Being a big fan of the Wallace and Gromit series of films, I’ve always dreamed of living in a world made of clay. Now my dreams have been realized thanks to Platypus.

You assume the role of an orange flying craft that must save the country of Mungola by blasting the evil enemy invaders out of the sky. Essentially, it’s a side-scrolling shooter but with one difference - everything is made from clay.

The graphics in Platypus are like none you’ll have seen before. Because all of the elements were actually made from clay and digital captured, it makes for some truly stunning viewing. The animation is pretty slick too, and the splatting explosion effects are some of the best I’ve seen anywhere. The high-octane sound effects are impressive too and really help to set your pulse racing.

While the visuals in platypus are innovative and unique, unfortunately the gameplay is much the same as your average shooter, and after a while the process of blasting everything that slides across the screen becomes somewhat mundane. There is some stuff to collect and a few power-ups to improve your ship, which adds a little more life to this game.

In terms of options, you can adjust the sound and music volume, rotate the screen, and view high scores, but there’s no facility for setting your own game controls.

You’ll be blown away by the graphics but once the novelty of this has worn off you’ll realize that Platypus plays like any other run-of-the-mill arcade shooter.

Download Platypus 1.00 in Softonic

Chaxer is a small little application that lets you quickly change your status in three of the most popular messenger clients for Mac: Adium, Skype and iChat.

Chaxer unfortunately will not work with other IM clients, and the ones mentioned above will have to be launched for it to work. Admittedly though, Chaxer is a pretty limited tool. True you can either change your status individually or in multiple apps at once, but you are pretty left with a choice of login, logout, available, away and offline. There is no way of adding your own custom status message for example.

Chaxer is discreet though and really simple to use. If you find that you constantly have Adium, iChat and Skype opened up it can be a good tool to have around. Users who only stick to one IM client will not find it of any use though.

An interesting application, yet Chaxer is fairly limited in changing the status on only three IM clients.

Download Chaxer 1.0 in Softonic

Lemmings is one of those classic video games that everyone has played at least once. If you haven’t (shame on you) then here is a quick recap of what it’s about. Your goal is to guide a group of lemmings through highly dangerous levels without getting any of them killed. Unfortunately, lemmings tend to be a little dumb and unaware of dangers surrounding them. However, you can give each of them a specific task so that the whole group manages it through levels.

The graphics in Lemmings are the same as 10 years ago, however you will probably overlook them if you are a true Lemmings fan. The gameplay is very easy to get accustomed to, and you can easily handle Lemmings with your keyboard.

One of the things Lemmings is truly infamous for is its difficulty level. As you progress through the game, and particularly near the end, you will be confronted with very very difficult obstacles. Either this will have put you off or you will rejoice at the complexity. In the end, Lemmings is really a puzzle game, which requires patience, planning and a whole lot of luck.

Get those Lemmings past the obstacles, whatever it takes!

Download Lemmings 1.4.2a in Softonic

Tired of iCal? PreMinder, which is still in Beta, makes for a potentially viable alternative.

First of all, don’t worry about losing all your iCal info and events. PreMinder lets you easily import all iCal information. The application is built in a multi-windowed interface, which has always turned me off a bit, as I find it unpractical to work. Not only do you have the big calendar window, but also the reminder window at the bottom, an events window on the left and a floating mini-calendar.

PreMinder provides multiple ways of scrolling through items, from a very handy monthly slider at the top to the daily notifier on the left or the quick back and forward buttons in the Calendar window.

PreMinder lets you create your own events, alarms and reminders. These can be repeated, stretched to multiple days or weeks and moved around very easily.

The search box at the top right of the PreMinder interface makes it easy to find any piece of data in seconds.

Although still in development, PreMinder is a promising alternative to iCal with lots of flexibility and features.

Download PreMinder Beta 0.7.2 in Softonic

PersonalBrain is a mind mapping application that aims to mold itself on your own way of thinking.

You can use the application to build to build up diagrams, create networks or simply sketch out your thoughts. PersonalBrain is flexible to work with. Start out from a “brain”, essentially a thought and build up from it adding new ideas. You can choose to focus on a specific brain and add your own notes to it. The search box at the bottom left helps you find an idea quickly.

PersonalBrain isn’t limited to your thoughts though and you can also drag and drop files, such as web pages and connect them together.

Surprisingly, PersonalBrain will only let you export your mind maps in HTML, when it would have been nice to have a choice of OPML and text among others.

PersonalBrain is a very flexible mind mapping program which lets you write down and connect your thoughts very easily.

