create

If you have ever wanted to be able to create your own iPhone game, Piclings gets you a step farther, offering users a way to use their own photographs to make custom levels for Picazzo, a little flying Picling that must gather coins and special objects while avoiding buzzing enemies.

Piclings uses a floating joystick to control Picazzo as he flies his way around one of their several levels, or ones that you create. The Piclings custom level creation analyzes your selected photo and creates ledges and walls using lines within your picture.

The level creation technology seems to be … Read more

Links from Monday's episode of Loaded:

Google launches a group-texting service called Disco

YouTube offers Create to help you edit other people's videos into your own

Google is reportedly working with Citigroup and MasterCard to launch mobile payments on Android devices

Intel is taking a crack at the smartphone market

Amazon.com may be looking to launch a cloud locker service that would host and stream all of your music, photos, movies, and books

Wal-Mart will give you a $100 credit for your old Nintendo DS if you want to buy a new 3DS

A new concept gadget … Read more

Programs like automatic update checkers and "helper" apps create Windows services that on startup whether you use them or not. You can manage Windows services from the Windows Task Manager or Microsoft Management Console, but it can be tedious to turn services on and off that way. Mz Services Manager is a free tool that builds on Windows' native services management capabilities with custom services profiles. You can create special gaming profiles, or a home theater profile, or custom profiles optimized for specific software or processes, then save them and load them almost instantly.

Mz Services Manager's … Read more

Most people remember Daedalus, if they remember him at all, as the maker of the wings his son Icarus used to fly too close to the sun, but the Edison of the ancient world also constructed the notorious Labyrinth that trapped the Minotaur. He's a fitting namesake for Astrolog's Daedalus, a free program that creates and solves labyrinthine mazes in just about any geometric shape, in up to 16 dimensions, and viewable from a wide range of perspectives, including overhead and first-person 3D views. Really obsessive types can even create infinitely long fractal-based mazes with more than 1 … Read more

Contrary to popular belief, the creation of PDF files doesn't require expensive, complex software. There are plenty of utilities out there now that make PDF creation as simple as printing. Solid PDF Creator is one such program. This basic piece of software lets users create PDFs with little effort or expertise.

Solid PDF Creator is attractive and easy to navigate. Once the program is installed it appears as a printer in the Print menu of every program that has printing capabilities. Users simply select Solid PDF Creator instead of their default printer, and the program opens a dialog allowing … Read more

Books are here to stay, but paper is an endangered species. While libraries full of actual books won't be disappearing any time soon, electronic books like Amazon's Kindle have established a firm toehold in the market, a trend that will continue as more titles are published as e-books. That's where Visual Vision's eBookWriter Lite enters the story. It's a free tool for creating and publishing e-books, but it's not a compiler. It's a complete visual environment that requires no knowledge of coding to use, yet it creates single-source-file e-books that can be opened … Read more

Some fonts are better suited for certain projects than others, but it's not always easy to preview and compare fonts to make the best decision. FontViewOK is a lightweight font viewer that lets you do exactly that. It's nothing fancy, but it's a great way to easily see what fonts look like in a variety of styles.

The program's interface is plain, consisting mostly of just a list of fonts. You can enter custom text with which to preview the fonts, and can also see what the fonts look like bolded, italicized, struck-through, and underlined, as … Read more

Excel's built-in plotting capability can only create one left-right axis per plot. Office Expander's Multy_Y is an add-in for Microsoft Excel that creates multiple Y axes on the left side of plots using existing Excel charts. Each Excel chart appears as a new Y axis on the selected Multy_Y plot, whereas the plot itself is depicted on a separate Excel chart. It can generate automatically formatted plots from XY-scatter plots. You can plot time factors on the X axis of Multy_Y's plots, too. The fully customizable plots created with Multy_Y will display in any Excel edition, not … Read more