Audiobooks HQ for iOS lets you download over 5,000 public-domain spoken-word books, including lots of classic works.

I love audiobooks. Nothing makes a car ride faster or more pleasant than a good spoken-word book piping through the speakers.

That's why I've routinely championed smartphone-powered services like Audible, Audiobooks.com, Simply Audiobooks, and Tales2Go.

Now there's another app worth adding to your audiobook arsenal: Audiobooks HQ, which gives you access to more than 5,000 public-domain titles -- all for a measly $1.99.

The app connects you with two catalogs: the Globe Radio Repertory and Librivox. The former contains just four works (including "Don Quixote" and "Madame Bovary"), while the latter gives you the real meat of the app.

That's where you'll find books like "The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes," "The Count of Monte Cristo," "Great Expectations," and "Gulliver's Travels." Again, these are all public-domain works, so there's likely to be a lot of material you've never heard of or have no interest in hearing... [Read more]

Tubalr has been making a buzz among the Web community quite recently by bringing a service everyone has been asking for but has never been quite fulfilled until now. This simple Web app lets you create playlists from YouTube videos. Simply input a search term, select between 'only' and 'similar' depending on how much you want to narrow down your options, and Tubalr will auto-generate a video playlist according to your search. The 'only' function will bring up videos directly relevant to your key term while hitting 'similar' can bring up a variety of related videos.

For example, we started by looking up everybody's favorite K-Pop song, 'Gangnam Style' by Psy. Hitting 'only' brought us about 10 variations of the song by Psy as well as renditions by others. The videos will continue to play until it reaches the end of the list, when it will return to the first video and repeat. If you've been looking for a way to continuously loop one YouTube song, this is one way to do it. Search for your video, remove all others from the playlist, leaving your desired video as the only selection, then hit Play. Did we mention that all of the videos are played ad-free? Using Tubalr's service is free of charge, while signing up gives you the o... [Read more]

How do I like my software?

Bundled.

For not much more than the price of a single app, you can often get as many as 10 of them, usually with a combined value in the hundreds of dollars. In fact, I've got three such bundles for you to check out right now.

They're all for Mac users, who already paid a premium for their hardware, and therefore deserve a break on software. Here's a rundown of the three bundles, followed by my pick for the best of the bunch.

1. Macbundler: Nine apps for $45

The nine apps in Macbundler's bundle have a combined value of $491. It's a mix of high-end tools like MotionComposer, a no-coding-required utility for creating animated/interactive Web content, and smaller stuff like Cocktail, "a general purpose utility for OS X that lets you clean, repair, and optimize your Mac."

There's some good stuff here, but you have to click through nine pages to see descriptions of each app -- kind of a hassle. And although I'm no expert when it comes to Mac software, I don't see any real standouts among the selections. A bundle is worthwhile only if there are at least two to three apps you'd buy separately anyway.

2. ... [Read more]

News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch (on the right) and Apple exec Eddy Cue at the launch of The Daily in February 2011.

The Daily, News Corp.'s embattled iPad news app, will officially be closing its doors on December 15.

The publishing house revealed the app's demise in a broad announcement today covering a wide range of changes at the company. The Daily as a standalone publication will be shuttered, but News Corp. said that its "brand will live on in other channels." Some staff, for example, will be sent to The New York Post.

"From its launch, The Daily was a bold experiment in digital publishing and an amazing vehicle for innovation," News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch said today in a statement. "Unfortunately, our experience was that we could not find a large enough audience quickly enough to convince us the business model was sustainable in the long-term. Therefore we will take the very best of what we have learned at The Daily and apply it to all our properties.

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It's time again to take the pulse of Adobe Systems and its Creative Cloud product and business overhaul.

In March, analyst firm Jefferies and CNET jointly surveyed people's opinions on Adobe's shift. Now we're running a new survey about Adobe's Creative Cloud subscription plan, Creative Suite 6, and Web design tools.

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• Adobe: Next Photoshop won't support Windows XP
• Adobe releases new Illustrator tools through Creative Cloud
• Blame the app stores: Adobe Touch apps not in Creative Cloud
• Adobe launches Creative Cloud subscription service
• Adobe's aggressive plans for Creative Cloud

We'll run the survey for a few days and share results later so you can see if others share your opinions about Adobe.

Photoshop is a storied b... [Read more]

The mobile browser market is more volatile than the PC browser market, but Apple consistently keeps the top spot. Chrome now accounts for more than 1 percent of mobile browser usage, Net Applications has found.

Chrome has made a dent in the mobile browser market -- but only on Android so far.

Although Google released Chrome for iOS in June, the browser accounted for only 0.01 percent of browser usage on iOS in November, Net Applications' latest statistics show. On Android, it was 4.03 percent for the month, and in the mobile market overall, it reached 1.14 percent of usage.

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• Zoom around the vast Milky Way in a browser
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[Read more]