Download PersonalBrain 4.5.0.8 in Softonic

Adeona is a tracking system unlike what you normally see. It doesn’t have a proper interface, and the process is a little technical, but Adeona will efficiently track a computer for you. If you worry that your laptop might get stolen, then it’s a good idea to set it up.

The first time you launch Adeona you’ll be asked to provide a password. The program will then save your data in a file. Retrieving information is a little bit more tedious, but requires this first step to have been completed.

You can closely monitor the location of a laptop, requesting a start and end time and the number of items you need. This gives you an idea of where your laptop has been in a period of time.

Adeona essentially works via a term file, which launches the Terminal, so you are highly encourage to have at least some knowledge of the Apple utility to work with Adeona.

It’s clear that this solution is not for everyone. If you have the patience and the knowledge you should find Adeona useful. Less experienced Mac users should turn to a simpler solution.

Download Adeona in Softonic

Lightscreen is a free, simple and practical utility to capture images for those that don’t want to mess about with post processing or resizing tools.

Lightscreen offers three ways to capture screenshots - full screen, active window, and an area that you can select yourself. All three offer you enough scope to capture just about any type of screenshot. You can configure the format, prefix and suffix of the file (numeric or date format) and specify the folder to save it to. You can also configure a hotkey to make screenshots instantaneous. There are also some other additional little additions such as control over image quality or you can also configure a delay on the screen capture if you’re using the hotkey. Once configured Lightscreen becomes especially useful to make multiple catches because every time you press capture, it automatically saves a file with the filename, format and parameters that you specified. The slight downside is that you can only configure a limited number of formats to save screenshots in namely PNG, JPG; BMP, PPM, XBM and TIFF.

A free and easy screen capture tool that will appeal to fans of The GIMP or those that just need a simple screenshot solution.

Download Lightscreen 0.3 in Softonic

Often the file you like to download is available on several different hosts. Phex will request different segments of the file from each host in parallel. After successfully downloading a segment Phex will merge it with the other segments of that file. This results in a much higher download speed. If a host is too slow the segment is split during download and given to another host. To make sure you never run out of hosts Phex is able to find new download hosts by itself with the automatic search functionality and features the Download Mesh.

You can choose for each download whether the segments should be chosen according to their availability (rarest first, BitTorrent-Style), their place in the file (earlier segments first, useful for previewing the file) or for previewing (the first 10MB according to their place in the file, after that according to their availability).

Phex offers very advanced configuration options. Much more than many other clients can offer. Especially advanced user can configure Phex according to their needs and are able to tune and see the effect of different settings.

With the passive search functionality Phex is able to constantly monitor the traffic that goes through the network and collect search results that match your passive search term. Also Phex snoops the traffic for new download candidates you need to finish your downloads faster. This type of searching is useful for longtime monitoring of available files on the network.

Other features include:

• Multiple searches
• Ultrapeer and compression technology for reduced bandwidth
• Integrated chat
• Browse host support
• Bitzi metadata lookup
• MAGMA support

Download Phex 3.2.6.106 in Softonic

There’s nothing more annoying than downloading or ripping a film and then reaslising you don’t have th right codecs to play it.

Or worse, the codecs that you have are corrupt and don’t playback properly. If you’ve found yourself in this situation then m5Studio Codec is a neat little package which brings together most of the most important codecs you’ll need. m5Studio Codec includes all the major codecs you’ll need to make sure that you’ll never have problems playing a film again.

Among the codecs included in m5Studio Codec are DivX or XviD, Ogg Vorbis or Cinepak or AC3 plus some some lesser known ones such as CoreAVC and Fraunhoffer IIS. Installation is simply a matter of double clicking EXE file and you’ve got a few configuration controls to control exactly how you want the codecs to perform.

m5Studio Codec is a useful codec package that will be able to playback most of the major formats that you can download or rip films to.

Download m5Studio Codec 8.3a in Softonic

Pitaschio is a free, easy application that makes it more convenient to use Microsoft Windows. This tool includes a large number of useful functions to tweak the way windows behave, disable certain keys and collect statistics about the usage of keyboard and mouse.

Take a look at what Pitaschio can do for you:

• Stick window to other windows when moving and resizing
• Restrict window position to inside of the screen
• Minimize window to system tray
• Use small icons in the desktop
• Disable Windows key, Insert key, Alt key etc.
• Lock mouse or keyboard while you are cleaning keyboard or mouse
• Take statistics about mouse and keyboard
• Calculate Moon’s age

Download Pitaschio 2.24 in Softonic