Adobe Photoshop Express is a Windows Store app, and you can install it from the link provided at the end of the post. So, let’s get editing! Launch the app and from its home screen, you will be able to browse for image files from your local hard disk via the Pictures Library button, open any photos saved in your Adobe Revel account, or even snap a picture right away using your PC or tablet’s webcam.

Note that you can also open any picture in Adobe Photoshop Express from desktop mode by right-clicking it, going to the ‘Open with…’ submenu and selecting ‘Adobe Photoshop Express ’. Here’s the Tarantula nebula for your viewing pleasure.

I’m a sucker for Windows Store apps’ user interface; ‘Modern’ apps have that air of elegance others can’t quite keep up with. Your editing tools are lined up at the bottom; click any one and choose from the settings therein. There’s the usual ‘Crop’ feature that you’d expect any half-decent photo editor to have, along with a ‘Red Eye’ removal tool.  ‘Correct’ brings out menus for ‘Contrast,’ ‘Exposure’ and ‘White Balance,’ where you can adjust different sliders to get the desired effect. Some buttons like ‘Auto Fix’ require nothing more than a click to automatically resolve common issues in the image, and I can name at least one person who’d be more than satisfied with the results.

There are also quite a few eye-catching effects available under ‘Looks’. These Instagram-like filters let you instantly turn even a dull image into a masterpiece at a click of a button.

From the charms bar, you can view and change Adobe Photoshop Express’s settings & sharing options, and clear cached images. One really swell feature is the ‘View Original’ button: just click and hold it to quickly see what the image looked like before you changed it. Ultra-convenient, isn’t it? You can also share the image to Facebook or Adobe Revel, or save it to your computer, from the icon at far-right.

Adobe Photoshop Express also lets you share images via email, or upload them to SkyDrive via the share option in the charms bar, as shown below.

Since Adobe Photoshop Express is a Windows Store app, Windows 8 users can take full advantage of the operating system’s multi-tasking features; you can snap the app to a sidebar while working on something else, and resume photo-editing at a moment’s notice.

Lastly, there are two paid in-app features; ‘Premium Looks’ ($2.99) adds a plethora of even cooler filters, and ‘Reduce Noise’ ($4.99) enables you to smooth out grain and speckling. You can try both these out for free, but you won’t be able to save changes a photo with these effects applied, unless you purchase them.

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It’s an Adobe AIR application that allows you to not only create different kinds of tasks, but also monitor the time you have been spending on them. Its own window pops up from time to time reminding you about time intervals to show what you’ve been doing for the past few minutes or hours. And since there aren’t any predefined categories for the type of tasks you may create or manage, you can put almost anything in there, ranging from breakfast or workout to the time you spent gossiping with your friends.

Whatcha Doings? sports a pretty simple interface, carrying a few different buttons on the main window to define your current task, access the app’s settings, view reports on what you’ve been doing, change the task to another one, hide the window, or quit the app. Clicking the current task button sends the app to system tray, from where it quietly monitors the task time.

To assign a new task, simply click Change Task button followed by specifying a couple of task parameters including task name and break or lunch interval, should there be any. Just type the entries in the relevant field and click Add. All your existing tasks appear under the Select Task drop down menu, making it easier to switch between them on the fly. Whatcha Doing keeps a history of all your previous tasks you’ve ever created using this app, and you can access this log via the Reports button, from where you can also print the report, or save it as a CSV or XLS file.

The Options screen (accessible via clicking Settings) allows you to make a few application-specific changes such as setting the user’s name, the check interval time for automatic prompts, and auto startup behavior at Windows logon. Additionally, you can clear your current tasks list as well as your history data from here, and specify the total numbers of days for keeping the history log.

Whatcha Doing? is available in three variants: Free, Premium ($10) and Group Rate ($15 / user / year). The premium version adds Basecamp support, while Group Rate also supports group tracking and management, in addition to all the features of free and premium versions.

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Winfy sports a really simple interface and displays information for the currently playing track including its album cover art, artist name and title. You cannot resize the window, though you can place it anywhere on your screen by simply dragging it to the required position. Winfy doesn’t have a lot of complicated options to confuse users; all it provides is a convenient way to control Spotify’s playback.

