The application can come handy for webmasters and network administrators who may use it to check DNS propagation – a process when a website is moved from an old location to a new server. You an also make use of it to check DNS connections that your system makes to remote servers in general. It may look simple on the surface (just like all other tools by its maker), but the application is really powerful and effective at what it does, displaying the DNS queries in real time.

The application doesn’t require any installation on your system and runs directly from its portable EXE file included in the downloaded ZIP package. When launched for the first time, a ‘Capture Options’ window pops up, letting you choose the capture method and the network adapter your want the tool to sniff. You can launch the Capture Options window any time at a later point by pressing the F9 key.

The interface of DNSQuesrySniffer displays the following information: Host Name, Port Number, Query ID, Request Type (A, AAAA, NS, MX, and so on), Request Time, Response Time, Duration, Response Code, Number of records, and the content of the returned DNS records. To the far left, you will find a bullet icon that automatically changes color to green or yellow according to the response code.  DNS sniffing can be stopped and resumed at any time by pressing F6 and F5 respectively. In addition, you can clear the current list by using Ctrl + X. Moreover, you can save any or all item(s) in the list into CSV, XML or HTML file.

DNSQuerySniffer works on Windows XP, Vista, 7 and 8, supporting both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of the OS.

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The default black leather-inspired skin of the app looks pretty good. The left pane lets you move through the different sections of the app under ‘Music and more’, ‘Video downloader’ and ‘Media Center’ sections. Music and more contains pretty much all things music, and lets you stream it from wherever you can using the provided set of options i.e. radio, podcasts and television. The radio section, for instance, houses a wide variety of stations including foreign and those from your local vicinity. To the far right, you will find the playback area, which displays the current track information along with the playback controls. The application also lets you curate playlists.

My next stop during the testing was Music search under Video downloader, and this feature also seemed pretty cool. It lets you stream music by name, genre, artist or album over popular video streaming services such as YouTube, Dailymotion and Vimeo. The streaming quality was up to the mark and Audials Light loaded the requested results almost instantly.

The Media Center side of the application is also pretty feature-rich. You can bring your music and videos saved on internal drive, cloud, smartphone or LAN all in one place. The provided import/export options related to each action work quite really well. Although I won’t recommend Audials Light to hardcore audiophiles for their local collections, as it lacks many features of the likes of MediaMonkey or iTunes, still, it’s a nice alternative if you mainly want to stream online music.

The last (and definitely not the least) interesting bit of the application is its awesome theming support. Even though the default skin looks great on its own, the application offers many other absolutely stunning choices via clicking the minuscule button at the top-right. Along with skins, you may also specify the font size for the text.

By signing into your Audials free account from within its interface, you’ll get access to a few additional perks like saving wishlists, participating in forums, and synching your music across multiple devices. Audials Light is a free application that works on Windows XP, Vista, 7 and 8.

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Although Next Browser won’t trounce the competition when it come to looks and functionality, everything that’s there works really well. Page rendering is fluid, tabs work well, speed dial provides instant access to your favorite sites, and the extensions support expand Next Browser’s functionality a few notches further. The app’s interface also looks pretty cool, while at the same time being fairly simple. When launched, you land on the speed dial screen, where you will find links to some popular websites such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Yahoo, CNN, Amazon and Pinterest by default, though you can always replace them with your own favorite or frequently visited websites. The tabs also works great, allowing you to quickly add new ones for browsing multiple sites in conjunction. Existing tabs can be closed by swiping them down in the tabs view.

The Next View feature that can be accessed straight from the home screen by swiping to the right. It presents you with popular stories from the internet related to technology, business, sports, travel, entertainment etc. This comes pretty handy for quickly going through some of the latest headlines and stories from all genres during your morning walk. Coming to extensions, Next Browser doesn’t have incredible third-party extension support at the moment, but considering it’s a fresh release, that’s perfectly understandable. The only available extensions as of this writing are Evernote Clipper and Pocket, both of which can be grabbed straight from the Google Play Store. The vertical extensions bar can be opened via swiping from the right edge of the screen, making them quickly accessible throughout the browser.

The app also lets you store, import and synchronize your bookmarks. The feature syncs your entire bookmarks list across multiple devices that have the same account configured, based on your email address. The voice search option can be enabled by pressing the hardware or on-screen search key while in the browser, and works great at searching any type of content online without having to type anything.

The app also keeps a history of your browsing data, though we couldn’t find any private session or incognito mode in there, which is quite disappointing since almost all major mobile web browser contain this option these days. The Preferences screen lets you configure some generic settings related to the app such as default search engine (Google, Yahoo, Bing), user agent, display options and some other tidbits.

