Apple's lead in mobile browsing increased in October 2011, while Android's browser passed Opera Mini for second place.

Google's mobile browser leapfrogged Opera Mini to take the second-place spot in worldwide usage of the Web with smartphones and tablets in October.

The change, revealed in Net Applications' monthly browser usage statistics, reflects the shift from older phone operating systems where Opera Mini is more popular to Android. But while Google's unbranded browser rose in the rankings, from 16.3 percent in September to 18.7 percent in October, top-ranked Apple rose even more.

Safari usage rose from 55.6 percent to 62.2 percent, extending its dominance in mobile computing.

Opera Mini plunged from 18.9 percent to 13.1 percent, Net Applications said. As the mobile market evolves, Opera is trying to tie its future more to Android--in particular with an upcoming version of the full Opera Mobile browser that can run in the lightweight Opera Mini mode when there's not enough network capacity available.

Other losers in the October mobile statistics were Symbian, which dropped from 4.7 percent to 2.6 percent, and BlackBerry, which dro... [Read more]

If you're looking for a full-featured image editor at a relatively low price, Pixelmator fills the bill nicely.

Sporting a smooth, Mac-friendly interface, Pixelmator's layout is much like Adobe Photoshop with separate toolbars offering standard selector and paintbrush-type tools, a color picker, a layer manager, and a brush picker with large array of options. If you don't need the more advanced features and filters of Adobe Photoshop, Pixelmator is an affordable and easy-to-use alternative. Version 2.0 adds a laundry list of new features including a new look, several new tools, and new brush and gradient editors.

Also this week, we have the latest version of TotalFinder, the app that adds tabs to the Finder and lets you view the Finder in dual-pane mode for easy file transfer. Our game this week is Clan Lord, the old-school fantasy online RPG that's not up to today's standards for graphics, but offers tons of fun and challenging gameplay.

Don't forget to check out this week's iOS app collection: Adding image effects on iOS. [Read more]

Another day, another Trojan. The malware bot called "Tsunami" that has been developed for Linux systems since around 2002 has been found on OS X.

The malware (OSX/Tsunami.A) is a minimal threat, and like other Trojans and backdoors for OS X requires you to manually install it. While it is almost irrelevant to most users, it is out there and has the potential to cause harm for some.

The malware is an IRC bot, which is a program that connects to Internet Relay Chat (IRC) network servers and channels, where it can be controlled as a client for distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks on targeted systems and networks. In addition it has the capability to both download files to an infected system and run shell commands (terminal commands) on it.

The current OS X variants of this malware appear not to work and may be in testing phases.

IRC bots are common programs used for numerous legitimate activities on IRC servers, but as with other well-intentioned routines, there is the potential for these bots to be developed and used for malicious activities.

Malware detection group ESET is claiming that so far there are two variants of this malware that connect to different IRC servers and channels. Both variants require someone to manually open the installer file, which then performs the following actions:

1. It installs the malware in the... [Read more]