Limewire

LimeWire is the world’s fastest P2P file-sharing application for all types of computer files, including music, video, pictures, games, and text documents. Other features include dynamic querying, file previews during download, advanced techniques for locating rare files, and an easy, clean user interface.

Design
After the blinding advertising blitz, courtesy of the free version of Kazaa 3, LimeWire’s relative lack of ads brought us a sense of peace. Not only that, we found LimeWire’s interface exceptionally attractive, well thought out, and easy to use. Little usability embellishments, such as automatic removal of cancelled downloads (this is a tedious, unintuitive two-step procedure in other P2P clients) and direct connection to known IP addresses for exchanging files with friends, made us feel that the designers actually use the program.

Features
LimeWire doesn’t offer Ares’ chat rooms but does serve as a media librarian for your whole PC, even handily displaying music by artist, title, and other tags. We did notice one small bug: An icon on the bottom of the program reported that it had detected a firewall, though we had none enabled. The program also plays/previews music files and uses Windows Media Playe to show video. It has a full-page connection monitor where you can track incoming searches of your own shared folder, as well as track files being uploaded from your computer by other users. LimeWire is the also the only P2P client we’ve seen that will launch pages in a browser other than Internet Explorer.