words

Mobile apps are still not secure when it comes to storing certain personal information, according to a new study from security firm ViaForensics.

Dissecting a variety of apps for Apple's iOS and Google's Android, ViaForensics found that 76 percent of them store user names in cleartext without encryption, while 10 percent store passwords in the same way, making such data more vulnerable. Running a series of tests from November 2010 through June 2011, the security firm checked out apps from several categories, including financial, social networking, productivity, and retail.

Each individual app received a pass, fail, or warn … Read more

WordInn Dictionary 2010 is a free dictionary program that offers definitions and phonetic and spoken pronunciations of unfamiliar words. While you're browsing the Web, communicating with friends, or just using software locally installed on your PC, you're apt to encounter unfamiliar words now and again. You can simply click on them to open WordInn for definitions, pronunciations, synonyms, translations, and more.

During its setup process, WordInn asked us to give a name, e-mail address, and native language, a "one-time" request that supposedly improves our WordInn experience. We're not crazy about submitting an e-mail address to … Read more

Words With Friends can now be played on Facebook, the game's publisher, Zynga, announced today.

Originally made available in 2009, Words With Friends has been a hit among iOS- and Android-device users. The game resembles Scrabble by requiring users to form words on a board complete with boxes for double and triple-score letters and words. The game adds some social flair by letting players take on friends from their respective devices. According to the Words With Friends listing in Apple's App Store, the game has more than 20 million players around the globe.

By bringing Words With Friends to Facebook, … Read more

Google AdWords can be a powerful form of advertising, placing ads for your business right next to related Google search results--if you do it right. Google AdWords Editor is a simple tool that lets AdWords users manage their campaigns on their desktop. There's no guarantee that it will improve the success of your ad campaign, but it can at least make the whole thing a little easier to deal with.

The program's interface is plain and utilitarian, with its major features arranged in tabs. We easily signed in to our AdWords account and loaded our data into the … Read more

Hanging with Friends is a fun online multiplayer word game for iPhone where you can match up against your friends to play a unique version of Hangman. From the makers of the popular game, Words with Friends, this fun game lets you register an account or connect with Facebook to play against people in your friend list or other players who also own the game. You also have the option to pass-and-play on one iPhone.

Hanging with Friends has a colorful and cute interface in which avatars of you and your opponent hang from floating balloons above lava. If you … Read more

Readdle makes several highly rated "productivity" iOS apps, including Readdle Docs, Scanner Pro, Printer Pro, and PDF Expert. They tend to run a little pricier than your typical 99-cent game, ranging in price from about $4.99 to $9.99, which is why we thought it worth pointing out that Readdle is having a 48-hour sale to celebrate its 4th birthday (it rarely puts its apps on sale).

The developer is also behind the free Shakespeare app that gives you access to the complete works of William Shakespeare. A Pro version that adds features such as a glossary, … Read more

The fact that PDFs aren't easy to edit is both a blessing and a curse; they can protect content from unauthorized changes, but they can also be a pain when you have a legitimate need to edit something. Sure, you can copy and paste text from a PDF, but your formatting will pay the price. Walker Free PDF to Word Converter makes it easy to convert PDF files into easily edited Word documents, and for the most part it keeps your formatting intact as well.

The program's interface isn't going to win any beauty contests, but it'… Read more

Microsoft Word is arguably the most widely used business application in the world, yet few Word users think twice about the format of their documents. People may change Word's default font size and style or switch between a single space or double space between lines, but that's about it. If you'd like a simple way to communicate your message more effectively without looking flashy, try these simple Word format tweaks.

First, a word of warning: nearly any document can benefit from a little creative formatting, but it can be easy to overdo the effects. Remember, the goal … Read more

Likasoft calls Polyglot 3000 an automatic language recognizer, which is an apt description of this specialized tool. It's similar to automatic translators in that it analyzes the language of text entries, but instead of translating the text, it identifies and displays the language, including confidence in the match expressed as a percentage. It handles more than 470 languages.

Polyglot 3000 has a very simple interface and an equally simple operation. It has a text entry field for typing or pasting text to identify, or you can load Unicode or ANSI text files directly into the program. It has but … Read more