interviews.

We were also impressed by the speed at which the tracks were saved to a location of our choice; on an 8Mb connection during peak hours it took little longer than a minute to retrieve an average sized song. Selections can be queued in a download list and incomplete tasks will be resumed if interrupted, resulting in a tidy and efficient service.

Importantly, the music is DRM-free and contains no restrictions on copying or burning to other media. Subscriptions to the service are available for periods from 6 months (at $3.33 per month) up to 2 years (at $1.66 per month) or you can grab a lifetime subscription for $49.95, with secure PayPal ordering available from the site. There are no limits on how many songs you can download during the subscription period and a free trial of the service will allow you to try it out by retrieving 50 percent of the track.

All of this sounds too good to be true and in fairness there are some issues that may put people off. Most tracks seem to be encoded at 64kbps bitrate, there's no facility to download complete albums and songs often contain incomplete ID3tag information. While the latter is easily fixable we can imagine that some users would consider the audio quality to be inadequate.

We're a little surprised that Easy MP3 Download found a legal way to offer such a product; such is the speed and convenience of the service and the extensive nature of the database. If you're not concerned with the relatively low bitrates you'll find it to be an excellent albeit basic way to build a large collection of your favourite tunes.

The latest version of Coffee Cup's WYSIWYG web site designer adds significant new features, including some which are overdue, like W3C compliance and support for web-friendly PNG image files.

Elsewhere the changes are primarily cosmetic, with new shapes and styles, a revamped interface and new themes intended to get design-challenged site creators up and running more quickly without needing to know a line of code.

The opening screen invites you to create a new blank web site, open an existing one or create a new one based on a theme; 10 themes are included and 40 more are available from Coffee Cup for $29.00. The included themes are billed as an improvement on those available in previous versions, but they still look stale and old-fashioned to us, and don't include things like alternative images and design elements which would make them more useful.

Visual Site Designer (VSD) lets you create web sites rather like pages in a printed newsletter. Thus, there are tools for creating shapes with solid fills, bitmap fills and gradients, lines, text boxes and so on which can be arranged, aligned and layered to create more complex and interesting visual elements.

You can then add navigation links, visual effects (like drop shadows and ‘glows') as well as rollovers from within the program; other features like photo galleries, forms, music and video players, calendars and even fancy Flash-based fonts are available at extra cost. More adventurous users can add HTML and Javascript by hand and there's built-in support for Google Analytics so you can track visitors to your site and see what they're doing.

The trouble is, VSD gets caught between two stools. On the one hand the included themes are uninspiring and don't do enough of the behind-the-scenes work for you: for example, adding a new page doesn't automatically add a new item to the navigation bar and it's also not possible to switch themes mid-way through designing a site.

On the other hand, the tools for building web pages from scratch probably require too many design skills from the target audience. Certainly, creating navigation bars is limited and long winded.

Elsewhere, picture re-sizing's not very intuitive - there doesn't seem to be a way of re-sizing by dragging a corner - and the properties dialogues take some getting used to because they're designed to stay open all the time, even when nothing's selected and all the options are greyed out. As a result, they always seem to be in the way.

Furthermore, pages are sorted alphabetically on the Show Page menu when it would make more sense to have them ordered in site sequence, and there's no neat way to get an overview of your site, apart from using Windows' tile feature.

go to official site www.coffecup.com

Google's attempt to muscle in on the browser market, and to take on the dominance of both Internet Explorer and the ever-growing Mozilla Firefox, certainly made a splash when it launched Chrome in 2008.

But that splash - and the millions of words written about the browser - failed to convert into anything more than 1 percent market penetration. Granted, that's no small feat in itself, but it's a certainty that Google is looking to fry bigger fish. As such it's readying Chrome 2, which it's now released in beta form pending a full release later this year.

At first the browser's characteristics and presentation appear the same, too. As with a growing number of applications, as part of the installation it asks if it can be your default program of choice, and then it goes about offering to transfer settings and suchlike. However, it's still a quick and breezy installation for a browser that retains a light system footprint.

