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Does Emote Maker make emoticons? Yes it does, but just barely. Is there anything else even remotely positive that we can say about it? No, we don't think there is.

We like the idea of making our own emoticons, the little smiley faces that can liven up chats, e-mails, and blog entries. Although at first glance Emote Maker seems like it would be easy to use--just drag and drop the features you want and then save your completed emoticon--in practice the program is a disaster. It's a huge memory hog, slow and unresponsive, and even opening the built-in … Read more

New e-glasses aim to replace old bifocals

I'm a lucky guy. I wear glasses, and I like wearing them. They're sort of my way of saying, "Screw you, world, I'm an actual nerd!" My glasses are big, they're black, and they make me look so good that I've destroyed all of my mirrors because I just can't stand it. But they're single index, meaning they're not bifocals. Undoubtedly, though, one of these days (probably around the time I hit 40, according to the research), I'll need to upgrade.

But maybe I won't be getting bifocals … Read more

Free Hold'em on the iPad

Editors' take: There are few things better than a good game of no-limit Texas Hold'em. One of them is a free game of no-limit Texas Hold'em. Heads Up: Hold'em HD for the iPad is a surprisingly polished title that offers 1-versus-1 competition (more would be nice, obviously, but beggars can't be choosers) against the CPU or a friend--someone you can hand your iPad to when it's his turn, or someone who has his own iPad or iPod. (Heads Up supports wireless play via Bluetooth.)

Old school shoot-'em-up action

StarCannon is a remake of classic arcade shooters of the past, with 2D shoot-'em-up action and challenging boss fights. The graphics are smooth even on the older iPhone 3G. The controls are mostly effective, but can sometimes feel sluggish using a touch-to-move system rather than an onscreen joypad. Your ship fires automatically as long as you are touching the screen so you can play the game using only one finger or your thumb.

You can acquire three different weapons as you play and, just like top-down arcade shooters of the past, StarCannon lets you upgrade each weapon with more … Read more

Rank your favorite songs with Rank'em

Everybody likes contributing an opinion, especially in subjects on which we consider ourselves experts. Rank'em (located at gorankem.com), now in beta testing, uses this human urge as the basis for a crowdsourced song recommendation engine.

This obviously wouldn't work without some structure--asking users to pick their 10 favorite songs at random, for instance, would be too scattershot and yield useless results. So Rank'em has users select particular artists, then asks them to choose between 5 and 20 songs and rank them in order. Users must also rate their level of enthusiasm--or "fanstanding" as the … Read more