Upon launch, Winfy presents you with a blank, fancy looking mini player. The application doesn’t automatically detect Spotify upon first run, or at least that’s what seemed to be the case during our testing. You may require to play or change the song from Spotify itself the first time when Winfy is installed. From there onward, you can play/pause the song or jump to next or previous track via the onscreen buttons that appear when you hover the mouse curser over the album art. You can also right-click Winfy and perform further actions from the context menu, which includes settings, toggle playback, previous track, next track, volume up, volume down and exit.

In the Settings console, you won’t find a plethora of options to play with. Though you’ll still find those one would expect from an app like this. There are toggles to always keep Winfy on top of other windows, start it with Windows, hide it when Spotify isn’t running, and disable its animations. Furthermore, you can clear cached cover art information by clicking the ‘Clear cover cache’ button.

All in all, it’s an excellent app that provides a simple way of controlling Spotify playback without launching Spotify itself. Winfy works on Windows XP, 7 and 8. Testing was carried out on Windows 8 Pro, 64-bit.

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MiniPlayer

The UI of the player hasn’t changed a great deal on the surface, but there are a few subtle changes that are sure to improve the listening experience for iTunes users. In the album info view of the player, a volume button has been added, which brings up a slider. When it comes to control view, the change might not be perceivable immediately, but the newly added seek bar is something that a lot of people have been craving to see in the iTunes MiniPlayer for a long time. You can easily skip to any part of the song using this bar, and there is no need to switch to the full view just because you don’t like the starting part of a track.

Song View

Clicking the album art takes you to the Song View, but it is not the view you might be used to. Previously, Song View had an interface that was a bit different compared to other areas of the music player, as you can see in the screenshot above. The UI looked a bit old-fashioned, and there was no integration for the new ‘Up Next’ feature. All this has changed now though, and Song View is much neater than before.

In iTunes 11.0.3, this view has volume controls in a new place, right next to the playlist icon and the search button. This search button lets you quickly find a song from your library without having to revert to the maximized view. You can also manage the Up Next list by using the arrow located in the top-right corner.

Albums With Multiple Disks

Previously, it was not possible for iTunes to distinguish between separate albums, and music on separate disks belonging to the same album. This small yet annoying quirk has finally been addressed in the 11.0.3 update, and the music player now keeps you library much neater than it did before.

As is the case with almost any update, iTunes 11.0.3 also carries some minor bug fixes and performance improvements. You can give it a go by heading to the link provided below.

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Ashampoo MP3 Cover Finder is in Beta, meaning the developers might still have to iron out some bugs before releasing the final version. You will need to activate the app via the beta code that you can get for free at the developer’s page. To get started, download the application using the link at the end of the post, click here and then enter your email in the proceeding webpage for requesting your license code.

After receiving the verification email in your inbox, click the activation link to receive the license code. Copy the code from here.

Now run the setup file, paste the code in the appropriate field when asked and click ‘Activate now’. That’s it – your beta is now all active and running as it should.

The app itself sports a fairly straightforward interface that presents everything in a simple fashion, making it easily understandable for most users. When launched, it shows a semi-opaque dashboard that enables you to load your songs in five distinct ways: a single song file, all song files in any folder, all songs in your ‘my music’ folder, via drag and drop, or songs from iTunes library. Being an avid iTunes user, I naturally found the iTunes integration extremely useful. The drag and drop feature is also great for quickly selecting songs you want to update cover art for. All you have to do is open the folder where your music is stored, and then drag and drop the required file(s) over the app.

The application automatically analyzes the tracks and searches for matched results from a multitude of sources. For instance, during testing I noticed it presented results from Amazon, Google, Discogs and iTunes. In addition, the application also enables you to choose between single and album covers for songs released as both singles and parts of albums. Once everything is set according to your preferences, click ‘Find Covers’ to start adding cover art to the songs you selected.

To sum it up, Ashampoo MP3 Cover Finder is one of the best Windows apps for downloading album covers art for your music collection conveniently. It works on Windows XP, Vista, 7 and 8.

