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Flashlight is a simple app designed primarily for Android devices that don't have a built-in LED flashlight.

It does come as a ZIP file, but the app is easy to install and even easier to use. As soon as you open Flashlight it displays a bright white area that can be stretched or zoomed to fill your screen. If you're happy with the white light, that's all you need to do. To switch your flashlight on and off you tap the middle of the screen. The interface has only three buttons, with only one applying to the … Read more

While the primary function of Microsoft Outlook 2010 is to send and receive e-mail, it offers a host of useful tools to manage tasks, meetings, contacts, and more.

The interface of Microsoft Outlook 2010 is nicely designed, but it is packed with options. Users new to Outlook should expect to spend some time with the Help file to take advantage of all it has to offer. For the basics, including e-mail, the calendar, and tasks, one-click access minimizes the learning curve. While it continues to allow users to receive e-mail from multiple accounts and easily switch from one to the … Read more

It might not offer the mental challenges of some games, but Bubble Shooter is a fun, even addictive game that anyone can play.

The basic objective of Bubble Shooter is simple. At the main menu of the app, you are given two main game options. The first one is the puzzle mode. In this mode, you have to complete the level by using the fewest bubbles possible. Don't worry, there are no specific time or bubble limits, but your score or evaluation can be greatly reduced as you use more bubbles. The arcade mode features larger, more general sets … Read more

It used to be that you had to go to Las Vegas to play the real slots. Then more casinos gave more players access to real Vegas-style slot machines, and online slots just sweetened the pot. Now you can play casino-style slots with Slot Machine Deluxe, a free Android app (you can buy more coins, though). We installed it on a Samsung smartphone running Ice Cream Sandwich.

Slot machine opens with two carousels of Slots displayed, though all but the first are locked. Before we started playing, we tapped the Settings icon, but the only changes involved turning off the … Read more

Body Scanner is an entertainment app that supposedly lets you see through clothes and zoom in on body parts. Of course, Body Scanner doesn't really do anything like that, but it does show a representation of what you'd think is an X-ray image based on what the camera is pointing at. There's no real scanning involved, of course, just photo manipulation.

Of course, this wouldn't be entertainment if the app simply showed a skeletal figure or perhaps just a smooth body skin, so Body Scanner spices things up with some imagination. Some images will show a … Read more

Adobe Systems isn't making any promises, but an update to company's Digital Negative (DNG) image format paves the way for two important features in Lightroom: panoramas and high-dynamic range photography.

Lightroom is for editing, cataloging, and publishing photos, especially those shot in higher-end cameras' raw formats. Raw photos consist of data captured directly from the image sensor without in-camera processing into a JPEG. Although raw photos offer better quality and flexibility, they're also much less convenient than JPEGs.

One aspect of their inconvenience is that raw photos usually arrive in proprietary formats from camera makers. Adobe has … Read more

With the Photokina show in Germany producing so many new high-end cameras, it's evidently been a busy season for Adobe Systems' Lightroom team.

That team just released Lightroom 4.2, which supports 22 new cameras, 43 new lenses, and lets people shoot with 11 new cameras tethered to a computer. It takes work to figure out how to decode each camera's proprietary raw format.

Here's the full list of new cameras supported, but note that the Nikon D600 support is "preliminary and there is a minor risk that the appearance of your images may change when … Read more

Let Google eat cake. Today, the Web giant turns 14 years old, and to celebrate, it's serving up an animated chocolate cake filled with Google-colored candles on its homepage.

It seems like just yesterday that the tech company was born, and now it's old enough to go to high school.

Last year when Google officially became a teenager, it celebrated with a doodle that showed a cake, some balloons, candles, and a few party hats -- but it wasn't animated. Apparently, this year it has upped its sophistication.

They say an image is worth a thousand words, but there are situations when a single image just isn't enough. VR Photo helps you by taking multiple photos and combining them into one image that you can view from multiple perspectives.

In the past, if you wanted to share an object with a client or on your website, you had to shoot multiple pictures with the iPhone (or iPod Touch) from each side and then present them one by one. However, VR Photo now does the exact same thing, but better. It guides its users on how to take … Read more