Aesthetically the browser still keeps the same ethos, too. With no heavy menu at the top it's the address bar that handles the bulk of the work, from searching to direct navigation. More advanced menus are available via small drop-down icons, and tabs appear at the top of the screen, rather than a little way down it like Internet Explorer and Firefox. Furthermore, you can still make your home page a collection of thumbnails of your most visited sites, which, while borrowed from Opera, remains a nice and useful touch.

So what's changed? The most obvious initial difference is the speed of the browser, which contrasts well and currently gives it an advantage over its rivals. It zips around, only hindered really by the most Flash-heavy of sites, but even then it copes well.

Compared to the original Chrome, there's a slight but noticeable improvement, and not at the expense of that aforementioned system footprint. The full screen and zooming functionality is logical and tidy (although hardly radical) and it remains a friendly browser to use, with some solid thinking behind it.

But its flexibility, certainly against Firefox and Opera, is constrained by the lack of expansion possibilities thus far. There's no market for extensions and add-ons here, and while that keeps the core browser pure and slimline, it is nonetheless a notable restriction. There are other omissions, too, with RSS support still to be implemented, and we did pick up one or two small stability issues as we were using it.

Yet the problem Google may face here is that Chrome 2 simply feels more like Chrome 1.5. There are no big, necessary new features and it feels like a tuned up version of what we already have. Granted, new things have been added, but these are present in Chrome's competition, too.

Which leaves speed as the compelling reason to give it a try. That's not a bad reason, either, but as with the first version, it's a useful second browser to have on a machine but lacks the punch and possibilities of Firefox.

The budget end of website creation is quite well catered for these days, and Magix is one of the bigger software players here. The latest Website Maker, version 4, provides an easy introduction to the process of putting together a professional looking site. The idea being that it's professional looking because, unlike your average budget site construction program, Website Maker 4 produces Flash based sites bristling with multimedia goodness.

While Website Maker requires a small installation on the local hard drive, it actually runs online. When it's first fired up, the program has to be activated on the Magix website before the creative process can begin. The user is then given their own magix.net website address, a chunky 5GB of online storage space, and a voucher that comes with the package provides one free domain name of their choice (although it has to be .co.uk, and available of course).

Website Maker's simplest mode of operation uses an editing assistant wizard to help select and then modify an existing template site. There are the best part of two hundred different site themes here, divided into categories such as animals, sport, business and family. We had already decided that we fancied putting together a heavy metal themed site, and indeed under the music category there was a rock motif available.


Once the main template has been chosen, the program displays six pre-defined web pages - the homepage, contact page, about me, picture gallery, videos and music - allowing the user to edit them. Text can be entered simply by clicking on the text box and typing away, whereas the default pictures, videos or audio can be swapped for any file on your hard drive. However, the relevant file must be uploaded to your online Magix account before it can be placed on the site.

The basics couldn't be any easier, really, and Website Maker takes care of layout details such as automatically aligning text. However, we did run into some problems. After we'd written some text in a template box, including a list, and then returned to it later, the program had squashed the list all into one line. It was still displayed correctly on the site, but not in the template box. This wouldn't have been an issue, except we wanted to edit a couple of words, and when we clicked the update button the layout went awry on the website as well. It wasn't a huge issue, but slightly annoying nonetheless. Other oddities included the default volume for our site's music clip being set to zero.

More of a worry was the fact that the rock template had got its wires crossed, with the default image page set up to carry a video, and the default video page set up with a gallery of six images. There was no way to change this, either. The editing assistant function might make the program easy to use, but it's also quite inflexible. It isn't possible to swap pages (though you can delete them), or indeed change the number of images on the gallery picture page, for example. In other words, the level of customisation is very limited.

Of course, further tweaking is possible in the main project editing suite, outside of the spoon-fed confines of the assistant wizard. This allows you to play with more details such as changing font sizes, stretching and moving pictures, fiddling with the opacity of the menu text, or adding animations to your graphics, such as an expanding and contracting skull. Well, we liked it, anyway. We were also a fan of the media player that looked like a leather belt, so don't trust our taste too much.

