Haxial Software Ltd. is a shareware company interested in creating quality, cross-platform software. They specialize namely in networking software, and have created many inventive programs in that vein.
The company was founded in 2001 by Niki McAllister and A.J. Riley. Rumor has it that one or both of these people were affiliated with Hotline in its early years. Whether or not this is the case, their flagship product, KDX, is heavily influenced by Hotline.
Although Haxial is a great company, they have their idiosyncrasies. For example, all of their software uses a proprietary GUI based off of the design guidelines of Mac OS 8 and BeOS. This makes the interface lightning-fast (no transparencies to worry about, just to give an example), highly customizable (a color scheme editor is freely available on their website), and cross-platform in the sense that a Windows user could use the Mac version with no problems, or vice-versa. They also have an issue with menubars (they don't believe in them and instead, windows have a menu button in the title bar, and contextual menus play a greater role). Still, their software is remarkably easy to use, and not too bad looking to boot.
Linux software is in development, although the company says that their software works perfectly in WINE. I have not tried their software in Linux yet to test these claims, unfortunately.
Anyway, here is a list of their software:
- KDX - A free Hotline clone, attempting to correct the wrongs that Hotline caused. For example, there are no download queues for users (although an individual is encouraged to set a queue for his downloads). It is blazing fast, unnervingly stable, and is slowly overshadowing Hotline and Carracho in popularity.
- NetPhone - A proprietary client-server Instant Messenger, with text and voice chat, and file transfer. There is no limit on how many people can participate in a chat. The encryption is great as well.
- WorldClock - Lists time zones chosen by the user, and has a built-in converter and calendar. Simple, but useful.
- DiskCatalog - A disk-cataloging utility bragging near-instantaneous search of multiple volumes. Calculates folder sizes on the fly, and allows the user to browse a disk not currently inserted.
- TextEdit - A simple text editing program. The main difference between it and other text editors is the quick proprietary GUI.
- RAT - An amazing remote program reminiscent of VNC or Timbuktu. Allows one to remotely control another computer and view various statistics about the connected computer. Also allows the connected user to kill any currently running process and lists how much memory each process takes.
- Hash - Allows one to check to see if a file is corrupted by making a "hash" of the file. Not much information was available as it was released very recently.
- Launcher - A simple program that allows one to put a list of commonly used files into a launch bar. Useful, although the GUI does not blend well with Mac OS X or Windows XP, unfortunately.
- Benchmark - A free, newly released benchmarking program specialized in cross-platform benchmarking. This software is still in Alpha stages, but is available to the public.