FREE APPS!

Picnik

Picnik is a great free app, with a lot of features, HOWEVER, Picnik is shutting down as of April 19. The company merged with Google and will now be a part of Google+. Its difficult to see what this merger will look like, but because of the change Picnik users are being granted free access to premium features and a full refund if they purchased a premium membership. Aside from the impending shut down, Picnik has lot to offer when it comes to photo editing. You can add text, clip art or "stickers", frames, and make your own touch-ups. All of these features offer the ability to change size, direction, flip, and much more. I posted an example of one of the photos I played with. In my picture I added text, a few stamps and increased the sharpness of the photo. I was also able to "tan" the skin and add highlights to hair. When I was finished editing my photo, I was given the option to post it to Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Photobucket, or save it to my computer. I did experience a few technical difficulties while editing, the program seemed to freeze in some instances, and a few of the touch-ups were a bit extreme and made the people in the pictures look fake by over-correcting problems. Regardless, I would definitely recommend this program, if it was sticking around, for a simple classroom or home editing program. It's definitely not a professional quality program that photographers would use.

ZOHO

Zoho has a lot of elements to offer it's users. There were so many different programs to try for business, productivity, and collaboration, I focused on two that I thought would be helpful to me. Zoho Writer and Zoho Show. I have already been using Zoho writer for the majority of the semester. I do not have Microsoft Word on my laptop, and it is WAY to expensive to purchase. A friend introduced me to Zoho Writer and i have to say it has been useful. While I do experience some difficulty with freezing and the spell check, for the most part Zoho Writer seems to work very well as a replacement for Microsoft Word. While some of the same problems exists for Zoho Show, it also proves to be very similar to Microsoft Powerpoint. The one option I found thatZoho Show offers is the ease of sharing. With the click of a button I was able to embed my Zoho Show into my blog for everyone to see. I would definitely recommend Zoho.com to anyone looking for inexpensive solutions for their Microsoft problems. Here's a quick slideshow of some of the features Zoho Show has to offer.