Forte Inc won Ziff-Davis' 1996 Shareware award for Internet Program Of The Year for their Free Agent Newsreader - and if you access newsgroups on the Net and haven't been supplied a copy of Free Agent by your ISP, this is the place to get one. Free Agent is a slightly slimmed-down version of Forte Inc's commercial Agent newsreader (which sells for $US29 if you purchase it across the Net or $US40 if you purchase the full shrink-wrapped version with paper manuals). Forte, however, distribute Free Agent as freeware and it's fully-featured enough to be used (and useful) straight away. Versions are available for both Windows 3.x and Windows95/NT and there are download sites all over the planet (including Australia, Asia, the USA, Europe, the UK and South Africa). A very short spin with this product will convince you to abandon any other newsreader you've been using to date. This is - quite easily - our Top Pick Of The Week

Early this year America Online released a WYSIWIG HTML editor called NaviPress which incorporated an online browser and HTML editor in the one program. It originally sold the software for about $149 (in Australia, anyway) but after several months AOL changed the product's name to GNNPress and began distributing it as freeware. A new version 1.2 has just been released and the name has been changed again to AOLpress - so if any of these names ring bells then yes, you've already heard about this product. We've used AOLpress ourselves (in its various forms) for the last 9 months and despite a few small defects that require workarounds and the software's annoying habit of rewriting HTML that it considers to be incorrectly formatted, the product frequently ranks in the top 2 or 3 in any comparative review of HTML editors. When used in conjunction with AOLserver (also free, and downloadable from this site), AOLpress actually allows you to reach directly into your web server and edit your pages visually "on the fly", avoiding the need for blind FTP updates. The latest version of this editor incoprporates some very nice features including full support for HTML 3.2 and Netscape HTML standards (you can set your preference) and is is such a significant upgrade over earlier versions that we were very, very close to making this the Top Pick Of The Week too. In any case, this is definitely worth a look if - like us - you believe that there must be a better web editor out there. Versions are available for Windows 3.x/95/NT, Mac and Unix.

Finally, to round off the week, something a little bit different: a few weeks ago we reviewed Intermind, a new software product which allows news to be broadcast directly into your web browser from a variety of Internet content providers. Berkeley Systems' After Dark Online is a product in a similar vein. If you have their famous After Dark Screen Saver (the one with the flying toasters) you can download After Dark Online and have news from DBC Financial News, Sports Illustrated Online, USA Today, ZD Net Computing Central and other sources broadcast directly into your screen-saver. This is only useful if you have both the After Dark screen saver and a full-time (or close to full-time) connection to the Net - but since that embraces an increasing number of people, perhaps you're one of them. After Dark Online is freeware (unless you choose to subscribe to the Wall Street Journal updates, which attract a fee) and versions are currently available for Windows95 and Macintosh. You can also obtain additional screens for the After Dark Screen Saver here, which are updated every month.