Photoshop is the one and only phenomena software when it comes to editing photos, adding special effects or for any professional designing project. Even though Photoshop is costly and even though it requires a lot of practise and learning to get expertise in it, I would say there are no possible alternatives to Photoshop that can match its power.

Wait. Why did I say so even though the title says it’s about 5 Photoshop alternatives?

AskMe is the new app in town, which is based on the concept of finding nearby services around your locality.

You can search stuff online, buy-sell things, find nearby services and much more.

AskMe is an Android exclusive app developed by 'Getit Infoservices Pvt Ltd.' and is just their 3rd app. Yet the app has managed to get a lot of positive feedback. Below are some of the important features of AskMe app:

Whether you lose all your contacts from your Android based smartphone, whether you accidentally deleted your messages or if you lost a lot of data from your phone's SD card due to crashes, there is one software that can help you out with the recovery.

The software in review this week is Wondershare Dr.Fone.

Wondershare Dr.Fone is capable of recovering deleted contacts, messages, pictures, videos and other data from your Android based smartphone. It can also help recover files that got corrupted due to faulty updates or ROM flashing.

The software is Windows based, that is you need to download and install the software on a Windows computer and connect your device to your computer to recover data from it.

When working with a brand new HDD or when thinking of making some quick adjustments to its partition, there is one tool you can rely on for all your partition management needs - MiniTool Partition Wizard Professional Edition

Recently I got a chance to test the software and I would say the results were totally satisfactory. There are a lot of features covered by this partition wizard tool by MiniTool which lets you perform advanced customization to your partitions and that too very easily.

The Pirate Bay has always been a pioneer to internet freedom. Earlier the largest torrent site which was constantly in news and always under treat of getting into legal trouble, this company landed into a new world of freedom in August 2013 by launching its anti-censorship web browser - PirateBrowser.

[Also read: How To Download From Torrent Sites]

PirateBrowser is seriously meant to provide internet users the freedom from national censorship by letting its users browse and download anything they want. PirateBrowser is based on Tor network and uses Firefox portable browser base to create a stable web browser which can unblock any website censored by the agencies. According to the official PirateBrowser site:

Apple devices is becoming more and more popular in today’s society. Almost everyone wants an apple device whoever he is because of its fast operating speed and beautiful outlook. But nothing is perfect, there are upset things happening, such as losing data. Are you still anxious about recovering lost files from a crushed Mac Pro?

[Also read: Backup your Mac]

Data loss happens due to a lot of reasons, such as, unexpected power-off, system crush, virus attack and hard disk corruption.

Accidentally formatting is the most common cause of losing data. If you are an attentive PC user, you may do some safeguard procedures to protect the data when you encounter such problems which may relive the embarrassed situation. But in order to get back the complete data from a crushed Mac Pro, researchers has developed a data recovery software for Mac which can help common PC users to recover lost files such as pictures, music, videos easily within a few minutes.

A Portable Document Format (PDF) is just another famous document format preferred all over the internet. Be it your favorite online novel, some help manual or college circulars, everything is presented in a PDF format.

PDFs were originally invented by Adobe and so the only official tool for creating a PDF must be the Adobe Acrobat. That is what we all know about but still, there are a lot of other tools and methods to create as well as edit a PDF file as an alternative to the commercial Adobe Acrobat software.

So today, I would like to share some of the best tools that let you edit PDFs easily and free of cost.

Digiarty is a multimedia software developer that has made DVD ripping/copying and HD video converting software rated highly by users. To celebrate 2013 Christmas and the coming New Year, Digiarty is now giving away its major HD video converter – WinX HD Video Converter Deluxe to all until January 3, 2014. The software is worth $49.95. Now you can easily get it for free by just visiting Digiarty Christmas Giveaway Page and grabbing the free full license. 

WinX HD Video Converter Deluxe is an all in one HD video converter, video editor, video downloader and slideshow maker. 

• Video Converter 

It can convert high definition video like MKV, M2TS, MTS, AVCHD, and MOD to others, convert high definition video to standard definition video like AVI, MPEG, MP4, WMV, MOV, VOB, FLV, RM, and WebM, and convert standard definition video to others. It can also convert videos to iPhone, iPad, Android, WP8 and other mobile devices. 

Whatsapp is a free cross-mobile messaging platform which is well known to most of us. Whatsapp cuts down our SMS bills as well as provides a lot of other features like group chat, lets you send photos and videos. You can even share your current geographic location with your friends.

As mentioned above, Whatsapp is a messaging platform for mobiles. Currently, Whatsapp is available for iPhone, Blackberry, Nokia S40, Symbian and Windows Phone.