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The interface of the tool looks pretty bare bones, and doesn’t carry any complicated set of options that the end users might find confusing. Though this may also end up as a downside of the app, as some power users may find it a little too simple for their taste, having little flexibility and control over the types of images they would like to extract or where they want to put them. All you can do is click the ‘Analyze file’ button, select the source file, and let deJPEG do the rest. It automatically analyzes the chosen file and extracts the appropriate image files in the same location as the source item. It would have been nice to have an option to let users decide where the output files should be saved.

Moreover, the application doesn’t offer a way to specify some sort of renaming scheme regarding the output images (the output files are simply stored as image1, image2 and so on), nor does it let you specify if you want to exclude images smaller or larger than a specific size or dimensions, which would have been really handy. When the images are extracted, the tool displays the results at the bottom, letting you know about the number of images that were successfully pulled out from the source.

During testing, I threw in a handful of different files in to the app and got mixed results in return. Some extracted pictures were a bit distorted, while at times the app didn’t work at all. Another major nuisance is that the app doesn’t explicitly state the types of files it supports. For instance when you browse the source file, it simple displays ‘All Files’ in the file support list. On the bright side, however, it’s a portable application and you can use in on the move by storing it on a USB drive.

Overall, it’s a decent app that can extract a batch of images from documents and program files. Testing was carried out on Windows 8 Pro, 64-bit.

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So what makes it stand out from the rest of the crowd? That would be its elegant interface and a horde of features, I’d say. The first and foremost of these is its ability to let you create tiles for websites and apps. Start Menu Reviver features Start Screen-like tiles that let you open your apps and other items. It also carries a navigation bar to the left that provides quick access to user accounts, network and sharing center, recent apps, start search, tasks, run console, and of course, your apps.

The Settings button here comes handy for quickly opening different configuration areas of Windows such as Control Panel, Device Manager, Scheduled Tasks, Services, Action Center, Start Menu Settings, Windows Firewall and Updates, and more.

Let’s now take a detailed look at one of the most interesting bits of the app: adding tiles. The application allows you to add Start Screen-like tiles for programs, files and websites of your choice. For doing this, simple right click on the app and click Add Tile in the context menu. In the proceeding window, you can specify the tile name, shortcut (either file or application’s path, or URL), color and tile icon. There’s a whole variety of icons included in the app for popular apps like Photoshop, Firefox, Chrome, Google Earth, Picasa etc. Alternatively, you can also add a custom icon if you wish.

The app also allows you to open or search desktop and Modern UI apps without opening the Start Screen itself. You can conveniently access apps, files, folders and other items using the search box. When you hit the Apps button, the drop down menu at the top-right lets you specify the type of items you want to open, for instance Desktop apps, Metro apps, Documents etc. Likewise, you can also sort these items if required. There are also minuscule battery and clock buttons on the top-right, but they may be rather redundant considering this information is already visible in the Taskbar.

Users often complain about the unintuitive placement of power options in Windows 8. Start Menu Reviver takes care of this annoyance by giving you instant, convenient access to power options i.e. log off, switch user, lock, sleep, hibernate, restart and shutdown from a single power menu.

To make application-specific changes, right-click the Start button and access the Settings window. Apart from making some generic changes like language, system startup behavior, and auto update, you can select between different Start button styles, disable the Dashboard tile (which basically gives access to the Start Screen) and customize further UI elements by changing the color scheme.

Start Menu Reviver is designed to work on Windows 8 only. Testing was carried out on Windows 8 Pro 64-bit.

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JPGasPDF is a portable tool, and requires no installation; simply download the program via the link provided at the bottom, extract the contents of the zip file, and launch the EXE file.

The developer Leelu Soft prides itself in making simple, easy-to-use software, and JPGtoPDF is no exception. Click the ‘Add’ button to browse for JPGs and add them to the list, hit ‘Create’ and the program will take care of the rest, automatically exporting your images to a PDF file and saving it where you specify. It’s as simple as, well, flipping through a picture book, actually.

If you want the images in your PDF to have a specific order, you can drag and drop them inside the display window to sort them just the way you want until you’re ready to convert to them to PDF. To remove an item, select it from the list and click the ‘Remove’ button. To empty the entire list and start from scratch, use ‘Clear’. In case you want to save your image list in its exact order for future use, the ‘Save’ button takes care of that, turning the image list into a text file that you can load into the application via the ‘Load’ button any time. That can be quite convenient when your PDF scrapbook or album is a work in progress, as you can sporadically add JPG images to the list by loading the saved file into JPGasPDF, or even by directly editing the text file to type in the paths path of your desired JPG files. You can also perform many of these functions by right-clicking in the main window and choosing the desired option from the context menu.

