There used to be a time when you would reach for the dictionary, knock the dust off it, then run your finger down the page while looking up a mysterious word. But these days, the concept of the print dictionary has fallen by the wayside with dictionary websites and modern desktop alternatives. Desktop program WordWeb can look up words in mere seconds, as well as provide you with plenty of useful related information.

WordWeb it is free for 30 days, and it continues to be free—provided you meet the company's environmental requirements.  In short, you can continue to use WordWeb for free if you take two or fewer commercial flights every year.  Any more than that and you need to buy the $19 Pro version of the software. Quite how the company thinks they can enforce such a rule, I have no idea. Nevertheless, it makes for a unique software license.

When you install the software (or use the portable version available if you check the option in the advanced settings during installation), just start it up and you will be presented with a simple interface in which you can type in the word you are looking for.  Or if you are linguistically inclined one day, you can opt for a random word and learn some interesting new words such as oleaginous, patristics, and skepful.

When WordWeb shows you a word, not only will you see the definition, but you will also get the text pronunciation, the audio pronunciation, and then more information which makes this piece of software a crossword puzzle lover's dream – synonyms, similar words, links to the word on dictionary websites such as Wiktionary (and Wikipedia so you can see the word in better context), and related nouns, verbs, adverbs and adjectives.

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Take a dash of Tumblr, and mix in a cup of Pinterest. Sprinkle it with Facebook and top it off with Twitter, and you'd have Storify, a social media curation service that's a whole lot easier to use than it is to describe.

The Media panel, which sits on the right side of the screen, is where you find content. From here, you can search for content from popular sources, such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, and Instagram; Storify's search panel also includes a link to search Google, which means that the entire Web is at your fingertips. The tabbed layout makes it easy to search for specific content types, such as images or comments. Once you find content you like, you simply drag it to your story to add it. Storify also offers a "Storify this" bookmarklet, so you can save content you find while perusing the Web. When you find something you like, you just click the bookmarklet to add it to your Storypad, which is where it sits until you want to use it in a story.

Once you've found the content you'd like to use in your Storify story, you drag and drop to add it to your story, which you create in a panel on the left side of the screen. You can include images, text, hyperlinks, Facebook comments, tweets, and, well, almost anything you find online, plus your own text, too. Storify arranges everything in an attractive layout, and you can change the order easily by dragging and dropping. Once you story is complete, you can publish it to the Web, which makes it available on Storify's site. You also can share it via email, which allows recipients to view the full story in their inbox, without having to click a link, or on Facebook or Twitter. In addition, Storify stories can be embedded on your own blog or Web site.

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If you love to read, there's a bitter truth to life. You'll never have enough time for all the books you want to enjoy. Current trends in publishing just make things worse, with endless multipart series and 700-page biographies hanging like ripe fruit in the garden of knowledge. When reading isn't practical, audio books have for years pitched in to help with the next best thing to the written word, but they haven't kept up with the times. Books on disc (or cassette!) just don't cut it in today's podcast- and smartphone-centric media world. Audiobooks.com ($25/month, seven-day free trial) has stepped into this fray with a Netflix-like Web-based streaming service designed to bridge the gap and bring variety and accessibility to the audio book experience.

Following the successful Netflix model, the site provides thumbnail graphics of each book's cover along with user ratings and a brief synopsis of the plot. Titles are grouped by genre, interest and suggestions based on previous selections, all with a heavy emphasis on the lighter side of popular fiction. The audio player is austere but functional, with a timeline slider, play/pause and a 30-second skip function but little else. Performance is snappy and sound playback is crisp and free of artifacts or stutter, even under low bandwidth conditions. Minor glitches in text rendering on the website seem more like growing pains than problems, but mobile site code, as tested on an Epic 4G Android 2.3 based smartphone, has more serious page layout issues that impair function on occasion, including interface elements that scroll erratically or make precise adjustments on the touchscreen difficult. Given the pace of development for the site, expect these wrinkles to be ironed out quickly, however.

Streaming services live or die on the strength of the catalog they offer, and Audiobooks.com does a fair job at keeping things interesting. While popular titles and bestsellers are well-represented overall, there are plenty of omissions, some of them curious. I rarely found exact title matches for my genre queries, but I was able to find similar quality fiction and nonfiction that scratched the same itch. Rex Stout was nowhere to be found in the mystery section, but there was plenty of Agatha Christie and Arthur Conan Doyle to stand in. George R.R. Martin was similarly absent in fantasy, but Robert E. Howard was nicely represented with more than just Conan the Barbarian—in fact, with new recordings I'd never heard prior to seeing them listed here. There are also an enormous number of Star Trek books, some four dozen, in the Science Fiction section. That's a lot of Shatner! For Trek purists, this may be reason enough alone to take a look. Non-Fiction books are fairly well represented as well, with a nice cross section of histories, biographies, science books and so forth to keep you awake nights when Ian Fleming won't do. Fewer abridged titles would be appreciated, however.

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To call CraftArtist a digital scrapbook tool is like calling Martha Stewart a scrapbooker: Both the queen of crafts and this free program are so much more. Yes, you can create digital art akin to scrapbook pages, but also cards, certificates, posters, even place setting cards--all with drag-and-drop simplicity.

