Xingtech have been producing high-quality audio and video software for the Internet for some time, and their StreamWorks Player - which plugs into both Navigator 3.0 and Explorer 3.0 - allows you to bring live, on-demand audio and video straight through to your desktop using streaming technology (ie you don't have to wait for the complete audio or video to load onto your hard disk before you play it). StreamWorks is based on the international MPEG standard for digital audio and video, providing the highest quality available, but doesn't require any expensive hardware add-ons and will work on the both the Internet and corporate intranets. Providing you have the bandwidth, it actually allows full-screen, full-colour, full-motion video with 44KHz audio and also offers scaleable datarates (from 8.5kbs to 2.0 Mbps, including ISDN and 14.4/28.8kbps modems) and scalable playback, where StreamWorks' intelligent decoding engine delivers the maximum playback performance your system can provide. The software is available for Windows 3.x/95, Macintosh, SGI Irix, Sparc Solaris and even Linux (Elf). Since streaming audio and video are probably the future of the Net (the forseeable future, anyway) this excellently-crafted add-on is well worth the look and simply has to be our Top Pick Of The week.

Back in early July we reviewed Traveling Software's WebEx and mis-spelled their name (for which, we suspect, they've never truly forgiven us). It's time to revisit them, though, if you'd like to obtain a beta copy of their latest version of LapLink - LapLink for Windows95 - which is currently available for a free 30-day download from their site. LapLink has been a well-recognised standard in remote access software for many years and a near-essential tool for portable computer users or WAN network administrators, and the new version has some very nifty features indeed. It's up to 30% faster on file transfers; it includes a new option for Win95 users to automatically synchronise file folders; and it now includes a proprietary Xchange Agent the enables users to synchronise one or multiple file folders automatically. The Xchange Agent also provides drag-and-drop editing capabilities and integration with Microsoft's System Agent so that you can run unattended sessions. The full product costs around $269 in Australia, less in the USA.

Our third and final selection this week is Sunsoft's brand new Java Workshop 1.0, which is available as a free 30-day trial download and which runs on Windows95, WindowsNT 3.51, Solaris Sparc and Solaris Intel. Java Workshop represents Sun's entry in the burgeoning Java market and their new product provides industrial-strength Java development tools with an integrated environment that has the look and feel of a Web browser. The product includes a project manager, a source code editor (you may want to link in your own - the supplied one is a little lightweight), an interactive debugger, class browser and a GUI builder, as well as an extensive class library and a very impressive and fully-featured help system. You can use Java Workshop to build anything from Web page applets to full-blown, standalone Java applications, and for a 1.0 release it's relatively defect-free. It is not a trivial program, however: to run it, you'll need at least a Pentium, 16 Mb of RAM (24 Mb recommended) and 15 MBytes of hard disk space - and if you run a Unix system, make that 32Mb of RAM and either a Sparc of a 100MHz-plus Intel chip. However, if you have the patience for a 7Mb download and the urge to dip your feet into Java, this may be the package to try - especially since the full version of the product only costs $149 (and only $99 until December as a promotional offer).