Next Browser is available at Google Play Store and can be download for free via the link provided below.

Download Next Browser For Android

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You can play, pause and rewind your favorite GIFs on the fly, as well as change their playback speed. In short, it’s a media player specifically designed to handle GIF files. The interface of 7GIF resembles that of an image preview tool (like Windows Photo Viewer); you get a few playback, zoom and navigation controls at bottom, while the GIF preview itself takes the rest of the window.

The fastest way to view your GIFs is to drag and drop them over 7GIF. You can use the pause button to pause at any frame – a handy option that other image viewers usually lack. The animation options button next to stop lets you control playback speed of the frames that the GIF file is made of between fast and slow. In addition, you can use the next and previous buttons to skip one frame at a time. Images can be zoomed in and out via the magnifying glass buttons. The application also lets you jump to next or previous files in a row, provided you have more than one GIF file opened in the app, of course.

The Tools button on the far-right throws in more options on the table such as save current or all frames in the GIF file as individual JPEG images, print the current frame, access file properties, enter full screen mode, hide toolbar, toggle always on top, change background color of preview, check for updates, and open advanced settings. All these actions can also be performed via their pertaining hotkeys.

When it comes to the ‘Advanced settings’, this window allows you to enable or disable a few more application-specific options, all of which are pretty much self-explanatory. Settings can be configured under General, Associate GIF files and Change Language sections.

7GIF works like a charm on Windows 8, and also supports Windows XP, Vista and 7.

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Kakudo replicates four finger gestures app switching in a way, and brings it to Android to lets users quickly switch between apps via swiping from the left or right edges of the device’s screen. This makes it fairly easy to work between two apps in conjunction, such as copy-paste operations from app to the other, jotting down your favorite quotes off the internet from the web browser to a note taking app etc. Upon swiping from either edges, the screen vibrates and instantly switches to the other app in line.

Kakudo provides a number of settings that you can turn on and off according to your preferences. The settings panel not only lets you make changes to how the feature works, but also let you turn it off altogether. The available set of options include toggling swipe behavior for available set of features, enabling or disabling the vibration function, and adjusting sensitivity of the swipe gesture. Another interesting bit is the ability to place a few apps in a favorites bar for quick access, that can be brought up via swiping up from the bottom edge of the screen.

You can tap the plus button to add your favorites apps or toggles to the favorites bar. Not only can you add any type of app shortcut there, but also quick toggles for WI-FI, brightness, GPS, Bluetooth, Camera, Sound and so on. In short, it gives you a lot of flexibility and control over how Kakudo should work for you.

In a nutshell, this tiny little app unlocks an all new multi-tasking possibility and brings an intuitive way for switching between running apps. Kokuda is available at Google Play Store in Lite and Pro ($0.99) versions. The download links of both the variants are provided below.

Download Kakudo Lite For Android

Download Kakudo Pro For Android

[via XDA-Developers]

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The application is mainly designed to protect data stored on USB flash drives or external drives that people often require to carry around, but works equally well on internal hard drives as well. The application doesn’t require any sort of installation, which makes it a perfect companion for portable drives.

When executed for the first time, Protectorion ToGo requires you to specify a master password for locking and unlocking your files and providing access to them. Simply enter the master password along with a password hint, and hit the ‘Start Protection’ button at the bottom.

The tool then automatically creates an encrypted ‘ProtectorionSafe’ folder at the source location. Even though you can still open this folder, any file or data stored within it can’t be directly accessed, and the only way to get past the barrier is to access the stored items from within the app. So, how do we do that? Lets find out.

Every time you launch the application, you’re presented with a password prompt before you can enter the main interface. Type your master password that you specified earlier, and click ‘Open Safe’.

The user-friendly interface of the app lets you store files into the encrypted folder via simple drag and drop. Additionally, it allows you to create custom folders for each type of content you want to store. For instance, you can store all you bank account details under one folder while keeping all your passwords separately accessible in another, in order to keep things well-organized and easy for you to access. Any folder or file that you delete from your safe is moved under the Wastebin, from where you can either copy it back to your safe or remove it for good. Files can be encrypted and decrypted on the fly using the pertaining buttons at the top.

All in all, it’s an extremely useful app for those looking for a way to keep their data safe from prying eyes, especially on portable drives. The application works on Windows XP, Vista, 7 and 8.

