Reviews

WindowsBlinds 7 skins Windows. Not the way a culinary wizard peels a grape, but in replacing the visual elements with a skin. In other words, it changes the look of the interface, including the colors, windows elements such as scroll bars and tabs, fonts, etc. You don't even have to be particularly creative--WindowBlinds comes with a number of looks or "skins" that you can simply select, including a Windows 8 skin. If those don't satisfy, vendor Stardock has over 500 available at wincustomize.com.

The WindowBlinds interface is easy to understand and use.WindowBlinds is separately downloadable element of the $50 Object Desktop, Stardock's collection of utilities that customizes Windows even further, changing not only the look of Windows, but the way it functions. WindowBlinds has a first-run tutorial that will teach you how to use the program, though it should be intuitive to anyone who's ever tweaked the Windows interface using the Appearance dialog. It has separate controls for transparency and adjusting each element of the look individually.

Zumobi Network's SportingNews NCAA Football (NCAAF) Android app is perfect for keeping up with your favorite NCAA football teams.

The app's main screen is clean and simple. At the top is a small box that shows the latest stats for your selected teams, alongside a gear-shaped button that takes you to the Settings menu.

Getting a new computer is a bit like moving into a new house: At first, there's plenty of room for everything. Then, a few months or years go by, and you find yourself surrounded by random clutter, wondering where all that free space went. I may not have much advice on de-cluttering your house, but if it's your hard drive space you're looking to reclaim, TreeSize Free can provide you with the answers you need.

TreeSize Free shows drive contents as a list sorted by size, with simple and clear bars indicating relative size.TreeSize Free is as straightforward as software comes. You don't even have to install it if you don't want to: Maker JAM Software offers an official portable version at the company website. To compile an accurate report, TreeSize Free must have access to all files on the drive you're scanning. For this reason, it launchers under an Administrator account by default. Once you're in the application, just pick a drive to scan, and let TreeSize do its thing. It took about a minute to scan a 465GB drive with 207GB of occupied space spread across 195,000 files. Free competitor SpaceSniffer took roughly the same amount of time to scan the same drive.

There's been much controversy over mobile OS security, especially where Android is concerned. With 47% of the smartphone market in Q4 of 2011, according to ABI Research, it's no wonder that Android is getting attention.

Its openness fuels adoption by smartphone manufacturers and wireless carriers, aids in mobile innovation, and helps bring more free apps. But some, like those who develop security apps, think its openness also makes it an easier target for malware writers and cybercriminals.

Pulsus is a low-key, minimalistic game of particles. It is marketed for iOS these days (both for the iPad and the iPhone/iPod Touch), but its original Flash version is still online, available for free play.

Pulsus has a very lean aesthetic, and shuns the flashy graphics many modern games strive for.In many ways, Pulsus reminds me of Auditorium, another Flash game. Like in Auditorium, there is a particle emitter, goals which the particles must hit, and forces that you need to manipulate to make this happen.

HP's Folio 13, the first of a new product line designed to appeal to both mainstream and business users, isn't the thinnest or lightest Ultrabook around. But unless you're a fanatic about such things, it will probably fill your needs better than its thinner and lighter competitors. It offers excellent performance and battery life, a fetchingly minimalist design, and a typing experience that thinner units can't match.

Our $899 (as of February 20, 2012) consumer configuration of the Folio 13 revolves around an Intel Core i5-2467M, 4GB of 1333 MHz DDR3, and a performance-enhancing 128GB Samsung solid-state drive. The display is flawlessly backlit and crisp, at 13.3 inches with a resolution of 1366 by 768. The $999 business version adds features such as a TPM (Trusted Platform Module) for security, a cleaner software image, and Windows 7 Professional rather than Windows 7 Home Premium.

I could start off by saying that Bejeweled 2 is a match-three game--but really, Bejeweled 2 is the match-three game.

For those of you who have never played a match-three game, the rules are pretty simple: Bejeweled 2 presents you with a board full of multicolored gems, and you have to swap adjacent gems to form rows of three or more matching gems. Depending on which mode you're playing, you're either trying to meet a quota of gem-matches or attempting to beat the clock. If you get stuck, Bejeweled 2 will point out two swappable gems (you can also use the hint button, though the game will dock some of your time if you do so).

Given Ashton Kutcher's prominence on Twitter, it should come as no surprise that the actor has (with the help of UberMedia) launched his very own Twitter app. Called A.plus, the easy-to-use application offers a decent feature set. But be warned: If your tolerance for all things Ashton Kutcher is low (and I must confess mine is) chances are good that you will quickly tire of seeing his mug and his name plastered across your desktop.

Like many Twitter management tools, including TweetDeck (long considered the trendsetter in this category), A.plus features a column-style interface. Its red accents and background are attractive, and I found its overall look more appealing than TweetDeck's steely gray, all-business look.

Folks who are unhappy with TweetDeck's decision to eliminate support for LinkedIn should take a look at Sobees Desktop. This slick-looking application offers an easy way to manage Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn accounts. Still in beta, this "social media manager" still has some kinks to work out, but shows plenty of potential.

Sobees Desktop lets you customize its layout so you can see the information you want, where you want it to be.Sobees Desktop features a customizable layout that you can easily tailor to your liking. You can decide how much information to see--whether that's one social media account or three, plus a search field and an RSS feed--and how you'd like to see it. You can choose side-by-side columns, top-and-bottom boxes, or a combination of both. And it's easy to switch between different layouts until you find one that meets your needs.

TweetDeck bills itself as a Twitter management app for power users, and this app has long been a favorite of those folks looking to manage multiple Twitter accounts. But its latest version is lacking some of the appeal that made earlier versions of this app a perennial favorite.

With its latest update, TweetDeck is now available in two versions: a Web-based version that runs on Apple's Safari or Google's Chrome browser and a desktop counterpart (which no longer runs on Adobe Air, as past versions did). The versions sync nicely, so that the information you enter when using the Web version appears when you log into the desktop version, and vice versa.