Mike Williams

At first glance, TransTools didn’t look like the most promising of programs. A suite "designed to help translators in various situations"? It would probably be for specialists only, and so expensive that big corporations would think twice -- right?

But wait. The package is really just about cleaning up poor formatting -- an OCR’ed document, say -- so could be useful for anyone. It works with Word, Excel, Visio and AutoCAD documents. And while there is a commercial version, the base edition is free for personal use? Now that’s much more interesting.

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Acronis International has announced the release of Acronis Disk Director 12, its popular all-in-one partition and drive management product.

There are no major changes this time, with Acronis concentrating on compatibility, for example ensuring that the new build now runs properly with Windows 8 and Windows 8.1.

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Your PC’s hard drive is buzzing with activity, and you’re not sure why. Could it be a virus? An application? Just a part of Windows? Moo0 File Monitor could help you find out.

Download and launch the program (there’s no installation required) and it goes to work immediately, detecting any modification to your hard drive and displaying its details: the date and time, change type (Create, Write, Rename or Delete), and the file name, size and path.

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VirusTotal has released its first VirusTotal Uploader for OS X, a simple tool which scans a file, folder or application for malware with 50+ antivirus engines.

Using VirusTotal Uploader for OS X can be as easy as dragging and dropping a file onto the program window. It’s uploaded, there’s a delay while the site checks your file with all the main antivirus engines, and finally a "Detections" figure gives you the results ("0/53", hopefully).

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ESET SysRescue Live Creator is a handy tool for creating a bootable antivirus rescue CD or USB key.

There’s no shortage of competition in this area, of course, but Live Creator has one or two useful touches that you might appreciate.

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CTI Text Encryption is a lightweight, portable text encryption tool. It’s ideal for sending sensitive information via insecure channels (email, online chat, web forums), perhaps from someone else’s computer, although you can also use it to save confidential data in files or elsewhere.

The open source program is a tiny download (827KB), a single executable with nothing else attached. Copy the file to a USB stick and it’s ready to use almost anywhere.

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Australian developer Auslogics has released Auslogics Disk Defrag Touch, a very major touch-oriented revamp of its Auslogics Disk Defrag package.

The most immediately obvious change is the very Windows 8-like interface, and we don’t just mean "it uses a few colorful tiles". The program runs full-screen, has the same bold design, a very similar layout for its controls and options: it actually feels like you’re running a Windows 8 app (although it also runs on Windows 7).

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Emanuele Colombo has announced an official Android release of his file transfer tool Dukto, which is also available for Windows, OS X, Linux, Symbian and more (there’s even a commercial iOS version).

Colombo suggests that there may be some compatibility issues, warning: "I tried my best to make it work flawlessly with any device, but I couldn’t do too much due to my very low free time and some limitations in current Qt support for Android".

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Clipboard History is a simple clipboard manager which remembers up to the last 20 text items copied to the clipboard, and makes them available for reuse later.

The program only supports text -- not images, files or anything else -- and so can seem a little basic. But don’t be fooled. There’s much more to Clipboard History than you might think.

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BullGuard has unveiled BullGuard Mobile Security for Android, its latest all-in-one security package for Android mobile devices.

The $19.95 (3 devices, 1 year) release introduces a new cloud-based antivirus engine, which should improve accuracy while removing the hassle of regular updates, improving performance and keeping battery-draining system load to a minimum.

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Curl is well known on Linux as a flexible command line tool which can download files using a wide range of protocols: HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, FTPS, POP3, IMAP, RTMP, RTSP and many more.

The program is also available on Windows, though (and Mac, iOS, NetWare, Solaris, AmigaOS and more), and is ideal for automating regular downloads in your own custom scripts.

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Google has acquired Quest Visual and its top translator app Word Lens, according to a statement on the Quest Visual site.

One immediate benefit for everyone is that the app -- and its language packs -- are now free to download, although apparently "for a limited time" only.

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Self-Destructing Cookies is a Firefox add-on which does a great job of controlling cookie use, without any of the complexity you’ll see in other tools.

Install the add-on and it takes immediate effect, automatically deleting a site’s regular cookies -- and its LocalStorage data -- just as soon as you close its tab.

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If you’d like to know what someone else is doing on a PC then the "Recent Items" (or "Recent Files") folder is a good place to start looking.

Just browse to C:\Users\%UserName%\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Recent and you’ll find shortcuts for anything recently double-clicked in Explorer, or that’s been opened by a standard Open dialog box.

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If you’re still missing the Start Menu in Windows 8 -- or even the more desktop-friendly 8.1 -- then there are plenty of ways to bring it back (Classic Shell is probably our favorite).

It’s not immediately obvious why we need yet another Start Menu alternative, then. But Spencer (yes, that really is its name) does have one or two differences which help it stand out from the crowd.

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