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The application boasts a UI that is not only quite user-friendly, but also fairly effective at what it offers. When launched, all your your currently running processes (including opened windows, background processes and services) are automatically terminated, leaving behind only the core Windows processes essential to keep the computer running. Even though it can remove malware from your system, the app can help you get rid of it yourself by making it possible for you to delete its files or use other tools after killing all its processes. The application may occasionally be terminated itself by a malware, so you may need to try a couple of times before successfully killing the target threat(s).

Holding the Shift or Ctrl keys while executing the app starts it under service and debug modes respectively. The former gives more control to the application for terminating required processes, and allows it to continuously run in the background and restart itself should it be stopped or killed by the malware. Debug mode, on the other hand, can come handy to manually terminate each process one by one.

KillEmAll displays a list of all visible processes on the left. You can select the required item and perform further actions from there. For instance, you can relaunch a process by selecting it from the list followed by clicking ‘Run’. Similarly, you can move a trusted process to the Whitelist so that it doesn’t get terminated the next time you run the app. Other available options let you open the file path of the selected process, Google its path or name, verify its signature, create IFEO, rename the item manually or with dummy text, or just remove it from the list.

Lastly, KillEmAll also enables you to directly upload a process to Virus Total – an online virus scanning service that analyzes suspicious files through a series of scans using a wide array of popular antivirus engines. To upload a process, select it from the list and click the ‘Upload to Virus Total’ link from the right.

KillEmAll works on both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7 and Windows 8.

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Upon launch, the player automatically detects your music and presents it all neatly organized in its Holo tabs for artists, recent, albums and songs. You can use right and left swipe gestures to navigate between these sections, while swiping up and down lets you scroll through your music list. The app also detects and displays album cover art next to song titles, and automatically downloads missing covers if enabled under settings. There’s a playback bar at the bottom, complete with next and previous buttons to skip the current song, along with letting you play or pause it. A tiny seekbar above these controls makes it easy to instantly jump to any position in the currently playing song.

A rather useful feature is its ability to automatically fetch song lyrics and album cover from the internet. During our testing, however, it fetched inaccurate or wrong lyrics for certain songs. Though you shouldn’t take it as a deal breaker, as the rest of the features work as advertised. The Now Playing screen lets you toggle repeat and shuffle modes. Akin to the main screen, you can use horizontal swipe gestures to navigate between lyrics, album art and songs lists.

It comes as no surprise that many music apps come with an integrated music equalizer to let you fine tune the lows, mids and highs of your music to your liking, and Now Playing is no exception. It features an effective equalizer, where you can either choose from one of the genre-based presets ranging from hip hop and heavy metal to jazz and pop, or even define your own custom levels. Lastly, the Settings screen of the app lets you adjust a few options like toggling playback controls on the lock screen, deleting the app’s cache, and switching to a dark theme that can come handy on AMOLED displays, etc.

Now Playing is available at Google Play Store for $1.85. You may want to take its 3-day trial version for a spin before shelling out your money.

Download Now Playing Music Player For Android

Download Now Playing Free For Android

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The usage of Fequal (or Find Equal Files) is pretty straightforward. Click the Directory button and then specify the source directory that you want to scan for equal (duplicate) items. You can configure a few options prior to scanning the selected folder, such as whether or not to search in subdirectories, check links, include empty files, and check files completely or just a fixed initial part ofm them (specified in MB). In addition, you can specify a particular file extension next to the directory path, which forces Fequal to only scan for the specified file type. When ready, click ‘Search’.

The application will start analyzing the selected folder and present you with a list of all duplicates found based on your preferences. From there onward, you can directly open the folder that contains a duplicate, delete it, or substitute its shortcut. Similarly, you can replace a duplicate file with a hard or symbolic link to the original version (that you’re keeping). When available, Fequal displays a preview of the file (such as an image) in the right pane. This feature makes it easier to take a look at the file you’re about to remove or substitute with a link.

You can select a different set of equal files via the list at the bottom. The Next and Previous buttons let you navigate between these groups. Similarly, you can refresh this list, remove the selected group from it, or clear all groups in it in one go.

Overall, it’s an extremely useful app for quickly taking care of duplicate files on your computer. It works on Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7 and Windows 8.

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The service allows you to store your current session as a ‘Cup’. When you cup a session, information regarding the supported programs is automatically synced to the cloud. Having done that, you can restore this session on another computer by doing an ‘Uncup’ from it. You can even share your cups with your friends, family and other users.

To get started, you will need to sign up for an early beta (link provided at the end of the post) using your email address, and then download the provided Windows or Mac OS X version depending on your operating system. If you use Google Chrome, make sure you install Cupcloud extension as well, when prompted upon launching the program.

