Popular media player VLC has been updated to version 2.0.2 and despite the minor version number increase, the changes should be immediately noticeable. The big news here is addition of support for Retina display so if you have invested in a new MacBook Pro, this is one app that will enable you to take full advantage of the enhanced screen.

Retina display support means that not only can video itself be seen in much better quality, but also that subtitles and any other overlays for a particular file can be displayed at a much higher resolution. This is clearly a release that will be of most interest to OS X users, and in addition to the new display option, a number of known problems have also been addressed. Blu-ray playback has been improved and issues that users had experienced with rotating, cropping and zooming with video have also been fixed.

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German developer Ashampoo has released Photo Optimizer 5, the latest edition of its fast and easy-to-use photo editing tool.

The revamped interface gives the program a very different look, but its core functionality is unchanged. You open with a thumbnail browser, and after browsing to your photo collection, can optimise the color, sharpness and lighting of any shot with a click.

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Reality Jockey is responsible for some of iOS’s more interesting audio apps, including RjDj, Inception and Dimensions. The London-based developer’s latest offering, Project Now, is an ambitious music app that aims to choose the perfect music for every situation you find yourself in. For example, if you’re just relaxing at home, it will play a selection of suitable tunes from your music collection. Go to work and it will switch to something more fitting for the business environment. Visit the gym, and you’ll hear music to work out to. Cleverly it also mixes in external sounds from your microphone, so you can still hear the world around you when you’re out cycling, or in the office.

When you first run the app it will import your music, which will take a while to complete. After then it will attempt to assess your situation, based on the current day, time, location and sounds around you, and find music to match. It can identify 21 different circumstances, including calm, active, asleep, snowy, night out and full moon. Quite why you’d want to listen to different music when the moon is full I’m not sure.

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When you’d like to share a particular set of photos with friends and family then you could just send them the JPEGs. Converting those images to a video slideshow with your own soundtrack, captions and custom transitions will look considerably more impressive, though -- and with a copy of Bolide Slideshow Creator to hand, that need not take very long.

Installing the program is quick and hassle-free. There are no toolbars to dodge, no unwanted extras to look for during setup, you’ll get the Slideshow Creator and nothing else.

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As we reach the end of June, commercial developers are busy preparing software for a Q3 launch, so we’ll be entering a lean period for key, new releases. This doesn’t mean it was a quiet week; far from it. TechSmith released Camtasia 8.0 for Windows and 2.2 for Mac. This powerful screen-recording tool will enable you to produce professional-level presentations for just about any audience.

If you’re seeking an image editor to complement your screen recording toolkit, look no further than the free GIMPshop 2.8. This is effectively the popular GIMP, wrapped up in a different and user-friendly interface. The various K-Lite Codec Packs are a collection of codecs you can use to play video and audio content on your PC. Although it’s becoming more of a challenge to find videos that won’t play on your PC, there are still plenty encoded using a compression format that was more popular in the early part of the previous decade. Download K-Lite Codec Pack 8.92 Basic, the Standard pack, Full or Mega, which also contains a number of conversion tools.

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TechSmith Corporation has released new editions of its flagship screen recording and video editing software, Camtasia Studio 8 for Windows ($299), and Camtasia for Mac 2.2 ($99). And this is no minor upgrade: the latest versions include some very substantial new features.

Flash and HTML5 support mean it’s now possible to add many new interactive elements to a video for instance. This could be as simple as providing a hotspot link to web content, but it’s also possible to ask the viewer questions in a variety of types (multiple choice, true/ false, “fill in the blank”, and more). TechSmith’s servers compile the answers and you’re emailed detailed reports on the results.

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We’ve made it to June -- the year just seems to be flying by! -- and with each passing month there are more and more great offers in the Downloadcrew Software Store. In fact, there are so many great offers to be found that we thought that we had better collect together some of the highlights to make things a little easier for you.

Starting things off are two disc burning tools from Roxio.Roxio Creator 2011 is available for just $19.99 (a saving of 80 percent off the MSRP) while its big brother Roxio Creator 2011 Pro could be yours for just $24.99, instead of $105. These immensely powerful media suites include everything you need to create CDS, DVDS and Blu-rays containing video, audio and data.

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Some people seem to be born with great artistic talent, able to produce amazing work with just a few strokes of a pencil or some well-placed dabs of paint. If, like the rest of us, you’re not so lucky, though, you’re probably going to need to help to produce anything which deserves to be called “art”. And that’s where Zip Art comes in.

