There are a lot of moving parts in each level and your job is to figure out the best way to gather up all 3 stars.

Amazing Alex (99 cents) for iPhone or Android is a physics game where you're challenged to create chain reactions with objects to complete objectives. Our hero, Amazing Alex, is a kid who's stuck cleaning his room and tries to get creative with organizing his belongings by building Rube Goldburg-like devices.

For each level you'll go through two phases: the building phase, where you'll set up your objects, and the execution phase, where you'll see if your arrangement of objects helps you collect all the stars for the level. Like in Angry Birds, you'll want to try to get all three stars for every level for a perfect score. The game is also clever in how you move through chapters; at the end of the first chapter, for example, a comic shows that Alex gets in trouble with his mother for all the ruckus in his room, so she sends him outside where he sets up more complex chain reactions.

There are 35 interactive objects to work with and part of the fun is figuring out the best way to complete a level. In the early stages, you'll need to simply direct soccer and tennis balls... [Read more]

The green lock icon on the left is how you can tell when you're on a site with the highest level of security.

The latest update to Firefox brings better security to search and to the URL bar, as the browser gets OS X and HTML5 tweaks, too.

The biggest change to Firefox 14 (download for Windows | Mac | Linux,) is that it runs HTTPS for all Google searches. This means that prying eyes, especially over public networks, won't be able to intercept your queries. Though Firefox currently supports this only for Google, Mozilla said in a blog post announcing the update that it hopes to extend HTTPS to other search engines in the near future.

A small interface design change also affects your security. This tweak makes it easier to see the "verified secure" lock icon to the left of your location bar.

If you're using OS X 10.7 Lion, you'll now get native full-screen support. All versions of Firefox will autocomplete URLs, and they support more hardware APIs. These include Wa... [Read more]

It took more than five years, but Apple has finally won a key patent related to the way lists and documents are displayed in a mobile operating system.

The company yesterday was granted Patent no. 8,223,134 for "Portable electronic device, method, and graphical user interface for displaying electronic lists and documents." According to the patent's description, the technology relies upon a touch-screen display and includes both the function for displaying lists and documents, and how they look on a mobile product.

Patently Apple was first to discover the patent.

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