Photoscape is an excellent free alternative to commercial photo editing programs like Photoshop. It includes a wide variety of filters, tools and special effects that help you touch up and edit your digital images.

Blending one image over another to create a combined image is a great way to add an artistic effect to some of your photos. It's also convenient for people who take multiple photos in quick succession and want to add certain objects in one photo to another with a similar backdrop. With Photoscape, this is quite simple to do, once you learn the process...

Skitch, the popular image annotation and screenshot tool for Mac, is now available as an iPad app. That means more possibilities for personalizing photos and sharing with friends and family, no matter where you happen to be.

In August Evernote purchased Skitch and has subsequently been adding features to the program to prep it for its release on iPad. This version of Skitch has a useful home screen that gives you a multitude of different options. You can edit an image on your iPad or snap a new photo, capture a screenshot, annotate a map to make directions even more understandable or even just sketch on a completely blank canvas. Skitch also has its own web browser with handy features that make marking up webpages quick and simple.

In addition, Skitch for iPad has numerous drawing tools that are all easy to make use of. You can move around objects on the image with your finger, draw arrows to highlight certain aspects of the picture, add in shape or text, crop the canvas as you like and use your finger for freehand drawing. When you're done, you can save your new drawings and annotations to Evernote and share via email, Twitter and more.

Best of all, Skitch for iPad is completely free and very easy to use. Sharing and editing images on the go has never been easier.

2011 has been another great year for iOS apps. Despite the fact that Apple’s mobile platform fell behind Android in overall popularity this year, innovation in iOS development is better than ever.

The Apple operating system is still where cutting edge applications are born, and this year’s launch of iOS 5 and the iPhone 4S device have fueled app developer’s imaginations even more. Here’s our pick of the best iPhone and iPad apps of 2011, based on what impressed us out of the hundreds of new apps we tested this year.

Garageband

For me, Garageband is the most accomplished iOS app of all time. It allows you to create impressive musical compositions without any technical know-how, through an interface that’s effortless to navigate. The software's Smart Instruments, including piano, bass, guitar and drums, serve to help you create music that sounds like it's been played by a pro.

First released alongside the iPad 2 in March as one of the flagship apps for the tablet, this music-making app has since found its way onto the iPhone, too.

Price: $4.99

iMovie

As with Garageband, iMovie is another piece of Mac software that makes the transition from desktop to handheld really well. The app makes smart use of the multi-touch gestures to allow you to add videos, photos, music and sound effects, and piece them together. You can choose to add footage from your camera roll, or capture video directly through iMovie. The results can then be shared via YouTube.

Price: $4.99

Looking for high tech gift ideas this Holiday Season? There are some really cool iOS toys out now that will impress anyone with an iPhone or an iPad.

Here are my top six iOS gift ideas for the holidays. All of them consist of an app, plus a toy or gadget that interacts with the application in some way. They all serve to highlight how far augmented reality applications have come in the last year.

Disney AppMates

Fans of the Cars movies will love these innovative iPad toys from Disney. Put the toy cars on your tablet and move them around and you’ll interact with the virtual world that appears in the app. The Cars characters are the first in Disney’s new line of AppMates, which could revolutionize the way we play games on our devices. Price: toys from $12.99, app free

Want to make your own cartoons on your iPhone or iPad? Install Dink on your iOS device and you’re just a few steps away from becoming the next Walt Disney or Tim Burton.

Dink, available for 99 cents in the App Store, is a surprisingly powerful animation app that allows you to make your own cartoons quickly and with little effort. Dink’s user interface is a bit confusing to start with though, so I’ve put together a quick guide to help you get started in this fun application.

Step One: Create a new animation

Dink’s front screen doesn’t make it completely clear where to start. What you actually need to do is to click the ‘+’ button to dive into a new animation.

Cloud gaming has been a huge buzz word for gaming both for PC, console, and in mobile.  The shine of excitement has dulled over the past year despite the rol-lout of the hyped up OnLive cloud gaming system.

On smaller fronts, cloud gaming is slowly growing.  As well as OnLive, there is Apple's iOS 5 introducing the iCloud, and Gaiaki bringing gaming into the cloud.  Their work has laid a lot of the foundation of how cloud gaming is slowly seeping into the mainstream in carefully planned steps.

Riot Games’ Brandon Beck moderated a panel with David Perry (Gaikai), Brian Prince (Microsoft), and David Wilson (GameStop); all of who are working with cloud in different ways.  Their opinions and ideas explain how cloud gaming is affecting the industry right now:

Under Steve Jobs, Apple developed has lots of excellent software, some of which has had a huge influence on technology and how we use computers. This isn't to say other companies haven't been just as influential, but it's hard to underestimate the Cupertino company's contribution. There are other great Apple programs, but I want to focus just on the ones I think have been game changers: Apple OS, iTunes and Garage Band.

Mac OS and iOS.

Right from the start, Mac OS was important. In Steve Jobs's own words, 'Windows just copied the Mac' in the 80s. That might be a slight exaggeration, but from the early days of Windows, Mac OS was clearly an influence. The current generation, Mac OS X has introduced numerous innovations over the years, notably the ability to be suspended and restarted very quickly. This makes it ideal for laptops, as the explosion of Macbooks has proved. Anyone who works on OS X and Windows will also note how much better Apple's Spotlight works when searching for files and applications. Unlike Windows, which looks like it's been designed by committee, OS X looks like something that has been built from the ground up with a singular focus.

The iPhone introduced us to iOS in 2007, and is now already up to version 5. This has revolutionized pocket computing, and the app icons arrangement has clearly influenced Android. The App Store has quickly become a hugely successful eco system, the first large scale example of a closed system for purchasing and installing software.