With a digikit theme in hand, you can upload common image files (JPEG, PNG, or TIFF), choose a template, and easily put together professional-looking designs with drag-and-drop ease. CraftArtist automatically adds a layer for each digikit item you add, and you can easily resize or move each item.

CraftArtist Compact uses tools familiar to both Serif PhotoPlus X5 and DrawPlus X5, and it's just as detailed a program. If you are a practiced digital artist, even with the Compact version of CraftArtist, you can achieve some pretty stunning results in minutes, with a few exceptions.

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Goodreads is an independent online community for book lovers, with a powerful, Netflix-like recommendation engine helping you find new and interesting books to read. Goodreads is similar to the Amazon-owned Shelfari community in that it is all about books, but it offers a very different take on the subject--so much so, that you might want to keep accounts on both websites. Membership is required, but free.

When you rate a book favorably at Goodreads, the site pops open a short list of books similar to it. When I liked Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, Goodreads suggested The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, a book that I indeed want to read. Other recommendations felt similarly accurate.

Much like in Netflix, you can mark a book as "want to read," rate it (only if you already read it), or click "Not interested," which is a tiny link under the rating stars. Rating a book or adding it to your wishlist is a simple, one-click affair. This is very different from Shelfari, where adding a book to your collection opens a multi-step wizard that can take a couple of minutes to step through.

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If you're a voracious reader, you probably know this feeling: You just finished a great read and are dying to talk to someone about it, but nobody around you ever read that particular book. If this ever happened to you, you may like Shelfari (free), an Amazon-related community for book lovers and authors.

Individual book listings are where Shelfari really shines. These days, just about every online store features crowd-sourced reviews and ratings. Shelfari sets itself apart by allowing users to add and edit many details about each book, such as a summary, a list of characters with names and descriptions, quotes, settings and locations, and more. There is even a special section for the book's first sentence. The result is almost like a purpose-built Wikipedia just for books: It is no wonder Amazon chose to tap Shelfari for its Shelfari Extras feature in the Kindle for PC application.

Having so much information available about every book can also cause spoilers. Shelfari tries to mitigate the risk by providing a "show spoilers" link next to the synopsis, and a spoiler warning next to the summary. Still, you may not want to delve too deeply into the details prior to actually reading the book. For example, if you look at the listing for Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, you will see that the very first character listed is a bit of a spoiler (don't look if you haven't read the book).

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I own a house that isn't quite the home of my dreams. It has plenty of potential, but just needs some help living up to what it could be. The same could be said of Punch Software's Home & Landscape Design NexGen 3, a $50 application that allows both novices and experienced users to design and redesign living spaces, both indoors and out.

Home & Landscape Design includes an extensive set of tools for customizing the look of the home you've designed, which allows you to see your house in a new -- or different -- light. You can add furniture, change wall colors and floor coverings, and alter the lighting. It took me some time to learn how to use all of these features, though, and even after spending plenty of time using the software's extensive help videos and tips, I never felt as though I had mastered it.

Like its HGTV rival, Home & Landscape Design does, as promised, let you design or redesign an exterior space too. I found its exterior landscaping features a bit easier to use than those on the HGTV product, and while the customization options are extensive, they're also somewhat difficult to master. I thought I had created a realistic reproduction of the retaining wall in my front yard using the software's 2D view, but when I switched to 3D, I realized that I had created a wall that dwarfed my entire home. I also attempted to create a double-wide driveway, like the one at my house, but instead found myself with a figure 8-shaped path that didn't come close to resembling anything I've seen in real-life.

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I watch a lot of HGTV, and I'm always impressed when the network's designers whip open a laptop and reveal an entirely redesigned living space, as if by magic. I was hoping to tap into a little of that magic with HGTV Home & Landscape Platinum Suite Version 3, a $50 buy-only application designed to allow novices like me to create interior and exterior plans for a new house or a redesign of an existing one.

Several hours and one uncompleted kitchen design later, I'm still waiting for the magic to kick in. Home & Landscape Platinum Suite may be designed for novices, but it requires a sizable learning curve. Even after watching video tutorials and perusing the 672-page user manual, I still find some aspects of the software confusing. But that is, in large part, because this low-priced application offers many, many features.

I used the HGTV software to create my dream house, based on nothing more than a design in my head. The experience was fun, though it took a bit of time, especially when it came to adding doors, windows, and interior design elements, like fireplaces. The result was impressive, especially when viewed with the application's 3D capability.

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I'm not an architect or an interior designer, but I sure like to pretend I am. I have plenty of ideas about how to improve my house, especially its 1970s-era kitchen. That's why I'm having so much fun with Ikea's Home Planner, a free, cloud-based application that lets me design the kitchen of my dreams--as long as it's filled with Ikea products, of course.