But there are a lot of users with some other mobile phones who don't want to miss out from the world of Whatsapp either. Are you one such mobile user?

Then there is a solution for you that will let you use Whatsapp with your laptop or even your PC!

Unless you are the sole owner of your computer, you might want to be conscious of activities taking place on your computer by the other users, right?

We may be talking about computers at a workplace or school, or the computer your children might be using. You might be looking for a brilliant solution to monitor your computer activities accurately.

So here, I would like to mention a software which I recently got the chance to test out.

Released in October 2012, Windows 8 is the latest OS by Microsoft. Millions of Windows users were expecting a grand revolution with the new OS, about which Microsoft had been spreading excellent news since a long time.

Windows 8 did provide a whole new experience to its users compared to the older OS like Windows XP or 7. The new OS was more like a tablet computing experience with the metro style start screen. Apart from the completely new interface, one more change was in the news with Windows 8.

It was the missing start menu. The start menu was totally replaced with the start screen and until the release of Windows 8.1, it was impossible to get back the start button in Windows 8 without the use of any third party tool.

Both free as well as paid third party tools are available that let you get a start menu in Windows 8.

So which are the 5 best free tools to get back the start menu? Let's see!

We know that Windows has a default disk management program but it has very limited functions and is not so flexible when it comes to adjusting a partition size, copying a partition or disk and other advance options.

And this is where third party disk management tools come into action.

I decided to try out AOMEI and I was really pleased with the results. So I decided to write a short review on it.

Product tested: AOMEI Partition Assistant Home Edition

Version: 5.1.2

Price: Free (Home Edition)

Today, on 26 October 2012, Microsoft has released its highly anticipated and latest OS - Windows 8. So whats new with this latest operating system by Microsoft? Well, actually everything is. Windows 8 promises a completely new PC experience than any other Windows OS released before.

Windows 8 is styled for tablet PC experience and that is why there is no start menu. Instead there is a start screen. Windows 8 also features touch interface in a much better manner than Windows 7. These two features can be an issue for some users. The general functions are also altered at some places like right clicking your mouse button will open a start tab on the bottom of the screen and so on. Also Windows 8 doesn't directly boot to desktop. All you see is a start screen in your first visit to Windows 8. Yes you can obviously use a desktop by pressing Windows+D keys. But when you will boot your PC, the first thing you will see is the start screen. There you would get titles of all the apps/software/programs available on your PC.

We have heard about people getting vaccination but ever heard a vaccine for pen drives? USB devices such as pen drives most usually get infected from Autorun.inf virus. This virus is just irresistible. No matter how clean and virusfree your PC is, whenever you insert your pen drive into your friend's PC and take it back to your PC, your PC gets high chances of getting infected by autorun.inf virus. The executable files containing viruses in your pen drive modifies the autorun.inf file of your pen drive to spread itself. So the virus is named after the file Autorun.inf itself. Luckily a vaccine can help your USB devices in this matter.

Also read: Create a Bootable Pen drive

Image courtesy of Salvatore Vuono/FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Technology can be compared to a fish. The longer it stays in the basket, the lesser it is desired. Yes, that is the fate of modern technology concepts, no matter how good they are. Modern man loves to see changes, innovation, flexibility and creativity in the latest gadgets and technology stuff. That also is an answer to why tech companies go on and on making advancements to each aspect of their products. 

The OS X operating system of Apple and Microsoft’s Windows operating system needs no introduction. How about running Mac OS X inside Windows operating system using VirualBox? Indeed, this is a typical example of the 'height of innovation and flexibility', a modern man is on the lookout for. 

You need a PC that runs on Windows operating system. Change your system settings to 64-bit as OS X operating system supports only 64-bit. In case you have your Windows set up to 32-bit, you will only be able to run Mac OS X ‘Snow Leopard’ version on Virtual box and not the ‘Mountain Lion’ version. Your system needs to have four GB RAM along with dual core processor or better configurations. Your hard disk must have at least 10 GB unused space. 

If you have an old PC, and try to run a 720p HD Movie on your PC...well you know what I mean to say! Not all computers and laptops can run such high definition videos smoothly. So what to do? Read ahead...

There are various video players available on the net. And some of them are very good for general use. But when it comes to playing a high definition movie such as 720p or 1080p, then most of them fail. But from my experience I can say that there is a good codec pack available that can solve this problem. 'K-Lite Codec Pack' contains many audio and video codecs, filters and tools that let you run high resolution movies on your PC and that too very smoothly.

K-Lite Codec Pack is a set of DirectShow filters, audio/video codecs and tools which lets you play most of the well known as well as less known video formats. K-Lite Codec pack also installs a movie player for playing movies using the given codecs.

