Every year PC Magazine give awards for the best shareware of the year in seven major categories: Applications, Business & Finance, Internet, Math & Science, Networking, Programming Tools and Utilities. Then they mount the prize-winners and runners-up on their server so other people can download them. This year PC Magazine reviewed over 5,000 shareware programs before selecting 35 finalists (some of which have already been reviewed in The Free Software Store, some of which were slated for future reviews). The overall winner in 1996 was Free Agent, which is now arguably the best Internet news reader in the world. The winners in the other categories were My Personal Diary for Windows95 (Applications), SmartDraw 95 (Business & Finance), WPlot (Math & Science), X-Forum3 Network Message Forum (Networking), WinEdit (Programming) and WinZip for Windows 95/NT (Utilities). PC Magazine's site has all of the programs available for downloading right now along with the runners-up. Unfortunately the program descriptions are buried below the main awards listing page (unfortunate because ZD-Net is painfully slow if you visit at the wrong time of the day) but you can still have a lot of fun poking around! And these are, after all, the best of year...and definitely our Top Pick Of The Week.

The more you surf the Net, the more bookmarks you lodge in your bookmarks file; the more email, IRC, ftp, news, gopher, archie and telnet addresses you stack up; and the more you begin to realise how completely inadequate your browser is for handling any of this. Programmer James Waletzky certainly did so he decided to do something about it. The result is Surf Central (now up to Version 2.0, beta 8) - a Win3.x/95/NT PIIM (Personal Internet Information Manager) that will reach final release stage by the end of this month. Surf Central is designed to keep all of your Internet addresses in one place and provide you with fully-featured address management capabilities that integrate very tightly with your browser. Surf Central will seamlessly import and export existing Netscape bookmark files and allow you to sort them according to user-definable address types and categories - and it includes a lot of other useful features as well, like a modem connection display, time monitoring, drag-and-drop category modification and much, much more (you'll need to read the data on the site to appreciate just how much more!). If you're drowning in a sea of Internet addresses this may be the solution you've been looking for! A 30-day evaluation version is available on Jim's site (the database will only hold 100 addresses) and the full product retails for $US22. Tucows have already given an earlier release a 4.5 cows rating - this one will probably go the max. Very highly recommended.

If you pay for your Internet connection by the hour and want to keep a close eye on how much time you're spending online, this highly-rated shareware product (which runs on Windows 3.x/95/NT) could be well worth a look. WS-Timer monitors your computer's comnmunications port to determine when you've made and/or lost an Internet connection and automatically writes down your connect times for each session, day and month into three different log files (all of which can be accessed from within the program). It also offers a front-panel display showing cumulative time - and at the end of each month or each period (if your ISP has a different billing period) the counters reset to zero so you can monitor yourself from one period to another. The Windows 3.x version requires VBRUN300.DLL to operate (keeping the download small), while the 95/NT version is a fully-bundled application. Registration costs between $US10 and $US17, depending on the final version you decide to purchase, and the program is very simple to set up and operate. Again, very highly recommended.