Bakery Story (iOS, Android) is a cute and simple interactive social networking game along the same lines as FarmVille. It's part of a series of "story" games made by the same studio (TeamLava), and just like FarmVille, it can become extremely addicting.

In Bakery Story, players open their own bakery where they can create and sell an assortment of sweets, desserts, and beverages in exchange for money (coins). The process of creating a confection is nothing more than a few taps, after which the player must wait a certain amount of time before the item is ready. … Read more

There are countless ways to find free apps for your iPhone, iPod, or iPad. You can peruse the App Store. You can subscribe to a Twitter feed like 148Apps Now Free. Heck, you can even use an app; I continue to be a fan of Appsfire Deals, which serves up a huge helping of freebies every day, right on your iDevice.

But here's the thing. Sometimes you don't want a seemingly endless list of unknown apps to wade through. You want a personal recommendation, like from a friend who says, "Hey, I found a great freebie today, … Read more

Tubalr has been making a buzz among the Web community quite recently by bringing a service everyone has been asking for but has never been quite fulfilled until now. This simple Web app lets you create playlists from YouTube videos. Simply input a search term, select between 'only' and 'similar' depending on how much you want to narrow down your options, and Tubalr will auto-generate a video playlist according to your search. The 'only' function will bring up videos directly relevant to your key term while hitting 'similar' can bring up a variety of related videos.

For example, we started … Read more

It's been about 18 months since I first wrote about Zapd, a clever app that lets you build simple, attractive Web sites using nothing more than your iPhone.

Why would you want to do that? To chronicle something cool, of course, like a wedding, vacation, party, or even a work project. I mean, your photos are already in the phone, right? The next logical step is to publish them where friends and family can have a look.

Of course, most such events involve your friends, family members, and/or co-workers, who will no doubt be snapping photos of their … Read more

Open Hexagon is a polygonal endurance run that draws heavy inspiration from Terry Cavanagh's Hexagon. Much like its former Web app game, Open Hexagon challenges players in a collapsing environment of walls that cave in. Your goal is to keep a dinky little triangle alive by orbiting around the core while dodging walls and crushing barriers. The game's overall design is a simple pixelated collection of lines and shapes, with some added chiptune tracks to appease the eardrums of our inner geek.

Since its release, the developer, Vittorio Romeo of Vee Software, has received mixed reactions for releasing … Read more

The Internet is a pretty great resource for work or school, but it can also be an enormous distraction. timeStats is an extension for Google Chrome that allows you to see how you spend your online time. A few clicks will get you a chart distribution of your Internet activity; a couple more, and you can get even more detailed reports. The reports break down your daily/weekly/monthly activities with awesome pie charts and bar graphs showing what you did on which day. It can also show you other details such as the sites, domain zones, and time spent … Read more

Whether you're a long-time PC gamer or new to the club, (in which case, welcome!) you should check out JogoBox, a game client/downloader similar to the likes of Steam and Desura. What makes JogoBox stands out is that its entire collection is totally free. "Choose from a selection of thousands of free games and play for as long as you like!" -- boasts JogoBox.com.

The JogoBox team essentially went out into the Internet and collected as many abandonware and browser games as they could find and stuck it all in once place -- a simple … Read more

It's not just your imagination -- Chrome really is getting faster.

Google said today that its JavaScript benchmark tool shows Chrome is 26 percent faster than it was last year.

"Stability sometimes takes higher priority, but we're still manic about improving Chrome's speed," Google's Toon Verwaest said in a blog post.

One way Google avoids the bloat that has crippled other browsers over the years -- the company set up automated tests to notify engineers whenever a change in the code makes the browser slower, Verwaest said.

The company's efforts aren't limited … Read more

Video game designer Peter Molyneux has a proven track record of successful games (Fable and Black and White are the biggies) and a style unique enough to inspire a hilarious parody account on Twitter. Molyneux was recently the head of Microsoft's gaming division, but left the company earlier this year to form his own game shop, 22Cans. Yesterday, 22Cans released its first game (or "experiment") for iOS and Android: Curiosity, a massively multiplayer puzzler that promises a "life-changingly amazing" secret to the one (and only one) gamer who can make it to the middle of … Read more