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News Corp. cans The Daily

News Corp. axes The Daily.

The Daily, which was an ambitious tablet-only news publication backed by News Corp., is shutting its doors December 15. Launched back in February 2011, The Daily was an interactive newspaper stylized for consumption on the iPad. Best of all, a year's subscription went for only $40 and offered a wide variety of sections. While there will be no more issues of The Daily, its brand will live on other channels within News Corp.

This week marks the 20th anniversary of the first text message. On December 3, 1992, SMS pioneer Matti Makkonen successfully sent … Read more

Create complex tiled images to be shared with others

Body Symbol Free: The Romantic Heart Photo Booth is an app that guides you in creating romantic photos. It does this by helping you shape your body into different positions that then are mosaicked into a larger photo of a heart, for example. Body Symbol Free: The Romantic Heart Photo Booth is a free app available from the App Store; it installs quickly.

The intent of Body Symbol Free: The Romantic Heart Photo Booth is to help you position your body by matching an onscreen outline. These images are then combined into a larger tiled image to match a shape … Read more

Ancient d20 die emerges from the ashes of time

Let's go back in time. Way back. Keep going. OK, stop. You're in the Ptolemaic Period. It's somewhere around 304 to 30 B.C. You're in Egypt. You're playing Dungeons & Dragons. Except back then, it's more like Pyramids & Petsuchos.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art owns what may be the world's oldest d20 die. It's made out of serpentine and looks to be in remarkably good shape for its age. … Read more

Recover files from disk reformat or partition changes

MiniTool Mac Data Recovery is an app designed to allow you to recover data from disk drives that have had a crash or sustained damage, either physical or logical. Whether you've accidentally deleted files or partitions, or had the disk go flaky on you, tools like MiniTool Mac Data Recovery become critical to recover information. MiniTool Mac Data Recovery installs easily.

MiniTool Mac Data Recovery presents you with a number of capabilities. The primary goal of the software is to try to recover data from a drive that has been erased, tagged as reformatted, or undergone partition changes. If … Read more

Notes made much, much better with NotesTab

NotesTab is an app that lets you write notes, just like Notes, but extends the functionality to allow sharing and some other cool features. NotesTab installs easily and sits in your menu bar. Whenever you need to scribble a note you just click on the icon and a notebook opens. As you type a note, it is saved immediately, removing the need to hit a Save button.

NotesTab has quite a few configurable options, such as the ability to customize hot keys and always be visible and on top of other apps. This lets you use it as a big … Read more

Annotate photos and screenshots, but there are issues

Skitch is an app designed to let you mark up screenshots or photos with comments and shapes, or draw something freehand, and then send your work to others or upload to your social media site. Skitch has some cool features built in, and it installs easily on Mac OS X.

The Skitch interface is like any paint tool, with a set of basic tools to the left and a palette for your artwork on the right. If you're working with screenshots or images, they are displayed in the right pane, too. Putting a comment in a block or arrow … Read more

Web-based content galleries made easy

Galleried for Mac is a way to look at a number of Web sites on one interface. This is a good way to find and organize your favorite images from many sites into one location, as well as to allow you to zoom in and out of images at will. For the iPhone, iPad and Mac, Galleried for Mac lets you create custom galleries of images (and other content) for rapid reference.

Galleried for Mac installs on the Mac easily. In use, you browse your favorite sites and then use a heart-shaped icon to add that site or image on … Read more

Fences 2.0 helps manage your desktop chaos

Fences 2.0 doesn't mess with what worked in the first version, which we loved when we looked at it three years ago. You get the same easy functionality of creating shaded areas (aka fences) on your desktop for organizing your files and folders. It lets you create rules, as you could with the old Fences Pro version, which automatically direct certain types of files to particular fences. Fences 2.0 introduces two new and useful features -- Folder Portals and Desktop Pages -- but before we get to them, let's quickly go over how the app works.… Read more

Apple might unwrap iPad Mini on Oct. 23

Friday's CNET Update is scanning for sales:

Best Buy plans to match prices on Amazon this holiday season, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal. Today's tech news roundup dives into the trend of "showrooming" and how you can use apps to get the best price at the register.

There's a fresh report on the iPad Mini. All Things Digital says Apple will reveal the smaller tablet at a news event on Oct. 23. But of course we won't know for sure until Apple breaks its silence. Pricing will be a big … Read more

Tap 20 desktop tablet, Vaio Duo 11 lead parade of Sony Windows 8 PCs

The time has come for each Windows PC manufacturer to announce its unusual and frequently convertible offerings for the launch of Windows 8 at the end of October. Sony's announcement of new Vaio laptops and desktops puts a square focus on touch and multipurpose use, with two brand-new desktop and laptop products, the Vaio Tap 20 and the Vaio Duo 11, as the centerpieces.

There are other, less exciting revisions as well: the E Series now offers a touch-screen aluminum E Series 14P, and the Vaio S Series now comes in burgundy red. We had a chance to test … Read more