filters

Contrary to its name, Little Photo for Android is huge on features. With an impressive list of filters and tools, and a seemingly infinite number of combinations to apply, Little Photo is an awesomely powerful camera app for your mobile device.

Open up the app, and either activate the camera, or load up an existing photo from your gallery. If you choose to take a new photo, you can either snap as you tap or enable a 3-second timer. From there, you'll be jetted over to the work space, where you can scroll through pages of effects to apply … Read more

We all like having things tailored to our specific needs and interests. But Eli Pariser thinks we should beware of the substantial risks inherent in the increasing personalization of the Internet.

Better known (so far) as the executive director of the progressive political action committee MoveOn.org, Eli Pariser is making noise these days as the author of "The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding from You." His new book, which was released yesterday, argues that the latest tools being implemented by the likes of Google and Facebook for making our Internet experiences as individual as possible … Read more

Windows supports text files natively and also incorporates a search function, but it doesn't go out of its way to put the two together. MuseTips Text Filter is a compact, portable, and free tool that can quickly and thoroughly search text files. It searches as you type and displays matching terms in contrasting colors. It also offers autosuggestions, full support for regular expressions, multiple query modes, and extensive filtering.

At less than 500KB unzipped, Text Filter is certainly lightweight, and since it's fully portable, it runs from any location, including from a USB drive or other portable device. … Read more

Acorn is an easy-to-use but still relatively feature-filled image editor that provides a lower-cost alternative to professional editing programs. With its slimmed-down interface--just a single palette and a document window--Acorn feels much like Apple's iLife applications, but it still provides a full array of editing features, including multiple layers (with masks), vector shapes, filters (such as tilt-shift, plus support for Quartz Composer compositions), blending, gradients, text and drawing tools (including a Brush Designer for custom brushes), and a hex color picker.

What makes this app most appealing is its ease of use and raw speed: Acorn takes full advantage … Read more

Most big-time e-mail clients offer some kind of spam filtering, as do many antivirus packages. There are also standalone spam-stoppers out there; as it happens, one of the best we've tried is also free. It's called Spamihilator, short for spam annihilator, and seems to sound best when pronounced "spam-EYE-uh-lator." It's a brainy e-mail filter that stands between your e-mail client and your account's connection, scanning incoming messages and sorting out the spam. It learns as you use it, with a little help from you. It supports plug-ins, POP3 and IMAP accounts, and secure connections.… Read more

Collection managers are databases optimized for collectors. Tian's GCstar is a free tool that can not only help you manage your collections but also keep track of items you've loaned to friends and neighbors and even update your records automatically by fetching additional information online. It's an open-source project, but it's not some half-app work-in-progress.

GCstar opened with its main interface and a New Collection dialog showing numerous default selections. GCstar can manage any collection, which is to say a collection of anything, from digital snapshots on your hard drive to vintage cars in your garage. … Read more

FarmVille is one of the most popular real-time simulation games on the Web and the most popular app on Facebook, with more than 60 million active users worldwide and nearly 25 million Facebook fans. Google's free Chrome browser isn't quite as popular yet, but it's gaining fast, with a growing number of cool extensions. FV Feed Filter is a free Chrome extension that lets you view and filter your FarmVille feeds in the Chrome interface.

We opened Chrome and logged on to Facebook. We then opened a new tab and downloaded and installed FV Feed Filter, which … Read more

I'll wager you've got mail waiting for you right now--probably in several different inboxes.

Gone are the days of having only two e-mail accounts: one from your boss for work and another from your ISP for everything else. Now you're likely to have a Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, or other free Webmail account--and maybe two, three, or more such addresses--in addition to or in place of your work and ISP accounts.

You can avoid having to open multiple programs or browser windows to view all your messages by forwarding mail between your active accounts. That way you've … Read more

If you feel safer online using your PC instead of your mobile phone, you are not alone.

A majority 87 percent of people polled for a new study think their home PCs offer better defense against viruses, malware, and hackers than do their mobile phones. Released today by the National Cyber Security Alliance and Symantec, the study (PDF) also discovered that people may be overconfident in the power of their computers to protect them as less than half are using full security software.

Though only 24 percent of those polled said they feel very safe using their home computers to … Read more