Here’s how the output PDF file of a few JPG images stiched together looks.

If you don’t already have anything similar, JPGasPDF can be quite the little helper. It’s focused, adept and very good at what it does. Still, after poking around a bit, I’ve found something to complain about. When you select an item, the program displays a little preview of it in the top toolbar, which is a good thing, except it’s a little too small to be useful. If your pictures are all big, bright ones like the ones I’m using, it’s okay, but if you’re adding images with text or empty spaces, the preview isn’t of much help.

JPGasPDF works on Windows XP, Vista, 7 and8. Testing was carried out on Windows 8 Pro, 64-bit.

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The landing screen of the app shows a few popular Whips shared by others. You can even shop for new related content such as Whip templates directly from its interface. Every Whip that a user creates and shares using the service appears on the WhipStream for others to see. To use Whip, the first thing you require to do is creating a Whip account, especially if you want to share the albums you create with others. The fastest way to do so is to use your Twitter or Facebook account. Once you’ve connected your social media profiles, it’s time to whip up some new photo albums. You can tap or click Create on the app bar or the main screen to get started.

Simply browse to the location of your desired photos in the built-in file browser to choose your pictures. Fortunately, the app lets you select multiple photos in one go.

The next step is to choose your Whip style, which consists of a variety of templates such as art deco, contemporary, crayon, crazy, elegant, pastel, photo book etc. If you aren’t happy with these and want to download a few additional ones, hit the More tile to the far right. That said, only three additional templates are downloadable as of this writing – spring, St. Patrick’s day and Mother’s day.

The ‘Build your Whip’ screen that pops up in the proceeding step further extends the customization. Here, you can give a title to your album and jot down a mini description. You can even add music to your Whip using the Add Music button on the app bar. Alternatively, the app allows you to record and insert custom voiceovers of your own. Akin to Whip styles, there’s a lot of choice regarding the type of music you wish to insert, including Mother’s day, celebrations, romance, nature, party, spring and more.

Once a Whip is created, you can publish it to the WhipStream by giving it a name and an optional description. You can also specify a category for the Whip, and choose the social media accounts on which it will be shared.

Whip also enables you to browse and view other people’s Whips. The viewing screen allows you to like whips, or post comment on them. You can also follow other users in a Twitter-esque manner.

Whip is available at Windows Store, Google Play Store and iTunes App Store for free. Testing was carried out on Window 8 Pro, 64-bit operating system.

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At a mere 7.3KB, Accelerify is as tiny as it gets. It’s a portable tool and to run it, simply extract the contents of the downloaded zip file. You’ll need to run the program as administrator, otherwise it won’t work. Accelerify pops up in a console window, and immediately begin to increment your clock’s time by one hour every ten seconds by default, though you can change this (more on it later). Every interval is logged with a number.

You can then switch back to your desktop, launch other programs or otherwise monitor your system. When you’re done, return to Accelerify, press any key, and the program will stop its work, restore your original time and close down. (You need to ensure that you close the program via the proper, ‘press any key’ route, though. If you just close the window, your clock will be left at its new setting, and you’ll have to correct the time yourself.)

If you want to adjust Accelerify’s default interval and increment settings, you can do so via command-line switches. So, if you want to step forward 10 minutes every 5 seconds, for instance, all you have to do is run ‘cmd.exe’ and specify your parameters.

Here’s how the parameters work: –i defines the interval (in seconds) after which the system clock will jump ahead, while –a (also in seconds) defines the amount of time the system clock will jump ahead. So, if I want Accelerify to forward my system’s time by 10 minutes (which would be 600 in seconds) after every 5 seconds, I type in ‘ –i 5 –a 600’ after accelerify.exe, as demonstrated in the command line above.

