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Gutterball Golden Pin Bowling Free is a bowling game with automated scoring and several powerups to increase your bowling skills. There is a free version of the game, with a paid upgrade to add more features and options. The game installs cleanly.

The Gutterball Golden Pin Bowling Free interface allows you to choose from two different alleys (five different alleys in the paid version), each with their own attractive graphics. To bowl, you use the mouse or keyboard to launch the bowl and add spin, controlling velocity and direction. There's an audio commentary that can be amusing at times, … Read more

Voice search is such a useful smartphone capability that yours may already have it (ours did). Maybe you already have Google's Voice Search, too. This free app integrates seamlessly with Google Search; just look for the microphone icon. Voice Search lets you search your phone or device, the Internet, and nearby locations just by speaking (clearly) into your phone. Even if you're not the best public speaker, Voice Search is smart enough to offer a range of suggestions, and it can learn to understand you, too. If your Android device doesn't have a built-in voice search app, … Read more

It might not offer the mental challenges of some games, but Bubble Shooter is a fun, even addictive game that anyone can play.

The basic objective of Bubble Shooter is simple. At the main menu of the app, you are given two main game options. The first one is the puzzle mode. In this mode, you have to complete the level by using the fewest bubbles possible. Don't worry, there are no specific time or bubble limits, but your score or evaluation can be greatly reduced as you use more bubbles. The arcade mode features larger, more general sets … Read more

It used to be that you had to go to Las Vegas to play the real slots. Then more casinos gave more players access to real Vegas-style slot machines, and online slots just sweetened the pot. Now you can play casino-style slots with Slot Machine Deluxe, a free Android app (you can buy more coins, though). We installed it on a Samsung smartphone running Ice Cream Sandwich.

Slot machine opens with two carousels of Slots displayed, though all but the first are locked. Before we started playing, we tapped the Settings icon, but the only changes involved turning off the … Read more

Autodesk AutoCAD is one of the standard applications on Windows for those who need an app for designs. With AutoCAD WS, the application moves to the Mac with support for Mac OS X 10.6 or later. For those who are not familiar with AutoCAD, it is a tool for laying out designs from simple to hideously complex, with the ability to mark up and comment on designs for collaborative use. With AutoCAD WS, those designs can now be portable, allowing you to move them around on mobile devices as native AutoCAD files or PDFs.

AutoCAD WS installs easily and … Read more

Body Scanner is an entertainment app that supposedly lets you see through clothes and zoom in on body parts. Of course, Body Scanner doesn't really do anything like that, but it does show a representation of what you'd think is an X-ray image based on what the camera is pointing at. There's no real scanning involved, of course, just photo manipulation.

Of course, this wouldn't be entertainment if the app simply showed a skeletal figure or perhaps just a smooth body skin, so Body Scanner spices things up with some imagination. Some images will show a … Read more

Unless you've lived in a cave with no connectivity for the last few years, you've heard about Angry Birds. Angry Birds Free is the introduction to the series and acts as a teaser for the paid app. Angry Birds Free downloads and installs with no problem.

The goal of Angry Birds Free is to launch birds from a slingshot, aiming them at structures with green pigs scattered about. The birds, some of which have special capabilities, knock over the building structures and kill the pigs. Wipe out the pigs and you pass the level. Sounds simple (and to … Read more

Adobe Systems isn't making any promises, but an update to company's Digital Negative (DNG) image format paves the way for two important features in Lightroom: panoramas and high-dynamic range photography.

Lightroom is for editing, cataloging, and publishing photos, especially those shot in higher-end cameras' raw formats. Raw photos consist of data captured directly from the image sensor without in-camera processing into a JPEG. Although raw photos offer better quality and flexibility, they're also much less convenient than JPEGs.

One aspect of their inconvenience is that raw photos usually arrive in proprietary formats from camera makers. Adobe has … Read more

Adobe developed the Portable Document Format to standardize electronic document handling. PDF, the file format that carries the business world on its back, is everywhere, from product manuals to legal documents. To open, view, and edit PDFs, you need a PDF reader -- for example, Adobe's free Reader. Despite competition from simpler tools, Reader remains the standard the others are judged against. We looked at the latest version of Reader, Adobe Reader X. With it you can view and annotate all PDF files, sign documents electronically, and access optional Adobe Online subscription services directly from inside its interface.

Reader … Read more