BrotherSoft Awards 2008 - Top New

2008 brought us a lot of awesome novelties, an unprecedented load of new programs in many categories. And so many of them are amazing developments that helps us in many ways, however, as you know, a selection has to be made, and only those which are really outstanding get their place in the list. These are the ten titles that stand out.

Google Chrome is a browser that combines a minimal design with sophisticated technology to make the web faster, safer, and easier.

User Interface
Chrome is not only a free browser, but it has an extremely elegant user friendly interface which is really intended to understand users needs without complicating things and at the same time it is capable to satisfy advanced users.
Highlight Features
This innovative browser brings minimal design with sophisticated technology achieving a faster, safer, and easier browsing experience, and its goal is also to gain stability. Easily surfed media sites, audio & video smooth streaming, good Flash handling, and quick PDFs opening.
Use and Help
New tabs opening shows a most visited sites thumbnail view, plus recently used bookmarks and a box to search browsing history.
Price/Value
Best – Free.



Windows Live Essentials gives you instant messaging, e-mail, blogging, photos, and more.

User Interface
All these programs user interfaces are very well designed to provide as best ease of use as possible, bringing not only eye-catching visuals but also accurate functionality.
Highlight Features
This is a free software bundle that includes a bunch of well known and helpful applications for your desktop which are extremely useful in the management of your computer stuff. However, making a written evaluation of every single program would be somewhat extensive.
Use and Help
Windows Live Messenger is a very popular IM client which usage is widely spread. Windows Live Mail for the management of multiple e-mail accounts. Photo Gallery is a handy app to edit, organize, tag, and share photo files. Windows Live Toolbar which added to IE enables you to gain quick access to your Hotmail, calendar, pictures and so on. Writer enables users to compose blog texts, add photos and links in order to be published. And finally Movie Maker is intended for creating awesome videos from photos and easy publishing them.
Price/Value
Best – Free.


Ubiquity provides an experiment into connecting the Web with language.

User Interface
Simple but intuitive, good looking and easy to understand
Highlight Features
This is one of the most revolutionary pieces of software of 2008. Ubiquity features the extraordinary ability to allow any user to perform a lot of actions that in the past were specified only for Web developers. Thus opening a wide variety of new usages which now will be available for everyone in a quicker and simpler way, this is possible due to the introduction of language-based instructions that allow users to control their browsing.
Use and Help
The new capabilities brought by Ubiquity include maps insertion (literally anywhere), on-page translation, code highlighting, and so many other handy actions and features that are just to many to be mentioned.
Price/Value
Best – Free.


AIMP is a freeware audio player written which has a Winamp-like skinnable interface and supports various audio file types.

User Interface
Its user interface is really good looking and it can be customized in many ways having also a lot of pre-defined skins.
Highlight Features
This is a really advanced media player with a lot of extra functionality such as audio conversion and recording. It offers high quality output based on an advanced reproduction technology unseen in other media players. But what is most attention calling is its really low resources consumption.
Use and Help
Besides playing, recording and converting, AIMP allows users to expand its performance through the use of plugins. Its equalizer brings many unusual tweaks like Speed, Tempo and Pitch and even the possibility to add effects like Flanger , Echo, Reverb or Stereo Enhancer.
Price/Value
Best – Free.


Photoscape is the fun and easy photo editing software that enables you to fix and enhance photos.

User Interface
It possesses an original interface highlighted by its unique circular navigator which show most of its features and procedures, making of Photoscape an intuitive, fast, and one of the most advanced image editors.
Highlight Features
Among freeware image editors, Photoscape stands out for its multiple features and the huge amount of actions users can perform with it. Major image formats are supported: RAW, JPEG, PNG as well as all others, including even animated GIFs.
Use and Help
Its pre-built templates are extremely helpful at the moment of generating collages, and many other photo-based imagery. Red-eye removal, light/shadow, and contrast-editing are some of the extraordinary features it brings as well as batch images edition, combinations, and printing.
Price/Value
Best – Free.