K-Lite Codec Pack is easy to install and easy to use. From my experience, I can say that it is the best solution if you can't run movies smoothly on your PC. Also the best thing is that K-Lite Codec Pack is free of cost.

• ffdshow [version 1.2.4475]
• LAV Audio [version 0.51.3]
• MONOGRAM AAC decoder [version 0.9.6.0]

DirectShow audio parsers:

• madFLAC [version 1.10]
• Monkey's Audio (DCoder) [version 1.0]
• OptimFROG (RadLight) [version 1.0.0.1]
• DC-Bass Source [version 1.4]
• AC3File [version 0.7b]

DirectShow source filters:

• Haali Media Splitter [version 1.11.288.0]
• LAV Splitter [version 0.51.3]
• AVI splitter (Gabest) [version 1.6.3.5565]

DirectShow subtitle filter:

• DirectVobSub (a.k.a. VSFilter) [version 2.41.5565.0]

Other filters:

• madVR [version 0.82.5]
• Haali Video Renderer [version 1.11.288.0]

Tools:

• - Codec Tweak Tool [version 5.4.1]
• Win7DSFilterTweaker [version 5.5]
• MediaInfo Lite [version 0.7.58]
• VobSubStrip [version 0.11]
• GraphStudio [version 0.4.9.1]

Shell extensions:

• Icaros ThumbnailProvider [version 2.1b2]
• Icaros PropertyHandler [version 2.1b2]

Download K-Lite Codec Pack

Microsoft has recently launched a new public version of its Attack Surface Analyzer tool to help companies assess changes to a system’s attack surface as new applications and products are added to the base software. Earlier, the beta version of the tool was launched, but after months of waiting Microsoft made the official release.

The Attack Surface Analyzer is used by the company’s internal software to monitor the application’s security practices. Microsoft also used the application to monitor the Security Development Lifecycle which identifies the gaps in security when a company installs basic software on its systems. Changes made to the main system can affect the networking of the organization - sorted out by using the Windows Attack Tool, which prevents the attackers from taking advantage of vulnerabilities and weak spots.

While explaining the purpose of the tool, Microsoft’s developer, Jimmie Lee said that Attack Surface Analyzer covers the security weaknesses in the network when applications are installed on the Windows operating systems and then highlights parable issues. The tool also gives an overview of changes to the system that Microsoft considers important to the security of the platform, while highlighting these changes in its report. Some of the checks performed by the tool include analysis of changed or newly added files, registry keys, services, Microsoft ActiveX controls, listening ports and other parameters that affect a computer’s attack surface.

Microsoft keeps a vigilant eye on the application and keeps a record of its functions. The application is developed not only for security professionals, but developers who have the skill and knowledge of code writing can use it to check its affect on the security of the application. The new and improved version of the application included two elements; GUI and command line interface. Microsoft explains the functioning of this application through a help guide wizard – in the process of scanning and analysis, while further explaining its function in the command version supports and the older version of Windows. This guide helps the IT professionals to integrate the application with existing management tools in an organization.

The application will help in collecting attack data from various Windows operating systems such as Vista 7 and different version of Server 2008, while assisting in analyzing and collecting data that would generate the application reports.

This application can also be developed for the mobiles to help in enhancing the security of mobile software. This application can come handy in keeping third party hackers from intervening into your phone while an application is being downloaded. Hence, the Surface Analyzer application would help the phone to identify loopholes in the apps you are downloading and help you to decide if they’re safe; incase a user downloads Android or iPhone spyware or even Angry Birds, the application would help in securing the interface and make sure no loopholes are left behind. The Surface Analyzer can be implemented in Windows phone’s which host Windows 7 and would give a competitive advantage to the phone as well as the company.

About the Guest Author: Stella Rebecca's major effort has revolved around latest gadgets. Recently she's been playing with the many best spy software for android that are diverting the interest of the new generation. Readers can find out more about what's most recent and happening in the spy software on iphone world.

This article is written by one of our guest authors. If you would like to guest post on our blog, you can contact us.

Facebook, the social networking giant, has brought our social lives to a new level. With Facebook, we can meet old friends, make new friends, share anything we like. It is damn easy to make friends on Facebook but it is even easier to un-friend someone - Just delete them from your friends list. And they would never get any notification that you un-friended them. But the same applies to you. And you would surely like to know if any of your friend un-friends you. So read on...

Social fixer lets you do:

• Tabbed news feed
• Different Themes
• Advanced feed filters
• Hiding posts already read
• Enlarge thumbnails on mouse hover
• Highlight new comments
• And this is the one you were looking for - Notification of Un-Friends

Download this free browser extension here. Now you can know whenever someone un-friends you!