"O brave new world, that has such felines in it!"

Does your cat feel that a lack of opposable thumbs is seriously hindering its ability to be beautiful on the Internet? Never fear; Snapcat is here!

The Android app is designed to let cats snap photos of themselves with their own paws. Following the principle of cats' fascination with laser pointers, it shows a dancing dot on your phone's screen. When your cat goes to bat at the dot, the touch of its paw fires off a picture from the front-facing camera. … Read more

If you're anything like me, you have an iTunes library you've amassed over the course of many years, one that includes everything from ripped CDs to Amazon MP3 purchases to song downloads from any number of outside sources.

In other words, it's a messy collection, with duplicates, missing album art and tags, and so on. There are plenty of utilities out there promising to clean things up, but most of them will cost you.

Not today. Until tomorrow, you can get Leawo Tunes Cleaner (PC/Mac) absolutely free. There's a slightly obnoxious catch, but ultimately it'… Read more

One of my favorite apps of 2012, Bad Robot Interactive's Action Movie FX, just got even better.

Available for iOS, the app lets you add Hollywood-style special effects to videos you've shot with your iPhone or iPad.

What kinds of effects? Suppose you're making a movie that involves blowing up a car (as all good movies should). Action Movie FX includes a missile-attack sequence that ends with a gorgeous fiery explosion. All you do is record at least 5 seconds of video (in this case, footage of your car), then wait for the app to render the … Read more

Songbird, an iTunes alternative that originally combined music playback and management with Web-based music discovery, will exit stage left permanently at the end of the month.

CEO Eric Wittman revealed in a blog post that Songbird will no longer be maintained as of June 28, and that its parent company, Pioneers of the Inevitable, also would be closing down.

"[T]he company has found ourselves unable to fund further business operations," he said. The open-source desktop version of Songbird, its mobile apps for Android and iOS, and its music discovery service Songbird.me will all go dark. Wittman … Read more

TweetDeck, the popular Twitter application for power users, has been updated with a completely new design for Mac users.

Twitter, which owns TweetDeck, revealed the changes on Friday. Version 3.0.2 of the software comes with the same column-based design users are accustomed to, but adds a new sidebar on the left for more quickly navigating across columns. The new version also includes drag-and-drop rearrangement for columns and the ability to translate tweets.

TweetDeck for Mac also includes improved filtering for mentions, retweets, and other features.

The new and improved TweetDeck is available now in Apple's Mac App … Read more

Microsoft inched a bit closer today to bringing the one app to the iPhone that's long been missing: Office.

The software giant on Friday released Office Mobile for iPhone in the iTunes Store. But don't get too excited, Office fans. While it's a free download, Office Mobile for iPhone will only work for subscribers to Microsoft's Office 365 Home Premium and ProPlus service. And it's optimized for the iPhone, not Apple's larger iPads.

"We don't view this as a standalone app," said Chris Schneider, a marketing manager in Microsoft's Office … Read more

If you are a Safari user then you might be familiar with the program's Bookmarks bar, where you can save links to individual Web pages, or group them as collections in folders.

You can also use it to save any other location you can link to through Safari's address bar, including files and folders on the system.

To do this, simply drag a file to the address bar, and you should see a bookmark to it as you would any other file. You can also load some files such as images directly into Safari by dropping them on … Read more

The big news today for Google+ is that the service is getting some notable improvements to its notifications system, the biggest of which is syncing across all devices. With this improvement, when you read or dismiss a notification on one device, the same action will be reflected across all of your devices, so you won't be bothered with repeat clicks and swipes.

Other updates include a new bell icon for notifications and an updated notifications tray, which separates new items from previously read items. According to Google's Vic Gundotra, the notifications improvements will be rolling out gradually starting … Read more

Android users now can print photos, documents, and other files directly to certain printers with Google's Cloud Print app.

Landing in Google Play on Wednesday, the app allows you to print from any compatible Android phone or tablet to any Google Cloud Print connected printer. You can also share photos and documents from the built-in Gallery and other Android apps to Cloud Print and check on the status of your print jobs.

You can see if your printer is compatible with Google's cloud printing through the Cloud Print Web site.