words

If Scrabble and Boggle had a digital love-child, and that love-child were then adopted by Bejeweled, Dropwords would be it.

To start, you get a five-by-five board of lettered tiles, with each letter worth a certain number of points, a la Scrabble. Your objective is to use these letters to make words and score as many points as possible within the allotted time. A word can be made up of any number of connected tiles, and can go in any direction, just like in Boggle.

But what makes this game different from Boggle is that after you find a word … Read more

Dropwords for Android is the digital love child that Scrabble and Boggle never had. In other words, it is a word nerd's dream come true. To start, you get a five-by-five board of lettered tiles, with each letter being worth a certain number of points, as in Scrabble. Your objective is to use these letters to make words and score as many points as possible within the allotted time. A word can be made up of any number of connected tiles, and can go in any direction, just like in Boggle.

But what makes this game different from Boggle … Read more

A new book revealing many of Steve Jobs' most illuminating quotes is being rushed to the market following the passing of the Apple leader on Wednesday.

Initially slated to be published next March and then pushed to November 15 following Jobs' resignation as Apple CEO, "I, Steve: Steve Jobs in His Own Words," is being shipped to retail stores early next week and should be available to consumers by the end of the month.

The book has already been available for pre-order at Amazon and has naturally seen a surge in interest since Jobs' death earlier this week.… Read more

One of the services that Apple offered when it initially released MobileMe was personal Web hosting, allowing users to create Web pages with Apple's iWeb program. While Apple will still be supporting its personal Web hosting service until June 30, 2012, the service will eventually be shut down. In addition, Apple's iWeb program has been discontinued, so while it still works, it too will sooner or later need to be replaced.

This situation will affect anyone who uses either iWeb or MobileMe hosting, but luckily there are a few options for people wanting to transition to alternative services … Read more

There are surprisingly few blogging apps for the iPad. Sure, you can access your preferred blogging platform through Safari, but why aren't there more apps tailored to the iPad for bloggers? I've used three and have a definitive favorite among the trio. Below, I give a summary of each, and if you click the links, you'll get tutorials that walk you through using each app.

Blogsy The priciest of the bunch, Blogsy is still a reasonable $4.99. What elevates it above the others is how easy it makes it to add and manipulate photos and videos. … Read more

Blogger is rolling out a site-wide refresh today.

It's the first major overhaul of the Web-blogging service in several years. Details on the new look and feel, along with key feature updates, can be found on Blogger Buzz, the official voice of Blogger. Apparently, after taking into consideration a plethora of user feedback, "the entire editing and management experience" has been "rewritten from scratch" making the overall user experience "faster and more efficient."

Among the most significant changes: The post editor now gives users "a larger canvas for drafting and previewing" … Read more

7 Little Words is a simple, minimal puzzle game that's perfect for fans of crosswords, anagrams, word searches, and other word-based games. The first 30 puzzles are free. After that, you can purchase extra puzzles in packs of 50 for 99 cents from the Android Market.

The gameplay is simple. Guess the seven words. To help you, you get seven clues, the number of letters in each word, and a reservoir of letter combinations from which to construct your guesses. Since there is no time limit or penalty for guessing wrong, you pretty much just play until you win (… Read more

Who wouldn't want to blog for a living? Low pay, even lower esteem among your publishing peers, and the scorn of anonymous readers who aren't shy about telling you and the rest of the world what an idiot you are.

Yes, blogging is a career of the future, right up there with correctional officer and bankruptcy attorney.

Cynical? Moi? Actually, I've been blogging now for almost four years and I love it. Maybe somebody not named Arianna Huffington or Perez Hilton is making beaucoup dolares from a blog, but I haven't met that person. Still, money … Read more

Mobile apps are still not secure when it comes to storing certain personal information, according to a new study from security firm ViaForensics.

Dissecting a variety of apps for Apple's iOS and Google's Android, ViaForensics found that 76 percent of them store user names in cleartext without encryption, while 10 percent store passwords in the same way, making such data more vulnerable. Running a series of tests from November 2010 through June 2011, the security firm checked out apps from several categories, including financial, social networking, productivity, and retail.

Each individual app received a pass, fail, or warn … Read more