style

Apple is bringing Notification Center to OS X Mountain Lion, looking to replace the need for popular notification app, Growl. While developers are able to get a taste of the overall look and feel of the new OS, who's to say those of us without access to Mountain Lion can't as well?

Well, thanks to a creative individual who took it upon himself to create a Mountain Lion Growl style, you can experience the general look of the upcoming Notification Center alert right now.

You can download the Growl style from this Dribbble page. The link … Read more

The lack of many phones running Android Ice Cream Sandwich has left a sour taste in the mouths of Android fans everywhere. Hopefully LG's three new L-Style handsets will sweeten the situation at Mobile World Congress very soon. … Read more

Three remodeled Sony Stores are popping up soon, in California, New York, and Texas.

Consumers can check out the transformed Sony retail experience on December 3 at the South Coast Plaza in Costa Mesa, Calif., the Houston Galleria in Texas, and the Roosevelt Field Mall in Garden City, N.Y.

When Sony quietly dropped the name SonyStyle this year, it was merely the beginning of a major shift in retail strategy for the consumer-electronics giant. Things shifted even further when Sony shut down more than a dozen of its retail stores in the U.S. amid a painful fiscal year. There was hope within the company that a new Sony store design would reinvigorate the consumer experience, which has fallen to the wayside as rival Apple continues to build a juggernaut retail phenomenon. … Read more

Big Lens is an image-editing app with a unique interface for adding effects and manipulating focus in your images. You start by snapping a picture or importing one from your photo library, then use touch-screen controls to set the aperture, change periphery blur levels, and adjust background light to create a bokeh effect. What's interesting about the app is that you have the ability to draw where you want focus or blur effects.

You start by drawing over the part of the image you want in focus, then hitting the arrow in the upper right to apply the effect. … Read more

PhotoToaster is an image editor with tons of preset effects and custom options to give your photos a stylized look. To "toast" a photo you can either take a new picture with your iPhone camera or choose an image from your photo library. Buttons across the bottom of the interface let you experiment with the different effects.

With PhotoToaster, you can use one of several global effects for a photo or use them as a starting point--this app lets you customize the effects to your liking using onscreen sliders. Global effects include retro looks, black and white effects, … Read more

Picfx lets you play around with 47 different effects and 13 different styles with which to tweak your images, and adds some extras not found in other apps of this type. As with most image manipulation apps, you can snap a fresh photo with your iPhone camera or import a picture from your photo library. Across the bottom of the screen are icons of leather-bound books, each of which represents a bunch of effects. The categories are broken up into Grunge, Classics, Textures, Light, Space, and Frames. Once you've selected a photo, the layout makes it easy to pick … Read more

MobileMonet lets you make great-looking hand-drawn and artistic representations of your images. Though there are many photo apps in the iTunes app store that let you distort and add effects to images, with MobileMonet you can create truly unique projects using a two-step system. You either start with a photo from your library or you can snap a fresh picture using your iPhone camera. From there, MobileMonet makes a black-and-white line drawing of your image. Touch the screen to use a spray-can tool to add colors back in to your photograph with paintlike effects. You have a number of variables … Read more

At CNET, the overall scores on our HDTV reviews are calculated based on three subratings: Design, Features, and Performance. To the chagrin of black-level and color-obsessed videophiles, we place a fair amount of weight (30 percent) on Design because, frankly, normal people do care what their TVs look like when turned off.

If you care a lot, then this list is for you. It contains the six best-designed 2011 HDTVs we've reviewed; Performance and Features be damned. In the case of a numeric tie in Design we've ranked the better design higher.

The clear winners so far in … Read more

Composing electronic correspondence can lack the personal touch that handwritten notes and letters possess. As a substitute, you can still change the font style on letters to friends and family--revealing just a small piece of your personality compared to your own handwriting. However, it adds just enough to make it seem less robotic and more "you." Here's how to change the default font in your Gmail, so you don't have to manually choose it every time:

Step 1: Log in to Gmail from your Web browser.

Step 2: Open the settings menu in the upper right-hand … Read more