Songbird is a free software media player and web browser developed as open source, with a stated mission "to incubate Songbird, the first Web player, to catalyze and champion a diverse, open Media Web."

User Interface
Its interface is clean and easy to understand, and users will find there are buttons to quickly hide & show the different panels.
Highlight Features
This is an incredible free, extensible and web-oriented music player based on the same source code of Firefox. Its resources consumption is low and the overall performance is really good.
Use and Help
Besides common functionality most media players bring, Songbird offers some extras like allowing media files which are stored on Web sites to be displayed as playable files, and it also integrates with Last.fm service. Songbird also enables users to add the album covers by Drag & Drop (as in iTunes).
Price/Value
Best – Free.


Digsby = IM + Email + Social Networks. Manage all your existing IM, email, and social network accounts from one easy to use application.

User Interface
Its interface is original and fully customizable and has skin support. Couldn't be better.
Highlight Features
This multi-protocol IM client allows AIM, MSN, Yahoo, ICQ, Google Talk, Jabber, and Facebook Chat Accounts all together in a single, clean and versatile interface. Additionally, Digsby offers two more key features: E-mail and Social Networking.
Use and Help
This program offers a lot of amazing possibilities such as multiple chat sessions management in tabbed windows with drag & drop support, contact rename, SMS, and much more. Users can manage e-mails and perform some actions like marking as read or Spam reporting right from Digsby's interface. In the Social Networking mode users can manage their Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and LinkedIn accounts.
Price/Value
Best – Free.


VirtualBox is a family of powerful x86 virtualization products for enterprise as well as home use. Supported host operating systems include Linux, Mac OS X, OS/2 Warp, Windows XP or Vista, and Solaris, while supported guest operating systems include FreeBSD, Linux, OpenBSD, OS/2 Warp, Windows and Solaris.

User Interface
Its interface is neat and user friendly.
Highlight Features
VirtualBox is an open-source cross platforms virtualization freeware that enables users to set a virtual machine on any PC. It is small in size (it will only use 30MB of space on HDD) and manages the virtual machine in a really efficient way. It has support for Solaris OS, OpenSolaris, Windows, Macintosh OS X, and Linux. The feature list is really endless.
Use and Help
This program will help users to run multiple operating systems simultaneously on the same PC. It also allows users to run cross-platform, multi-tier apps.
Price/Value
Free for non commercial usage.


TeamViewer establishes connections to any PC all around the world within just a few seconds. You can remote control your partner's PC as if you were sitting right in front of it.

User Interface
It has an incredibly well designed interface that allows users to connect in an easy
and efficient way.
Highlight Features
This popular piece of software is an easy and fast remote control solution which enables users to share their desktop and to transfer data. It works behind any firewall and NAT proxy. TeamViewer has become the standard tool that supports and assists users in remote locations.
Use and Help
In order to connect to a remote computer users will only have to run this program on both machines and as it is cross platform, it will not matters if it is a PC or a Mac. Users can even use this application to present their work by showing their own desktop in a distant place.
Price/Value
TeamViewer is completely free for private usage.


FormatFactory is a multifunctional media converter, which supports almost all media formats.

User Interface
The application's interface is really simple to use, however, do not waste time searching for the "file" button or menu, because it won´t be shown until selection of the outcome format.
Highlight Features
This fully featured format converter allows users to convert all kinds of audio, video and images between many formats, including WMV, AVI, MPG, MP3, WMA, AAC, JPG, PNG, GIF and much more. Furthermore, FormatFactory brings support for all the formats used by portable devices like PSP, iPhone and iPod.
Use and Help
Users can perform single or batch conversion (complete folders), and also set up some basic conversion settings. FormatFactory is a really handy and efficient program when it comes to rapid conversion of media files.
Price/Value
Best – Free.

Final Words
All in all, these are the awarded titles for the Top New category, as you can see it was a hard decision to make as they are all magnificent exponents of what 2008 brought us in the software novelties section.