A couple of words of caution here: if you increment the clock too rapidly – let’s say, an hour every second, – some scheduled applications might miss their cue, and not pop up when expected. Also, you need to try out Accelerify to see if it’s working well with your events. Accelerify works by basically changing the time of your clock, instead of speeding it up. Subtle difference there, but it could cause you to miss an appointment set for 01:54, for example, if you started it at 01:40 with jump intervals of 10 minutes, because the program will jump to 01:50 and then 02:00, skipping all the intermediate values as it doesn’t cycle through every second. Therefore, it’ll work well if your appointments are set in delineations like 12:00, 12:30, 01:00, 01:30, etc. and you start the app at a rounded time with an interval that would trigger the times you want to test.

Accelerify works equally well on Windows 2000, XP, Vista, 7 and 8. Testing was carried out on Windows 8 Pro, 64-bit.

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Coffee sports a very lightweight design and resides in the system tray area, quietly running in the background. You can right-click its notification icon and choose your desired action from the context menu. These include pause, refresh, quit the app, execute Type and Run (more on that later), change language, assign applications to file types and so on. Almost everything that the context menu offers can also be accessed via hotkeys, which makes using the app even easier for keyboard junkies.

Assigning custom applications to any type of file is also fairly easy, and works absolutely like a charm if done properly. To do that, head over to Preferences in the app’s context menu and click ‘Extension Configuration’. First, you need to specify the extension for the file type to which you want to add an application association. You can do this by simply typing the extension in the top text box, or by browsing for any file of that type on your computer. For example, you can type .TXT or .JPEG, or click the ‘…’ button to select a text file or a JPEG image from your computer, and click Associate to add the extension to the list. Once added, you can associated primary and secondary programs with that extension. Simply click the browse button under Main and Alternative applications to specify your desired programs to use for opening the file, and click OK.

Now when you will double-click any file of that type, it will open in the main application that you have specified for it, regardless of what’s the default program set for opening this file on the computer you’re using. Similarly, double-clicking it with the ALT key pressed will open that file in the alternative application specified by you in Coffee.

Coffee also makes it possible to specify programs upon double-clicking any file type on your computer for the first time after installing Coffee. However, this feature can also nag you in your workflow, as getting this association prompt for each unrecognized file type you open can end up being quite annoying.

In case the location of a previously assigned application is changed, you can always specify the new path by opening the Application Path Configuration console from Preferences, which displays a list of all the associated programs.

The ‘Type and Run’ feature I mentioned earlier can prove to be extremely useful for launching apps by using keywords. You can assign a specific keyword or phrase to a file so you don’t have to type the full name or path or browse to its location every time you need to launch it; just enter its keyword n the ‘Run’ field and click ‘Run’ or ‘Run Alternative’ to launch it in its associated main or alternative application respectively.

All in all, it’s a versatile application that gives you a lot of flexibility and control over launching files on your computer in different programs. It works on Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7 and Windows 8. Testing was carried out on Windows 8 Pro.

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Although there are other similar Windows apps like Speccy and PC Hunter that give much more advanced and in-depth information regarding your system, Sys Toolbox Pro aims to provide most of the info right at the front, which is what makes it quite intuitive and user-friendly even for newbies because there are no tabs, menus or sections to navigate here to access the info. The application shows you in-depth software and hardware information of your computer including the operating system installed, the amount of storage space on your disk drive(s), RAM, CPU, motherboard serial number, battery status (in case of battery or backup power), display resolution, BIOS, system time, user accounts, startup processes, network status and more.

Apart from displaying system info, the app lets you kill unwanted active processes that might be consuming system resources. You can kill the any such process from the Utilities section of the application window. Beside killing processes, you can view, add or remove startup programs that automatically begin running at Windows logon.

Sys Toolbox Pro lets you easily retrieve your Windows product key by clicking the ‘Pro. key’ button. The key is displayed in a separate prompt, which allows you to copy it to clipboard in order to paste to the required location. Likewise, the application also lets you view the current battery status in case of using it on notebook. To do that, you just need to click ‘Check’ in the Notebook section. Lastly, it also shows you the IP address of your computer. The application displays both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses.

Even though Sys Toolbox Pro is not jam-packed with a plethora of features, its user-friendly design and ability to provide the required information in a simple interface makes it worth giving a shot. It supports both 32-bit and 64-bit OS editions of Windows XP, Vista, 7 and 8.

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