Launch the average painting tool and you’re generally confronted with a stack of options covering brushes and color, outlines, fills and more. Which is fine, sometimes, but if you just want to be creative then all this functionality can get in your way.

Freehand Painter is, well, simpler. Much simpler. Launch the program and you can start drawing right away, with your finger if you like (you can use a mouse as well, but it’s designed for a touch-sensitive screen). And any other tweaks you might want to make will only take a moment.

There are no operating systems that are free from irritations and, despite its largely warm receptions, Apple’s latest OS X release, Mountain Lion is no exception. When Lion released Lion Tweaks was on hand to allow users to tweak and customize the OS and there is now an updated version available in the form of Mountain Tweaks. This is a free tool that enables you to change numerous settings to tailor OS X to suite your needs.

Tweaking tools have always been incredibly popular, but it is usually Windows users that reap the benefits of utilities designed to allow for easy changes to regular and hidden changes to the operating system. Lion Tweaks was an impressive tweaker made available for OS X Lion, and this latest release sees the app updates to add support for Mountain Lion. Mountain Tweaks can in fact be used under both Lion and Mountain Lion, but there are some settings specific to the latter.

Another day, another tech product launch, and all those numbers that go with it. We just love numbers, don’t we? And generally the bigger the better. (Except in cases where they’re supposed to be small, obviously.)

The numbers in hardware and software specs are useful tools, and it’s true that bigger numbers are often better. But those same numbers carry hidden dangers, too, and, like a burger that’s too big to be good for you,  that extra dollop of cream on your cake -- or the Italian town of San Gimignano, where each family just had to build a tower taller than all the others -  we can become addicted to the figures without thinking about what they all really means.  So let’s not blindly give every latest marketing prophet his profit, but consider our own health first.

Have you considered the HTC One X but found the price to be too high? The phone now is a whole lot cheaper. AT&T slashed the price in half -- by $100 from $199.99 to $99.99 on a two-year contract.

The One X comes with Android 4.0.3 Ice Cream Sandwich out of the box, but the Taiwanese company is working on delivering the latest, Jelly Bean, and confirms to BetaNews that they will upgrade the One X (One XL internationally) as well as other devices such as the One S to Android 4.1. It's great news for HTC owners as well as future buyers. Jelly Bean is a very attractive offering with welcomed improvements and nice new features. The catch: HTC offers no upgrade timeline for when the phones will receive the newest Android version.

It’s the end of another month and the end of another busy week of software releases. If you’ve been too caught up with other things to keep an eye on the titles that have been hitting the download servers over the past seven days, this roundup will bring you up to speed.

Tomahawk 0.5.5 is a social media player that enables you to play your local music collection as well as tracks from the web, and also enables you to browse through the collections of your friends. If you’re keen to share your musical taste with your friends, look no further than ON AIR 4.0.0.834, which will automatically update your Skype status with the track you are currently listening to.

Apple recently made its first ever presentation at the Black Hat security conference, and despite being one of the most expected and highly anticipated moments of the event, the Cupertino, Calif.-based corporation hasn’t made the best possible initial impression. The audience was left somewhat disappointed, only to have Apple follow up a major security acquisition.

The keynote was presented by the manager of Apple’s platform security team, Dallas De Atley, who reiterated the iOS security paper that Apple released two months ago. The problem stems from the fact there were higher expectations for Apple's debut: updated information on steps the Cuppertino, Calif.-based corporation is taking to resolve their security issues and concerns would have been of far greater interest, and it would have shown how seriously Apple takes security.

Google has posted Jelly Bean 4.1.1 factory images for the Nexus lineup on their developers website. It's reason for modders needing to restore the factory default image to rejoice. Unlike other Android devices, the Nexus lineup benefits from Google's direct support and timely updates as well -- Galaxy Nexus received Jelly Bean 4.1 about two weeks ago.

Jelly Bean factory images are available for all Nexus devices, starting with the Nexus S up to the latest released, the Nexus 7. It just shows that Google is committed to updating its lineup of branded smartphones, even after almost two years since the release of the Samsung-made Google Nexus S.