Spending time at GDC Online 2011 was interesting.  While the conference is much smaller than the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, the specific focus on all things online offered a lot of interesting content and new technologies to learn about.

Digital Harmony Games’ introduction of Dragons vs Unicorns might have been my last meeting before I flew back to San Francisco, but it showed off something I have been waiting for in mobile games for a while now.

True real-time cross platform gaming

September 26 and 27 brought Mobilize 2011 presented by GigaOM, to San Francisco where big names in the evolving mobile market came together to talk about the near future of mobile.

Every developer, publisher, and company arrived with ideas of where the mobile market would be heading in 2012 and years beyond.  Thoughts about the migration of users to smartphones and the rise of HTML 5 were big topics of discussion.

During many of the sessions I attended, speakers discussed their opinions of the landscape of the mobile environment and how they were experimenting with the influx of new users across Android and iOS.

Here’s a little bit of what I learned during the two day event.

A couple years ago, the mobile market only really had two types of apps and games: free or paid. Now users are presented with free, free with ads, free with in-app purchases, paid, paid with free updates, and paid with paid updates among others.

That difference has created a new industry. BulkyPix's, COO and VP of Sales and Marketing, Vincent Dondaine answered some questions about development, games, and commerce.

Microsoft has unveiled a few interesting details about the future File Explorer in Windows 8. The most outstanding new feature is, undoubtedly, the addition of the ribbon interface.

Explorer in Windows 3.1

Explorer in Windows 8

The decision to apply a ribbon to the Windows default file manager hasn’t been taken lightly. As explained on its blog, Microsoft has done a lot of research about the most commonly used commands in Explorer, and the way users access them. After studying the results of this analysis, ribbon was clearly the best choice for the new interface in Explorer, for several reasons: it lets you display the most important commands in prominent locations while also exposing loads of other minor tools, organizes commands conveniently in handy groups and it follows the design line opened by Office and Microsoft Paint, making it easier for people to get used to the new interface.

Is this the beginning of the end for Flash? Adobe has launched a preview version of Edge - their new web motion and interaction design tool for animated content creation using HTML5, JavaScript, and CSS3.

However, Adobe has stated that it is not a direct replacement for Flash although it offers most of the design features available in Adobe Flash Professional. Edge is based on the WebKit rendering engine and takes full advantage of the latest web development standards as Adobe seek to find a solution to Flash related issues across platforms and manufacturers such as the banning of Flash by Apple on iPhones.

Adobe Edge allows you to add animations to HTML documents and add CSS styles to SVG, PNG, JPG and GIF files. The preview version is free to download and use on both Mac and Windows and is continually being updated with new tools and features. You can follow the latest developments and news on Facebook and Twitter.

Download Adobe Edge here for Mac and Windows.

Google is on fire: in just a few days they've launched their own social network Google+, announced the rebranding of Picasa and Blogger to Google Photos and Google Blogs respectively, and slightly redesigned a few of of their online services (such as search and calendar). The new design will presumably be slowly rolled out to all Google services in the near future, but you can have a sneak peek - at least in Gmail:

To preview Gmail's new look you have to click the gear icon on the top right corner and select the Mail settings option.

Then click the Themes tab and browse down to the bottom of the page. You'll see two Preview themes: standard and dense.  The first one uses the same space between text lines that Gmail has been using up to now, while the second one leaves more space between lines and makes it all cleaner.

Whatever theme you pick, Gmail will immediately apply the new design. This is how my inbox looked with the standard Preview theme:

This week saw Microsoft release its Internet Explorer 10 Platform Preview 2. The preview allows you to check out IE 10, which will come with Windows 8, expected next year.

It's important to note that a platform preview is not the same as a Beta release. Internet Explorer 10 Platform Preview 2 allows you to test out some of the new technical implementations in the browser, but it is a long way from a fully functional, user friendly browser (insert sarcastic comment about Internet Explorer here).

What you can do with Internet Explorer 10 Platform Preview 2 is check out a range of tests designed to show off upcoming capabilities. There are speed demos, HTML5 demos, graphics demos and browser demos. The app opens on Microsoft's Test Drive page, which allows you to easily play around with all the demos, and also features a user guide. You will notice there's no address bar - you can actually browser wherever you want on the web, but to navigate you have to click CTRL+O which opens a window so you can enter a URL.

Internet Explorer 10 Platform Preview 2 is free to download, and requires Windows 7.

If the images in your photo album are dull and boring, maybe it’s time to spice them up! You don’t need to be a Photoshop guru or known all GIMP menus by heart; there are dozens of easy photo editing tools – available for free or in trial versions – that help you apply eye-catching effects to your images without requiring any experience in photo editing.

Want to add a Polaroid effect to your photo, or turn it into a pencil sketch? What about a pop-art effect like a painting by Andy Warhol? With this collection of apps to edit and retouch images, the only limit is your imagination!

eezPix - photo editing for everyone

eezPix is an easy-to-use, yet complete photo editor that includes all the tools you need to work with your images: adjusting brightness and contrast, converting from one format to another, adding a frame  or inserting a watermark are some of its possibilities.

All the effects included in eezPix are highly customizable. In addition to that, the program supports working in batches – adding the same effect to multiple images at the same time.

Tint Photo Editor - make color stand out

Tint Photo Editor is a photo retouching tool that specializes in one single effect, but does it really well. It highlights one color in your image while keeping the rest in black and white, thus achieving an impressive result.

Again, it’s very easy to use. Tint Photo Editor analyzes your image in search for all the colors used in it. All you need to do is choose which one you want to emphasize.