The program was created by light sculptor, scientific artist and former physicist Paul Friedlander, in an effort to help anyone, even the totally talent-free, express their creative potential. And while, as a software developer Friedlander is clearly a great artist, Zip Art is an interesting way to produce appealing abstract images, often in just a few seconds.

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When you need sound effects for a game, video, presentation or some other task, then of course there are plenty to be found online. If you’ve very precise ideas about what you need, though, it could take plenty of browsing to locate something suitable, and so it might be easier to use LabChirp to synthesize them for you.

Despite its extremely small size (the program arrives in a 78.5KB download), LabChirp has plenty of power. You can set your effect modulation, shape its envelope, use standard waveforms or create your own, and support for up to eight channels means there’s plenty for creativity here.

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There are a number of worthy highlights this week, including the long awaited Opera 12 release, iTunes support for iOS 6 devices and a relatively major update to Skype for Windows and Mac.

The major release this week must be Opera 12. After months of beta-testing, the browser is finally available, along with an interesting twist, in the form of the first native 64-bit build. Whether a 64-bit version of a web browser makes a huge difference is another matter entirely. Opera 12 ships with numerous speed improvements, including basic support for hardware acceleration. It’s not all good news though as gone are the widgets and other features such as Opera Voice. Download Opera 12, Opera 12 (64-bit) and the separate Opera Portable 12, which you can take on the road.

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Western Digital has been around for decades, and is known primarily for its storage solutions. Thursday, WD unveiled a new line of home networking products that show the company's continued interest in personal media management and entertainment, a relatively small segment of their product line that currently includes the the WDTV product line and My Passport AV line.

The new My Net line includes five differently-equipped dual-band routers and an 8-port network switch which range from $79 to $350 in cost.

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Viewing a digital photo’s EXIF metadata can provide all kinds of useful information, including the date and time the original image was taken, the camera used to take it, exposure and ISO settings, shutter speed, metering mode and a whole lot more. And seeing some of this can be as simple as clicking on the image in Explorer (the bar at the bottom of the window will show you a few key tags).

Displaying more EXIF data can be a challenge, though, even if you try a third-party image viewer: some display only a few tags, others force you to open a new window each time to see the relevant information, and a few ignore it altogether. So if you prefer an easy life then you might be interested in Photo Data Explorer, a simple image viewer which pays particular attention to a photo’s metadata.

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As we move through June, there are more and more software titles being released. The past week has been pretty busy, particularly on the web browser front, but there have also been a number of other programs worthy of note.

If you still use physical CDs and DVDs, ISO Workshop 3.0 is worth taking a look at as it enables you to work with virtual drives to save having to keep switching discs. Diskeeper 12 Home is a great tool for anyone looking to ensure that their hard drive is completely defragged, and Diskeeper 12 Pro includes support for drives exceeding 1TB. Another interesting tool for maintaining your system is GhostBuster 1.0.1.0, a free utility that remove references in the registry to hardware you no longer use. There’s also a portable version available – GhostBuster Portable 1.0.1.0.

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The audience at the Thursday June 7 12:10 am screening of "Prometheus" at the Arclight Theater Hollywood on sunset Blvd in Los Angeles just sits in their seats. No one moves, no one talks. The lights come up and it is so quiet you can hear a pin drop. People just stare forward and after a minute turn to their friends with the look of what did I just watch?

Slowly people stand and shuffle out when the credits start to roll. I mean you can taste the confusion and the hurt of the crowd. The reaction is the same as the dejected looks I saw at age 15 when "Star Wars: The Phantom Menace" ended. Did the unimaginable just occur? Could Prometheus do to "Alien" what the prequels did to "Star Wars"?

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There are countless websites that feature hours of streaming video that you can watch whenever you have an Internet connection. But what about those times when you are not able to get online? If you are going on a trip and want to ensure that the children have something to watch on a laptop or tablet, Wondershare vDownloader is a tool that can be used to grab a load of videos in advance and load them onto the device of your choosing.

Saving videos from some websites is easy enough -- just right click a link and save the target file to your hard drive. With other sites things are a little more tricky, you may need to examine source code and determine the link needed to download a file. And then there are some sites that make it all but impossible to save a copy of a video you have come across. Whether you’re looking to make it quicker and easier to download videos, or you want to be able to save copies of those videos that are hard to get, Wondershare vDownloader is a valuable, and free, tool.

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