Mike Williams

RITLabs has announced the release of The Bat! 6.0, a major update of its flagship email client. Top of the "New Features" list is full Unicode support, which means users should now be able to work with multiple languages simultaneously.

The program now adds support for Internationalized Domain Names (IDN), allowing it to correctly recognize domain names containing Arabic, Chinese, Russian and other characters.

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Blocking unwanted web content -- cookies, scripts, images -- is a great way to speed up browsing and improve your security, and there are a host of browser extensions to help you get started. But there’s a problem. Most of these focus on just one content type, such as adverts, and more general tools are often tricky to use.

HTTP Switchboard is rather more interesting. Not only does this Chrome extension help you block a wide range of content -- cookies, images, plugins, scripts, frames, XHR and more -- but it allows anyone to do this just by pointing and clicking.

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High Motion Software has announced the release of ImBatch 2.0, its comprehensive image batch processing tool.

As before, you can use the program to resize or rotate photos, tweak colors and contrast, apply effects, set tags and more. But now you’re also able to apply new "AutoEnhance" tasks, which do their best to automatically optimize your target images.

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It’s a regular web annoyance: you’re busy online, a line of browser tabs open, when suddenly one of them starts playing a Flash video ad. Which one? Normally you’d have to check each tab in turn, but that’s all about to change with Google Chrome 32 beta.

The next time your concentration is disturbed by some unexpected sound, just glance at the tabs, and a speaker icon will appear next to any which are playing audio. Further icons highlight tabs currently using your webcam, or Chromecast, and we expect others will appear in future.

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Avast is probably best known for its free antivirus, but if you need more power then the company has plenty of commercial alternatives. Pro Antivirus extends the package with online banking and shopping protection, for instance, while Internet Security further adds a firewall and spam filter.

Top of the consumer range, though, is Premier. Along with the usual antivirus, firewall and browsing protection, this includes a tool which will automatically detect and install updates for key applications. The Data Shredder securely wipes confidential documents, while AccessAnywhere allows you to access and control your PC over the Internet.

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PDF is a great format for sharing content, not least because it’s viewable just about everywhere. It’s not quite so convenient if you need to reuse that content elsewhere, of course, but there could be an easy solution: just use UniPDF to convert your source documents to Word (DOC, RTF), images (BMP, JPG, PCX, PNG, TGA, TIF), HTML or plain text.

The program is easy to use. Drag and drop your PDF files onto the program, choose an Output format, click "Convert", and watch as UniPDF goes to work.

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Search and replace is a key part of most text editors, and it’s generally very simple to use: type a keyword, press [Enter] to look for it, then step through however many matches there might be. This is so straightforward and familiar that it’s easy to forget there’s any other way.

Regular expressions do offer a far more powerful alternative, though, at least if you take the time to learn how they work. As an example, take a look at  \b[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}\b  : despite looking like binary garbage, this is actually a very useful search term which will locate any email address. Not something you could easily do in any other way.

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Prefetching is an excellent Windows Vista/ 7/ 8 performance-boosting technology where the system monitors applications as they start, detects any dependent files they might need, and preloads them when the program next starts. This can drastically cut down disk access times as an application switches from one file to another, making a real difference to your system boot and application launch times.

There’s more to prefetching than PC optimization, though. You can also use this data to monitor which programs are being launched on your system, and when. And you can view the files a program accesses when it first starts, which could be useful when troubleshooting. All you need is a forensics tool like Sanderson Forensic’s Prefetcher to interpret the data for you.

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Berlin-based utilities developer O&O Software has released version 8 of its flagship backup and recovery tool, O&O DiskImage.

One very convenient new feature sees the program able to directly create VHD files. You’ll need to enable this first (Edit > Imaging Options > select "VHD File"), but once that’s done your future images will be saved in VHD, rather than O&O’s own OMG format.

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If programs aren’t running as expected on a PC then checking whatever .NET versions are installed is often a good idea. So it’s a pity that Microsoft doesn’t provide a quick and easy way to do this, instead forcing users to navigate through multiple Registry keys (not so helpful when you’re trying to remotely troubleshoot problems with a PC novice).

Fortunately there are plenty of more straightforward alternatives around, and one of the more capable, ASoft’s portable .NET Version Detector, has just been upgraded to version 14.

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PhrozenSoft’s VirusTotal Uploader has been updated to version 3.0, and there’s plenty of useful new functionality to explore.

You no longer have to launch the program as an administrator, for instance. You’ll still be able to upload most files to VirusTotal, get a verdict on whether they’re malware, and if you do run into any limitations then the program can be elevated at any time.

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Resplendence Software’s PC crash analysis tool WhoCrashed has been updated to version 5.0.

The big news in this release is that the program now runs properly on Windows 8.1. If your new system has a blue-screen crash, run the program, click Analyze and it’ll try to identify the cause for you. The crash report includes new hardware information, including system manufacturer and motherboard name.

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Web pop-ups are annoying, intrusive, and potentially dangerous, which is why all the top browsers make at least some attempt to block them. Google’s Chrome is no exception, but it won’t stop everything, and so you might want to add a little extra protection in the shape of JavaScript Popup Blocker.

As you’ll guess from the name, this free extension aims to block all JavaScript-generated pop-up and pop-under windows. You don’t have to worry about configuration, at least initially, as it starts working right away: just carry on browsing as normal.

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SeriousBit has rolled out EnhanceMy8 2.0, the latest edition of its Windows 8 maintenance and tweaking utility.

This release benefits from full Windows 8.1 support (although of course it also runs just fine on Windows 8). EnhanceMy8 2.0 is also the first digitally signed version of the program, which should ensure that it’s properly recognized as a trusted program by your security software.

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22 years old and still going strong, veteran archiving tool WinZip has today been updated to version 18. And this time, it’s mostly about the cloud.

This starts with support for more services; you can now directly add files from (or save archives to) your Box, CloudMe, Dropbox, Google Drive, SkyDrive, SugarSync or ZipSend accounts.

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