Next, enter your credentials (email and password) that you used during beta sign up and click the Submit button in the app to get started.

You will be presented with the main application window, from where you can easily start to cup and uncup your sessions. The software doesn’t come with a lot of features but the ones that are there work absolutely as they should. This also helps keep it simple enough for everyone to use. To kick off, click the Cup button at the top and you will see your content in the right menu, including URLs of websites, files and folders, document files and so on. Now to resume your session, download and run Cupcloud on the other PC and hit Uncup – simple as that. That application also automatically syncs your current session with its corresponding existing cup, though you may manually do it as well, by hitting Sync.

Cupcloud allows creating private and shared cups. The latter comes in handy should you want to share the same sessions with others around you. In addition, you can create folders in each category to keep your cups separately sorted based on parameters like date, name, title, time etc. Folders can be created under both private and shared sections. To share a cup, simply right-click a folder under the Shared section and click ‘Send Invitation’ from the context menu, followed by typing the email address of your intended recipient. They will simply need to download the app to be able to uncup and resume that shared session.

Cupcloud works on Windows and Mac OS X. Testing was carried out on Windows 8 Pro, 64-bit.

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[via Lifehacker]

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The interface of the application has all the app’s features arranged under Backup, Options and Log tabs at the top. It should be noted that TSR Backup doesn’t work the way most task-based backup apps do, where you just create backup or restore tasks and execute them when required. Instead, the application creates an exact backup copy of your data to any user-specified location. When it comes to restoring a backup, users have to manually do that via copy-paste.

To make a backup of your data, click the Add button under Source Directories, followed by selecting the folder that needs to be backed up. The application automatically copies the sub folders within the main directory to the list as well, so if you want to exclude any specific folder(s) from the backup process, you can mention them under Excluded Directories. TSR Backup also has shortcut buttons to quickly add Windows default user directories and Windows System directories under source and excluded list of directories respectively. The final step is to specify the destination directory for the backup, and click Start.

The current status of the backup process appears under the Log tab, from where you can mark four different options depending on your preferences regarding what to include in the log file from scanned, copied and skipped items, and any errors that are encountered. Information regarding the processed files also appear at the bottom, along with a Stop button to terminate the backup process any time.

In case you require to restore the files, you can simply copy them back from the destination directory. TSR Backup also saves the directory structure, making it easier to restore everything back exactly the way it should be.

TSR Backup is available in Free and Pro ($29) versions, where the later provides a few extra features such as continuous backup and free email support. The application works on Windows XP, Vista, 7 and 8.

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The utmost edge Smart Launcher Special holds over the stock Android launcher (and other manufacturer-customized or third-party launchers for that matter) is the gorgeous, minimalist-friendly interface. There are no ugly icons to deal with, nor any cluttered home screens laden with random widgets. In fact, Smart Launcher Special keeps both of them (shortcuts and widgets) separate from one another. The main screen, aka the Quick Start screen, presents app shortcuts arranged in a flower-like shape that looks fairly immaculate, thanks to their uniform design. They are round and can be easily customized to your choice. Existing shortcuts can be removed by dragging them out of your way to the bottom right. In addition, when you tap an icon, a plus button pops up in the middle, letting you add additional shortcuts.

To enter the widgets area, simply tap the minuscule icon at the bottom-right. Likewise, you can tap and hold your finger on the screen to bring up the wallpaper menu. The widgets screen also looks equally nice, and you can place whatever widget you like on it. Unlike the Quick Start screem, the widgets section comprise of multiple home screens.

The app drawer is accessible via its pertaining button at the Quick Start screen or swipe gesture from the left edge, and it keeps your apps well organized under different categories named Communication, Internet, Media, Utility and Settings. This makes it easier to access things you want. If you’re not happy with the preconfigured categories, you can easily customize their names under Settings. The Preferences screen of the launcher lets you customize a plethora of options under Settings and Personalization.

Settings let users toggle functions such as status bar visibility, screen orientation, drawer activation mode, clock, left-handed mode and so on. Similarly, the Personalization section lets you apply cosmetic changes to the app, ranging from clock style and global theme to icon size and categories labels etc.

So, if you like to keep your Android home screen simple and minimal yet functional and elegant, give Smart Launcher Special a shot while the offer lasts. You can download it via the link provided below.

Looking for even more amazing home screen replacements for your Android device? Don’t forget to check out our list of the top free Android launchers out there.

Download Smart Launcher Special For Android (Free for limited time)

Download Smart Launcher For Android (Free)

Download Smart Launcher Pro For Android (Paid)

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