Adding new elements, such as a picture, is as simple as exploring your uploaded files area on the bottom toolbar, and dragging the image onto the working project area. Everything is done with a standard desktop publishing style interface, using boxes and handles to re-size, rotate and so forth. It really is commendably easy to use, and producing something like a picture gallery, which a site viewer can use to enlarge and scroll through a set of photos, is a brief matter of a few clicks.

The only somewhat irksome facet of the interface is the object parameter window. This is used to add elements such as tint or animation to an object, but the window is quite large and rather gets in the way of the project desktop at times (it's static, and therefore can't be shifted out of the way, either).

It must also be said that designing a site completely from scratch is a trickier matter, at least when it comes to the background and framing of the page, as you're not given much help by the program on this score. It's then that a lot of fiddling and experimentation is necessary (not to mention the odd contribution to the swear-box).

But Magix certainly delivers on its promise of allowing beginners to design some fairly impressive looking Flash web sites. However, one potential bugbear regarding Flash in the future, which might be worth bearing in mind, is Apple's lack of support for the technology. The iPhone doesn't do Flash browsing, and neither will the iPad, and that could be problematic for Website Maker 4 pages, if the tablet makes as big a splash as Steve Jobs is hoping.

The idea behind WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) web editing is a good one: you get all the flexibility of DTP-style layout without having to learn a line of code. Although this is an idea most of us can get behind, such products usually have some associated problems.

First, the graphic design tools tend not to be that good, in fact are hobbled by the very fact of producing something for the web rather than for print; second, the web bits (links, navigation bars, rollovers and so on) can be pretty clunky; and finally, the code that they generate errs towards loose and baggy so the resulting sites run more slowly than they should.

Xara Web Designer is the exception, the first program to fix all three problems at the same time. For less than £40 you get a web design program that has the same kind of graphical chops as the company's vector-based Xara Xtreme but includes good underlying web technology to generate XHTML and CSS code that validates properly; and for the terminally lazy it ships with dozens of high quality templates with all the navigation built in, for you to use as the basis for your original pages.

Web Designer 6 builds on the good work of previous versions but beefs up the web stuff still further. So, it's easier to build good navigation bars: buttons stretch to accommodate your text, sub-menus feature transparency and animation effects courtesy of Dynamic HTML, and new buttons are automatically added as new pages are created.

It's always been easy to change individual theme colours dynamically, but now the templates ship with ready-made colour variations which you can just drag out of the gallery and drop onto the working page to change the colour scheme at a stroke, and there's wide support for widgets to add things like PayPal and Google Checkout buttons, YouTube videos, contact forms, Google maps, newsfeeds and more.

For those of a more D-I-Y inclination, version 6 now recognises HTML snippets and when you paste them into a page, automatically creates a placeholder instead of asking you what on earth they are; similarly, adding external files like PDFs and Word documents has been streamlined. Some of the publishing issues from earlier versions have been usefully addressed here too. As well as cleverer FTP handling (settings can be stored with the web site and different profiles saved for later use), Web Designer now publishes sites incrementally so only the changes since the last save are uploaded to the site; an overdue improvement and big time-saver.

Other new features include slideshow enhancements, using drag and drop to populate photo galleries, fancier Lightbox-style effects for looking at photos, as well as more and better design templates. Text handling gets a helping hand too, with support for proper justification, bulleted/numbered lists and indents.

If you've seen previous versions you'll notice that version 6 has undergone a real makeover and now sports a new dark interface. We found this was a help when working on predominantly light coloured web pages because it distinguished the tools from what we were working on, but when the pages were dark it became a bit overpowering. Thumbs up for the new fly-out buttons on the button bar, but thumbs down again for not taking the opportunity to re-design the bits that ignore Windows design conventions, like those stupidly small scroll bars.

go to official web for more detail www.xara.com