twist

TwistedBrush Open Studio offers to help you create digital works of art. With its elaborate paintbrush set, its simple controls, and a bevy of options, it improves on the usual painting programs.

The program's interface is a delight to navigate, with its instructional Help file and numerous but not overwhelming options. The program is organized much like the popular Paint program packaged with Windows. There's a fragmented color palette, a selection of brushes, various shape-making tools, and a large canvas to work with. Like Paint, it uses a click-and-drag method to create images. Where this program differentiated itself … Read more

Sometimes a gadget comes along that sweeps you off your geeky feet. Also, it's not very often that a curiously upholstered SUV comes along and crashes into the podcast like a wrecking ball. Today we bring you all of the above in one episode.

Motorola Droid

The commercial

Dating habits of iPhone users: A profile

Molly’s new true love: HP Envy 15

Wednesday saw the launch of a new version of DoubleTwist, the iTunes-like desktop music client that also syncs with Amazon's music store and was founded by Monique Farantzos and Jon Lech Johansen (aka notorious hacker DVD Jon). While we don't cover every piece of software that hits the Web, this one is unique: it not only syncs with iTunes, it syncs with Android phones, like the forthcoming Droid from Verizon.

This is big news for non-iPhone users. All the major smartphones these days boast of being music players, but for the most part users don't use them … Read more

Donald and Jasmine discuss some iPod numbers as well as a troubling issue with the Zune HD that Microsoft appears to be ignoring, at least for the time being. Also on deck is a new music service from Google that's aiming to make your music hunting experience a little easier, and some first impressions on the DoubleTwist software, which has been making waves among Palm Pre and other music phone users. Plus, we have some listener curiosity and hit on the fact that we're not tech support for Dell.

Subscribe in iTunes audio |  Subscribe in iTunes video | Subscribe in RSS audio |  Subscribe in RSS video… Read more

Lately, I've been hearing a lot of fanfare about an application called DoubleTwist that is at its core a free music jukebox that offers content syncing to a variety of portable devices, including the BlackBerry, the PSP, and the iPod, as well as pretty much anything that can mount in Universal Mass Storage mode. One of the main draws of the program is that it can take your iTunes library and sync it to a variety of non-iPod players, an important feature for anyone who has ditched the ubiquitous device in favor of a music phone or other MP3 player. And soon, the Windows version of the jukebox will offer built-in support for Amazon MP3 store purchases as well (note: the Mac version already supports Amazon MP3 purchases), a move in line with the company's goal to offer consumers choice when it comes to digital music management.

Certainly, DoubleTwist is a useful solution for a lot of people, especially since it incorporates automatic video transcoding for a lot of the supported devices, which is the feature that drew me to the software. However, the program is not without its pitfalls, and some of them are sure to cause no small amount of frustration. For example, the video transcoding--done during the syncing process--takes forever. Conversion speed was roughly two times normal speed, so a 90-minute movie took 50 minutes or so to encode and transfer. Still, considering DoubleTwist offers this feature for free and integrates it so simply, I'm willing to forgive the sluggishness.

Much more annoying is how slow the video library loads in thumbnail mode, and while it is loading, you can't actually browse the selections.… Read more

Yesterday, I blogged about how the forthcoming Droid won't be an iPhone killer because it lacks the simple sync interface provided by the iTunes desktop application. I neglected to mention an excellent application called DoubleTwist, which offers the easy sync experience of iTunes for a much wider variety of devices, including all the Android phones currently on the market, most BlackBerrys, Sony's PlayStation Portable, and a huge range of other non-Apple products--as well as the iPod and iPhone, if you're so inclined.

Created in part by Jon Lech Johansen (aka DVD Jon), who's best known for … Read more

With six new cell phones in the last two days alone (and more expected Thursday), it's been a busy week in the mobile world. But even with the new Palm Pixi and the Samsung Rogue, Nokia has managed to grab the spotlight with one of the strangest-looking handsets we've seen in a while.

The Nokia 7705 Twist for Verizon Wireless is not only square, it also features a blast-from-the-past swivel design. Front and center is the 2.4-inch, 262-color display above a few navigation controls. There's also a ring around the swivel point that lights when you … Read more

TextTwist 2 is a fun and challenging word game that contains a variety of different puzzles. There's a little something for everyone here, and lovers of word games will find hours of distraction.

The program's interface is sleek and attractive, and users can easily access the various games, as well as options and instructions. The program contains several variations on the word-scramble theme, including Untimed, Timed, Word of the Day, Lightning, and Crossword games. In each game, users are presented with a jumble of letters, which they must then rearrange into words. In several of the games, users … Read more

It's really a good thing that Bejeweled Twist only has a 60-minute trial period. Otherwise we'd still be playing it instead of writing this review. In fact, we may have ended up playing it all day. It's that addictive.

We are used to high quality games from PopCap, and Bejeweled Twist is no exception. The graphics are absolutely outstanding, some of the best we've seen. The optional music and sound effects are fun and add to the game. Although we had never played any version of Bejeweled before, we were racking up points in no time, … Read more