Hands-on Mozilla's Firefox OS - Boot to Gecko

SAN FRANCISCO -- Microsoft's not the only big tech player taking a gamble on a new direction. Mozilla made an aggressive argument for Firefox OS to Web and app developers Monday night at its confusingly named Mobile Monday Mixer -- confusing because the company held the event last night at its San Francisco office.

As the lights from the Bay Bridge blinked in the background, Jay Sullivan, Mozilla's vice president of products, laid out why developers should care about Firefox OS. "If you're looking to build and develop mobile software without the 30 percent toll [Apple charges], Firefox OS will appeal to you," he told a room packed with around 75 developers. Among those present were HTML5, JavaScript, and CSS developers, as well as developers from at least one competing browser.

Firefox OS is Mozilla's stab at providing an open-source mobile OS alternative to Apple's closed iOS and Google's semi-open Android -- not unlike what Firefox did for Web browsers when it debuted in 2004. But Mozilla is also recycling software it's creating for Firefox OS in its desktop and Android browsers to improve them. At its heart, Firefox OS is an attempt to keep Mozilla relevant as the rest of the world goes mobile.

Sullivan told the crowd last night that Mozilla has created a way -- technically, a "payments API" -- for regular Web browsers to handle payments the way that native mo... [Read more]

AppGratis finds a daily freebie that's worth your time.

There are countless ways to find free apps for your iPhone, iPod, or iPad. You can peruse the App Store. You can subscribe to a Twitter feed like 148Apps Now Free. Heck, you can even use an app; I continue to be a fan of Appsfire Deals, which serves up a huge helping of freebies every day, right on your iDevice.

But here's the thing. Sometimes you don't want a seemingly endless list of unknown apps to wade through. You want a personal recommendation, like from a friend who says, "Hey, I found a great freebie today, check it out."

That's the idea behind AppGratis, a free app that tells you about other free apps -- but only one per day. Each is hand-picked, tested, and reviewed, so there's a good chance it's something cool and worthwhile, not some crummy waste of space. Plus, most of the apps are those that usually cost money, but happen to be free on that day (and only tha... [Read more]

As of today, Snapseed, one of the more unique photo-editing apps for desktop and iOS, is officially available for Android. After enjoying much success on other platforms and even getting acquired by Google in September, it was only a matter of time before this increasingly popular product would make its way onto the Mountain View titan's own mobile OS.

Snapseed offers borders, filters, and a handful of other useful tools for fine-tuning photo attributes like focus, brightness, contrast, and more. And not surprisingly, the app comes with built-in Google+ sharing, which seems to set the stage for an ultimate Google-Snapseed versus Facebook-Instagram showdown.

Snapseed for Android is compatible with tablets and phones running Android versions 4.0 and higher.

Also, Google today updated the iOS version of Snapseed, making it free to all users.