When you begin a new project, you can choose to start from scratch, with a bare room,or, if that option seems too intimidating, you can opt to start with one of Ikea's pre-designed spaces. Luckily, designing a project from scratch isn't too difficult. You start by selecting the room shape, and Ikea includes enough options-- including those with indents and diagonal cutouts--to satisfy the needs of most people. You can adjust the size of your walls, but Ikea's measurements rely on the metric system, so if you're in the US, you'll have to get your meter stick out or be ready to do the conversions on your own.

Once the walls are in place, you add your windows and doors. You can click from a list of options (such as interior and exterior doors or interior openings); so many are available that I started to feel slightly overwhelmed. I felt even more so when it was time to add the real meat of the kitchen: cabinets, shelves, and appliances. The Ikea Home Planner is a lot like a digital version of the Ikea catalog, allowing you to choose between built-in cabinetry and free-standing items with names like Bjursta and Udden. If you find yourself lost in the endless options that the catalog provides--to say nothing of a visit to an actual Ikea store--you may find your head spinning as you try to decide whether you should use Tyda handles and a birch veneer, and if your handles look better on the right or the left.

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I'm all for saving energy, especially if it means saving money on my utility bills. But I'm not sure that Energy Saving (€20, 14-day free trial), an application designed to help you monitor and reduce your use of energy and other resources, can really help with that task.

Once you get past all of those options, you're finally able to get Energy Saving up and running. The software features a decent interface: it isn't exactly elegant, but it's plenty user friendly. It includes options for tracking the use of power, water, gas, and heating oil. As you click on each of these options, Energy Saving guides you through the process of creating the records you need to begin tracking consumption. My biggest complaint, though, is that the application lacks any real customization. For example, my water bill presents the per-unit cost in cubic feet, but Energy Saving only allows me to enter the per-gallon rate. (Which is strange, too, since this is a European application with a decided European feel, as it reminds me to enter the VAT when entering prices.)

Energy Saving's handling of heating oil is a bit confusing, too, as it asks me for the "Filling Date" and "New Level" of my oil tank. After a filling, the oil tank is full, so I entered the full capacity as the new level. But it later asks me for the full capacity of the tank and the amount paid for a filling. It calculates the per-gallon charge based on that full capacity number, which results in an incorrect per-gallon price. It should ask me how many gallons of oil were added and the overall price to come up with the correct figure.

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One of the biggest challenges in distributing digital content is to make it easier for people to consume legally rather than illegally. When it comes to e-books, this gets even trickier; e-book files are much smaller than video or music files, so they can be downloaded much faster. Safari Bookshelf (various subscription plans, starting at $10/month) is a bid to make it easier, faster, and more productive to consume electronic books online legally rather than download them.

"Slots" are basically places your virtual shelf has for books. Once you choose to read a book, it takes up one slot on your shelf, and must stay there for at least one month. Once that month elapses, you can swap it out for another book. Slots are a good way to offer the service at a reduced price, but they also make it much less useful.

The Unlimited Access plan does away with the concept of slots and lets you read any and all books, but you still must read them online, using a browser (Safari also offers an iPad app and a mobile-friendly version of the site). If you're more interested in downloading e-books for offline reading, both the unlimited and limited plans offer download "tokens." You get five tokens every month, which you can use to download chapters (a chapter usually costs one token). You can also buy extra tokens for $2 each.

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If you need to balance your books but you have trouble finding time to record everything you earn and spend, try Hello Wallet. This free app syncs with online accounts and lets you flag spending as "wish I hadn’t," "glad I did," "had to," and so forth, so that you can identify expenditures to eliminate in the future. The site walks you through budget setup and notes how much, on average, other people in your city with your income spend in each ex­­pense category.

--Megan Geuss

Part budgeting tutorial and part money management guide, the intuitive You Need a Budget program for Windows walks you through setup and fund allocation, helping you add accounts and project spending in dozens of categories. YNAB then maintains a running tab of your spending, with graphs that illustrate how much you've spent over the months and how your net worth has progressed. Security-conscious users will appreciate that YNAB can’t automatically download activity from your bank account. You can import OFX, QFX, and QIF files into the ledger, but YNAB encourages self-reporting because that approach forces you to think more concretely about your spending habits.

You can try out You Need A Budget for free, but it costs $60 to keep. The price of admission also buys you entry into YNAB forums and financial-planning classes, where you can glean advice from experts. Mac and iPhone versions are available as well.

Note: The Download link takes you to the vendor's website, where you can obtain a trial of the software.

--Megan Geuss

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What Is It?

Basically, Google Wallet is a mobile payment system that will store credit cards, loyalty cards and even gift cards using an Android app on your smartphone (Note: to start, only the Nexus S 4G on Sprint will be compatible). After it's installed and all set up, you will just tap your phone on a PayPass reader when you check out at a participating store. Payment and loyalty program information are instantly transmitted via the phone's Near Field Communication chip.

As Google describes it on the Wallet website, "our intention is that Google Wallet will be an open mobile wallet holding all the cards and coupons you keep in your leather wallet today."

How Does It Work?

Unlike many of Google's other projects, Wallet is far from open, at least at the start. It depends entirely on partnerships with credit card companies and merchants, not to mention the presence of an NFC chip in a phone and a Pay Pass reader at checkout.

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