Browse your photo library and choose from small, medium, or large thumbnails.

There are tons of photo-editing apps in the iTunes App Store, but a recent update to an old favorite might be one of the best yet. It's called Photogene 2 and it offers so many tools that it's almost like it does the job of multiple apps.

Photogene 2 (99 cents until November 17) is the successor of a favorite photo-editing app of ours on iOS, and this completely rebuilt version is definitely worth checking out. To start off, a redesigned interface offers intuitive controls for exploring Photogene2's many editing options.

Photogene has a bunch of editing tools and effects you can use with your images. Either take a snapshot with your iPhone camera or grab an image from your photo library to get started. From there, the app features a radial menu on the bottom that divides up Photogene's main functions, including crop, rotate, color adjust, effects presets, and retouching tools. When you pick a function--effects presets, for example--you can then swipe through the available presets to see how each effect changes your picture. More detailed functions like light and color levels bring up sliders so you can get your image to look just the way you want.

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After what can only be described as a poor start for Google's much-anticipated Gmail app for Apple's iOS platform, the software has returned.

The app, which was released earlier this month and then yanked almost immediately, had a bug that Google said broke notifications. It also served up an error message the first time users fired it up.

"We've fixed the bug and notifications are now working, and the app is back in the App Store," wrote Matthew Izatt, Gmail's product manager in a post this morning.

Izatt added that the app has also improved its image handling in HTML messages so that images are sized to fit the screen.

Google says that users who picked up the original app need to uninstall or log out of it before installing the newer software.

The app is noteworthy in that Google has avoided offering an Gmail client for iOS since the introduction of the App Store. Users of the iPhone, iPod, and iPad can, of course, use Apple's own e-mail client to access their e-mail, however that built-in client is missing many Gmail-specific features.

Izatt said that us... [Read more]

Google's plug-in lets Flash Pro developers convert their Flash content to Web-standard content using Google's online Swiffy service.

Google has released a plug-in that lets Flash Pro users convert Flash's SWF files into HTML code directly from the Adobe Systems developer tool.

The plug-in links to the Swiffy service Google operates to convert Flash to Web standards including HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics), and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). Those Web standards let people see the content in a browser without relying on Adobe's Flash Player plug-in.

"The extension enables you to convert your animation to HTML5 with one click," said Esteban de la Canal, a Google programmer, in a blog post today. "The extension is available for both Mac and Windows, and it uses Swiffy as a Web service, so you'll always get our latest and greatest conversion."

Although the vast majority of browsers on personal computers have Flash Player installed, it's a rarity on mobile devices, especially because it's banned altogether from Apple's iOS. Last week, ... [Read more]

Less than two weeks from now, thousands, if not millions, of us will once again gear up for yet another annual retail scramble.

(Credit: Screenshot by Eddie Cho/CNET)

Black Friday kicks off shopping for the holiday season and is one of the busiest events for most major retailers. We're here to offer some tools to help you take advantage of the many deals across different stores and get the most out of this hectic day. All you'll need is some light planning, caffeine, and an Android phone to run some handy apps.

Behind every successful shopping story lies a well-thought-out master plan. Researching products and the best prices available for each item on Black Friday can be a tiring and troublesome task, especially when deals are spread out across dozens of stores. Thanks to some collective sites and well-designed apps, this process has been simplified immensely over the past few years for mobile users. Before getting in line, use these apps to discover the hottest bargains and know what to expect before the doors open.

1. Research

Black Friday App by Dealnews is a deal-aggregating app that specializes in Black Friday ads. It reminds its users of the number of days left until Black Friday and displays both current and upcoming ads from all major retailers. In addition, you can use the app to make direct purchases an... [Read more]

Android tops the charts in mobile malware, largely due to the failure of Google's Android Market to properly review apps before they hit the marketplace, says a new report from Juniper Networks.

In a blog post yesterday, Juniper found that Android malware has soared 472 percent since this past July. In particular, October and November have seen the fastest rise in Android malware since Google unveiled its mobile platform, according to Juniper's Global Threat Center.

The number of Android malware samples collected in October rose 110 percent over September and 171 percent over those collected up to July. Further, Juniper's Malicious Mobile Threats Report, released this past May, discovered a 400 percent increase in Android malware from 2009 to the summer of 2010.

And Juniper lays the blame at the foot of Google.

"These days, it seems all you need is a developer account, that is relatively easy to anonymize, pay $25 and you can post your applications," noted the blog. "With no upfront review process, no one checking to see that your application does what it says, just the world's largest majority of smartphone users skimming past your application's description page with whatever description of the application the developer chooses to include."

Of course, as Juniper points out, malicious apps are removed from Android Ma... [Read more]

ThinkUp's feature list

Expert Labs has released version 1.0 of ThinkUp, a program that lets people archive, search, and analyze their activity on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+.

And if you ask me, this is a big deal.

ThinkUp, the free, open-source brainchild of programmer and Lifehacker founder Gina Trapani, keeps track of what you've done online. It extracts the data from the walled gardens that house more and more of people's digital lives then replants it in your own garden.

The app isn't simple to install, unfortunately. You need some server administration skills so you can host ThinkUp on your own Web server or run it on an instance of Amazon's EC2 cloud-computing service. (More on that point later.)

But once it's running, it retrieves an important part of what you do online that can otherwise be hard to find.

"In ThinkUp, I can find the message where I announced my son's birth. On Twitter or Facebook, I can't," said Anil Dash, an entrepreneur and founding director of Expert Labs, in a blog post announcing ThinkUp 1.0.

Adds ... [Read more]

Android owners relying on free antivirus apps may be headed for trouble.

Testing seven different free antivirus scanners for Android (PDF), AV-Test found most of them unreliable and unable to provide sufficient protection, especially in comparison to paid commercial apps.

Setting up its testbed, AV-Test ran the apps through their paces on a Samsung Galaxy Tab running Android 2.2.1.

The products tested were all downloaded from Google's Android Market and included Antivirus Free from Creative Apps, BluePoint Antivirus Free from BluePoint Security, GuardX Antivirus from Qstar, Kinetoo Malware Scan from CPU Media SARL, LabMSF Antivirus beta from LabMSF, Privateer Lite from Online Vault, and Zoner AntiVirus Free from Zoner. To gauge their performance alongside commercial apps, AV-Test also looked at F-Secure's Mobile Security and Kaspersky Mobile Security.

All the products were tested on their ability to perform on-demand scanning, as well as automatically detect malware that tries to install itself.

Among the free scanners, Zoner AntiVirus Free came out on top in the on-demand scan test, even though it detected only 32 percent of the malware on the tablet. Most of the other products found only 10 percent of the malicious files, while some didn't detect any of the malware at all. In comparison, the apps from F-Secure and Kaspersk... [Read more]

Windows 8 promises less annoying and intrusive restarts after an update.

Windows users who hate having to reboot their computers after a new update is installed may find some relief in Windows 8.

Microsoft is promising that the upcoming OS will require fewer restarts after a patch, bug fix, or other Windows update finishes installing.

Restarts are sometimes a necessary evil when an update installs simply because the files that need to be updated are in use and can't be modified until the PC reboots. But Microsoft clearly realizes that updates annoy people for that very reason.

"When it comes to Windows Update, one of the most discussed topics is the disruptiveness of restarts in the course of automatic updating," Farzana Rahman, group program manager for Windows Update, wrote yesterday in the latest edition of the Building Windows 8 blog. "And for good reason--restarts can interrupt you right in the middle of something important."

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