catalogs

This secret is out. Sometimes, girls like to play with He-Man action figures and boys like to nurture dolls. A Swedish toy catalog is getting a lot of attention for swapping out traditional gender roles by depicting a boy playing with a dollhouse and a girl blasting an imaginary foe with a Nerf gun.

Top Toy created the holiday catalog for toy chains BR and Toys"R"Us. The catalog was released in both Denmark and Sweden, but the Swedish version features some Photoshopped changes. Perhaps most notably, a boy wielding a toy gun in the Danish catalog was replaced by a girl, while a boy appears on another page playing with a very pink dollhouse.… Read more

ACDSee Pro 6 is the photo editing software of choice for many professional photographers. It offers powerful image editing and cataloging tools with secure online storage capabilities that let you store and access massive RAW images for editing and processing wherever and whenever you want or need them. ACDSee is oriented toward maximizing your workflow, too. The fully featured ACDSee Pro 6 is free to try for 30 days. It's not cheap, but it's hardly expensive as image editing software goes. It's well within the budget of sophisticated amateurs, and the price includes online storage space.

ACDSee … Read more

Ikea has already introduced its catalog for mobile devices, but now the Swedish furniture giant is going a little more in-depth with the 2013 edition. There are more than 40 bits of extended content sprinkled throughout the catalog.

The 2013 physical catalog pairs with a special Ikea catalog app to unlock more than meets the eye on the printed page. Unlike the Moosejaw X-ray catalog peep show, expect to see furniture rather than statuesque Scandinavian models.… Read more

With no official Pinterest app yet available for Android, there are swathes of users itching to pin their much-loved items while on the go. Enter Fancy, an Android app for another visual cataloging site, TheFancy.com.

Just like the popular Pinterest service, Fancy is about saving pictures of the people, places, and things you love. Rather than pinning items to pinboards, however, Fancy lets you "Fancy" items and save them to a list (or multiple lists). You can search for items, scroll through recently Fancy'd items, or look through the lists of users you follow. It's … Read more

On the eve of what many expect to be the unveiling of the next iteration of the iPad, Apple has quietly added a Catalogs category to the iTunes preview section in its App Store.

Because deployment seems incomplete, the purpose of the new category is a bit of a mystery. And unfortunately, Apple representatives did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

However, AppleInsider theorizes that since the company is expected to unveil an iPad tomorrow that features a Retina Display, it is getting ready to offer high-resolution, interactive catalogs be delivered to the iPad via the App Store. … Read more

Sony's sad security song isn't finished yet.

Hackers have reportedly broken into the music label's servers and downloaded Michael Jackson's entire 50,000-track catalog, including many songs that have never been released, according to a report in Britain's Sunday Times (behind paywall). Sony purchased the catalog in 2010 from Jackson's estate for $250 million--billed as the biggest recording deal in history.

"Everything Sony purchased from the Michael Jackson estate was compromised," a source told the newspaper. "It caused them to check their systems and they found the breach. There was a … Read more

Because of Apple's partnership with search comparison engine Wolfram Alpha, Siri now has the ability to search the entire Best Buy catalog, a feature added to Wolfram Alpha today.

Best Buy has public APIs that have allowed Wolfram Alpha to leverage the data from more than 35,000 products that Best Buy sells. Because Wolfram Alpha was built on a natural-language interface, as Siri is, the ability to get accurate and informative results using voice recognition is that much more impressive.

Siri, using Wolfram Alpha's access to Best Buy's APIs, has access to pricing information, tech specs, … Read more

For Android Honeycomb users, Google Catalogs could've served as an incredibly useful mobile shopping tool this holiday season.

It aggregates catalogs from over a hundred popular retailers, lets you search through and mark favorite products, and gives you links to make purchases directly from retailers' sites. It even lets you create and share visually stunning collages with friends. Unfortunately (for us and for Google), the app appears to be marred by a few performance issues that can't be overlooked.

The app's interface is beautiful, with high-resolution graphics and simple navigation. You can flip through pages with a … Read more

The Google Catalogs app for Android Honeycomb tablets aggregates shopping catalogs from over 100 popular retailers. It lets you search and mark items as favorites, gives you links to make purchases directly from retailers' sites, and even lets you create and share visually stunning collages made up of your favorite products. However, as great as the app sounds on paper, it unfortunately suffers from some annoying performance issues that just can't be ignored.

The interface of the Google Catalogs app is beautiful. It's easy to navigate, features high-resolution graphics, and flips through pages quite smoothly. Items on catalog … Read more