Creating collages with your images is easier than ever on your iPhone, and--with the right app--you can make great looking projects in minutes and share them immediately.

Are you old enough to remember making collages with a glue stick and poster board? These days anyone can create a collage (without all the mess) using digital photos and any photo layout program on a desktop computer. But some recent apps for iPhone make it even easier with intuitive touch-screen controls and other extras that put the old glue-stick-and-photo method to shame.

This week's collection of iOS apps is about making collages. The first lets you choose a layout and add photos for quick collage projects. The second does the same, but adds more features and lets you make sendable postcards. The third adds something a little different, with a multilens feature that produces unique results.

With Diptic, you can tap a photo in the collage and adjust levels and brightness using sliders.

Diptic (99 cents) is a fairly simple app that lets you make cool-looking collages using photos you take with your iPhone camera or what you have stored in your photo library. You start by selecting from 21 different layouts, such as one photo... [Read more]

Chrome's privacy controls.

Google's Chrome security team unveiled yesterday its guiding principles on how they build a safer browser.

The manifesto declares seven key guidelines for Chrome security. The first one, "Don't get in the way," both echoes Google's unofficial motto, "Don't be evil," and reflects what many Windows security vendors have learned the hard way about keeping people safe. If security negatively affects performance, users will look to alternatives. For a browser which has built its user base on speed, sluggish response times have the potential to wreak great havoc.

"It's great to see invisibility and automatic background updates as the first principal. Good security is transparent and inescapable," said Chris Wysopal, chief technology officer at Veracode. "The less security decisions that involve the user the better. Every security decision made by the user is a chance that something with be postponed or forgotten or worse, an opportunity for social engineering."

Privacy is not mentioned in the list of principles, and that may raise the hackles of some security experts. "I think Google's approach to privacy is a little bit different than others," said Je... [Read more]

BlueStacks for Windows 8 scored a Best of CES Award in Software and Apps from CNET editors.

Software is becoming a bigger part of CES, which is a bit ironic since Microsoft has begun to pull back its presence. CES 2012 saw the rise of familiar software names powering your living room TV, augmented-reality apps that created a new way to interact with the world around you, a stone-cold assassination attempt on the QWERTY keyboard, and a deft program that ports Android apps into Windows 8.

Let's start with BlueStacks for Windows 8, our Best of CES Award winner in the Software and Apps category. We first looked at a rough version of BlueStacks last year. Now, many of the kinks have been ironed out as it prepares to bring you the entire Android app catalog in Windows 8, complete with individual tiles for each app. Angry Birds Metro, anyone?

One of the most common questions that CNET readers ask is, "How the heck do I cut the cable TV cord and still watch my shows?" While there are numerous paths up that particular mountain, one new answer is to get a Web-enabled TV. We saw a smorgasbord of quality TVs powered by software at CES 2012, including a demo of ... [Read more]

When the MacDefender fake antivirus malware was making its rounds early last year, there was a daily cat-and-mouse game between the criminals developing the software and various malware detection companies, plus Apple with its XProtect routine that establishes its "Safe Downloads" list.

While MacDefender has been properly addressed and is no longer an issue, the latest cat-and-mouse game appears to be revolving around the recent Flashback malware that was found for OS X. Flashback is a Trojan horse that is distributed as a fake version of Adobe's Flash player program. When installed it will insert a payload program into applications like Safari and Firefox, which when run will attempt to send personal information to remote servers.

The new Trojan variant is packaged as an Adobe Flash installer.

Since its initial discovery in September 2011, the Flashback malware has undergone around 10 revisions in an effort to get around malware detection software, wit... [Read more]

Maybe you want to save Web pages for offline reading, or maybe you want to archive a page you created.

There are all sorts of reason to want to save pages, but it can be hard to tackle saving multiple pages at once. ZipTabs is a Chrome extension that lets you save any or all open tabs in one ZIP file, making the process much smoother and more convenient, Here's how to use it: 

1. Download and install the SingleCore extension. This is required to use ZipTabs, but you don't need to do any more than install it. 
2. Download and install ZipTabs. 
3. Restart Chrome. 
4. When you've got a set of tabs open to Web pages you want to save, just click the ZipTabs icon in the upper right and select which open tabs to save. 

   Step 4: Select tabs to save.

5. Select a name for the ZIP file, then click "OK." 
6. When the ZIP file is created (it can take a little while), it is saved to Chrome's download folder. This can't be changed, though you can point Chrome toward a different folder in its Options settings. 

That's it. Your ZIP file is easy to save and share.

Thanks to ... [Read more]