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If you enjoy watching the incredibly popular television show "The Walking Dead," or just have a general interest in zombies, then you'll enjoy this application, too. The Walking Dead-Dead Yourself app allows you to create an entertaining zombie version of any portrait you have on your mobile device. It is disturbing and fun at the same time.

The Walking Dead-Dead Yourself takes a little while to download. The app is pretty big because of the many different image files and image editing aspects of the program. Once the program opens, however, the fun begins immediately. The app … Read more

Drag the Rope Maze HD Free is a puzzle game that requires you to drag rope in various directions without retracing your steps. While we were intrigued by the game's premise, the actual gameplay was confusing and difficult to maneuver.

The first thing we noticed with Drag the Rope Maze was that English is obviously not the developers' first language; some of the wording a bit awkward and difficult to understand. For example, the directions stated, "Once you tie the rope, different way will appear." Huh? Thankfully, a hand pointed us in the direction we need to … Read more

If a mobile character gets popular, you can expect a running game with it to not be far behind. Angry Gran RadioActive Run drops mobile favorite Angry Gran into a side-scroller, trying to dodge radioactive elements. The game is a decent time-waster and a little addictive, but the out-of-control ads and difficulty suck the limited amount of fun out of it.

Accidental ads taps abound in this app, as ads are almost always bigger on the screen than the actual buttons you want to hit. The only place this isn't true is when you're actually playing the running … Read more

Autodesk Motion FX is an effects plug-in for MacBook and iMac that works with the camera to give you some way-cool images. There's quite a bit built in to Motion FX, but the easiest way to learn what it does is to download it and play with it for 10 minutes. Do that and you might be hooked. Motion FX requires Mac OS X 10.7, so if you haven't upgraded yet this is a good reason to do it! Installation is easy.

To use Motion FX, you select an effect and it is applied to the image … Read more

ThGCube is a desktop enhancement that lets you create a slideshow of images displayed in a cube or other animated format. It's a nice idea and has a surprising number of features, but in practice we weren't too crazy about it.

ThGCube offers six options for displaying images: the cube, a star shape, horizontal and vertical wheels, and horizontal and vertical lines. Some of these are kind of hard to describe, but all involve animated 3D displays of your images. Our first beef with ThGCube was the large watermark displayed on the unregistered version. We have nothing against … Read more

Speed-reading programs are older than computer programs, but they're a natural when teamed up as software. Speed Reading III is a simple, free tool that tests your reading speed but not your comprehension. It's designed to help you increase your reading speed and concentration, which can boost comprehension. The basic idea isn't to try to read every word as fast as you can but to focus on a midpoint and see how well you understand the message.

Speed Reading III opens with a plain and simple interface containing a text message that describes the basics of reading … Read more

If you mashed up Facebook and Outlook with some professional networking features, threw in a dash of scientific interaction (think Berkeley's BOINC) and pointed the business end at researchers, you'd probably end up with something very much like Mendeley Desktop, a Web-based interactive network for posting, editing, reviewing, and critiquing academic research. It indexes and organizes your research, papers, PDFs, and other tools into an easy-to-use interface, but its online features also make it easy to access work posted by other researchers as well as access scientific, medical, and technical databases and sites.

Mendeley Desktop requires a free … Read more

You've almost certainly seen mind maps, which depict ideas, words, tasks, projects, and other elements as graphical symbols arrayed around a central idea. They're nothing new; the Ancient Greeks knew of them, and today mind maps are used in business, industry, government, academia, the military, and other planning-dependent fields. Freeplane is a free, Java-based tool for creating mind maps. As with many open-source projects, Freeplane is available in a wide range of interface languages.

The first thing we noticed about Freeplane's efficiently configured layout was a toolbar containing a row of quick-access Function keys, beginning with F1, … Read more

Chrome TV lets you stream international TV stations to your desktop via a browser pop-up inside Google Chrome. It draws its listings from an online database, which means you can't add your own channels or make other changes. Chrome TV's selections are nothing if not diverse--linguistically and geographically, at least. The programming leans toward news, weather, and sports broadcasts as well as what might be called cultural affairs programming, though we did find some movies, classic cartoons, and other pleasant surprises.

Chrome TV is free and installs easily, but it might require the Windows Media Player browser plug-in, … Read more