In July of 2011, Bryan Halfpap waited for his return flight home to Maryland. A network systems security professional working for a natural resource refiner and energy provider, he had just finished up the week of events at the DefCon security conference in Las Vegas.

Slumped in his waiting chair, tired, bored, and with time to kill, he popped open his laptop. Audio and visual confirmations of open wireless networks lit up his computer. McCarran International Airport, the gateway to the neon-colored pleasure island that is Las Vegas, had free Wi-Fi. For whatever reason, Halfpap wanted to kill some time by getting to know the airport he was sitting in.

In May 2010, Google hit the headlines when it was revealed that street mapping cars had accidentally collected around 600GB of payload data from unsecured wireless networks around the globe.

The news caused a privacy storm and led to legal actions in numerous countries. In the United Kingdom, the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) took a lenient approach, saying that while the activity “constituted a significant breach of the first principle of the Data Protection Act” it accepted Google’s explanation as to how collection had occurred. The agency was willing to take no action, provided the search giant deleted the data it had captured.

Even though communication and information technologies have made constant communication
between clients, coworkers, and supervisors even easier, the Bureau of Labor Statistics last month said remote work and telecommuting has actually remained flat since the mid 1990's, and that only around 24 percent of employed Americans said they work from home even just a few hours a week.

The U.S. Department of Education, meanwhile, found comparable statistics for students engaged in distance learning and Web-based education. In 2009, twenty percent of undergrad students took an online or distance learning course of some sort.

After the release of the most recent comScore Media Metrix data, any assertion that Google+ is a "ghost town" can be promptly dismissed. Not only is Google's new social network more popular than ever, its number of unique visitors topped more than 110 million each month, and the data doesn’t even take into account tablet or mobile phone usage.

The comScore data reveals that the number of monthly U.S. Google+ unique visitors increased from 15.229 million in November 2011 to 27.732 million in June 2012. Over a seven-month period, the social network has seen an increase of 82 percent on the number of unique visitors. To put it into perspective, 27.732 million is 12.53 percent of the total U.S. unique visitors.

Like I wrote two days ago, "iPhone sales are slowing", all while Samsung's increase. Today, IDC released calendar second-quarter smartphone shipments, and Samsung and ZTE took share from every other major manufacturer, including Apple. Let's be clear: iPhone doesn't typically lose share. It's a persistent gainer. Well, that is, until now.

Apple shipments into the channel increased by 27.5 percent year over year to 26 million units from 20.4 million. But global market share fell to 16.9 percent from 18.8 percent a year earlier. Meanwhile, Samsung smartphone shipments surged 172.8 percent to 50 million units from 18.4 million. Market share rose to 32.6 percent from 17 percent a year earlier. Quarter on quarter, Apple share fell from 24.2 percent, erasing most of the gains following the iPhone 4S launch last autumn. Meanwhile, Samsung rose from 29.1 percent.

One of the new features of Office 2010 (yep that’s 2010) was the Outlook Social Connector. This addon brought with it the ability to display social network information within Outlook itself. It took a little while for developers to get on board but last time I checked you could download "providers" to integrate Facebook, LinkedIn, Windows Live and Xing data.

Well, Office 2013 is now with us, and the social connector has been improved further. You no longer need to download a specific "provider" for Facebook or LinkedIn. Simply sign in with your existing credentials and Outlook 2013 will pull through the relevant data.

Every PC owner will occasionally need to find out more about their system hardware, and Basic Hardware Inventory is a simple tool that will quickly display just about everything you might want.

This starts with the core ingredients that are essential to any system information tool: CPU model and speed, total RAM, hard drives and capacities, graphics card, monitor, network interfaces, motherboard model, BIOS type and date, and more.

Apple has agreed to purchase security firm AuthenTec for $356 million, a Thursday SEC filing from the Melbourne, Fla.-based company indicates. Apple is likely looking to bolster the security credentials of its products, and with the recent focus by hackers on Apple's products, that might be a good idea.

AuthenTec produces a variety of software and hardware-based security solutions, including fingerprint sensors. Its VPN security software is already included in smartphones and tablets from Samsung, and its DRM platform is used to protect streaming content within the HBO GO application.