free

Technology doesn't just complicate our lives, it also does a number on our deaths.

Imagine the challenge of accounting for all of your digital assets once you've shuffled off to Buffalo. Even if you consider your e-mail, text messages, and social-media posts disposable, you've probably stored photos, videos, and very personal documents on one or more Web services. You probably want to bequeath some or all of these items to family and friends.

If you run an online business, ensuring a smooth transition in the event of your demise becomes even more important. To ease the burden … Read more

Jukebox Free is designed to provide a free and easy tool for creating playlists and running them on your iPhone without accessing the music app. It has limited features to do so, however, and because it doesn't interact with the Music app directly, there are issues with DRM that severely limit its usefulness.

The interface for Jukebox Free is easy to use. It opens with a blank screen and a play bar at the bottom. To add music, you press the + button in the top- left corner and it will go to your Music app and start pulling songs … Read more

If your child can't put down your smartphone or tablet, it's good to have an array of fun but educational games on retainer. Kids Learn n Play (Free) is designed to help them learn their ABCs, but it's not as deep or polished as other learning games on Android and there are a few other issues that detract from its ability to help your kids learn the alphabet or spelling.

There might be an initial moment of confusion because the app shows up as "English Alphabet" in your phone's app launcher. It has two … Read more

The touch screen interface of the iPad and iPhone makes the devices perfect for any game that asks you to flick, slide, or push something around the screen. From bowling and soccer to skee ball, there are dozens of extremely simple apps that are instantly addictive for this very reason, and Arcade Hoops Basketball is definitely one of them.

The premise of Arcade Hoops Basketball is very straightforward. Like an arcade game that gives you a minute to shoot as many baskets as you can, the app provides you with four balls that you can shoot however fast you want. … Read more

We're big fans of old-school jigsaw puzzles that you put together on your coffee table, so we were intrigued to test one out on our iPhone. Photo Puzzle Plus FREE lets you snap your own pictures to turn into a custom puzzle. While the interface navigation could be better, we were pleased by the puzzle results.

Photo Puzzle Plus FREE opens with a plain interface. Three menu buttons reside at the top of the screen, right above a banner ad, so you have to be careful where you tap. The Upgrade button, of course, lets you upgrade to a … Read more

Maybe it's because we're getting old and our eyesight isn't what it used to be, but we much prefer using our iPad for productivity apps because of its larger screen. For that reason, we've been on the hunt for a simple calculator app for our iPad and were looking forward to trying out iCalculator for free. And what can we say? It's pretty bare bones, but gets the job done.

iCalculator for free introduces a very large, basic calculator -- you won't find a scientific calculator here. The buttons are very large, making this … Read more

There are some pretty cool drawing apps out there for kids. Draw and Paint Free with iPainter touts itself as a drawing app to keep kids occupied. While it does offer a blank canvas for kids to draw on, it also comes loaded with lots of inappropriate ads that kids can easily tap by accident.

We knew right away that Draw and Paint Free with iPainter wasn't kid-friendly when we were greeted with a pop-up ad for a Night Vision Pro app. And we were greeted with it every time we opened the app. That's strike one. The … Read more

The Free Software Foundation, never a friend to digital rights management, has taken issue with its arrival in the Web standards world.

In a letter from the FSF, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Creative Commons, and other allied groups yesterday, the group called on the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to keep DRM out of the standards it defines.

"We write to implore the World Wide Web Consortium and its member organizations to reject the Encrypted Media Extensions (EME) proposal," the groups said. "DRM restricts the public's freedom, even beyond what overzealous copyright law requires, to the perceived … Read more

Something as portable and easy to lose as your smartphone deserves more than the good intentions of strangers to protect your apps and data when (not if) it goes AWOL. With so many free security apps, why would you let that happen? Perfect App Protector Free is a great example. It's also called the Lite version of a Pro app. Some users may even know it as Perfect Applock Free. Whatever you call it, this easy-to-use but effective security app from Morrison Smart Software can protect your stuff. We tried it in a Samsung Galaxy S3 with Android 4.… Read more