If you’re a huge fan of abstract wallpaper but you don’t have the software or the know-how to make one you’ll definitely want to try Flame, a web-based drawing tool that makes creating abstract doodles easy and fun.

Using Flame you can create a variety of shapes and patterns and the user interface is simple. You have a palette which is black by default, white is the only other option. You have an adjustable brush, customizable in size, softness, and other variables, and you can select your colors and the level of opacity and saturation.

One of the best ways to create really soft and flowing lines is to move the mouse quickly. The faster you move the mouse the “wider” the brush stretches and the softer and more diffuse the lines are. If you move the mouse slowly you get a laser-focused beam of intense color, move it quickly and you get a wide swath of gossamer-like color.

You can save your pictures to your computer, the default size is 1680px × 1050px with no ability to select other sizes—a feature we’d love to see implemented for creating crazy triple-screen wallpaper and other sizes. If you make a particularly awesome wallpaper, share it in the comments below. Have a neat tool for making your own wallpaper? We want to hear about that too.

Flame via download

We’ve been following the rumor mill avidly on Microsoft’s alleged “digital journal” device dubbed Courier, and today sees another spate of leaked images and details courtesy of Engadget.

The Courier is a hinged device that combines elements of a tablet, an e-reader, and a netbook (sans physical keyboard). It’s reported to be less an inch thick, slightly heavier than a pound and slightly larger than a 5×7 print when folded. Instead of running Windows 7, the Courier will run the mobile OS Windows Mobile 7 Series, with an NVIDIA Tegra 2 chip under the hood.

Other leaked features include handwriting recognition, cloud storage for all the data in the device (plus a way to integrate comments on shared items back into your journal), a built-in camera and headphone jack. Unfortunately, none of this is yet official from Microsoft itself, so everything including the loose “second half of 2010″ release date is still a bit speculative.

Nevertheless, the Courier is shaping up to be an exciting take from Microsoft on an Internet tablet meets e-book reader, particularly as both of those form factors continue to heat up. Check out more pics in the gallery over at Engadget (and if you missed it, the earlier leaked video) and let us know what you think of this device from what we “know” so far.

You’ve clearly made an educated decision in choosing the Firefox browser, so why not make further decisions about how it looks? As you may know, Firefox can give you a totally personalized browser experience, with plenty of options to customize its look and feel.

We’ve trawled the plethora of available add-ons, themes, and features to bring you ten great options to beautify your Mozilla-made browser — from super skins, to improved tabs, to better buttons. There are even a few kittens along the way.

Check out the options we’ve highlighted below and let us know in the comments any add-ons you currently use to make your browsing experience a bit more beautiful. After all, when it’s this easy, why settle for default?

1. Firefox Personas

Taking advantage of Firefox’s “Personas” feature is a really quick and easy way to spice up the basic look of your browser with skins that decorate the browser bar. Install the plug-in and you can chose from 35,000+ Personas that can be changed on a daily basis, or even just to suit your mood, with a super-simple click-through-and-choose process.

With so many options available, you can imagine there really is something for everyone as far as the skin designs go. They range from art, scenery, brands, and games to TV- and celeb-themed choices.

Cost: Free

2. ChromaTabs Plus

For those that think it’s the little things that add-up to make up the bigger picture, ChromaTabs offers one simple tool that will make your browser more colorful. This add-on makes the usually gray browser tabs colorful with a rainbow of shades by tinting each tab a different color depending on the website loaded. The coloring-in works automatically depending on the color of the site’s favicon, but if you’ve got the time, tabs can be assigned site-specific colors.

Cost: Free

3. Walnut for Firefox

Ideal for fans of retro style and reminiscent of your classic wood veneer, Walnut for Firefox gives your browser a wooden look and feel. Walnut is a complete skin redesign, which means that all windows, widgets, panels, and even other add-ons get the tree-themed look, kindly offering a more natural feel to your browsing experience.

Cost: Suggested donation of $4.99

4. about:kittens

If you think the presence of a cat is always going to improve matters, then about:kittens is the add-on for you. It somewhat randomly sticks a kitty in the “Help > About” box, chosen from the vast selection on kittenwar.com. No more boring “about box” logo pics to snoozify your browsing experience, as with this add-on, every about window will offer an adorable little kitty.

Cost: Free

5. Browser Backgrounds

As opposed to just spicing up the browser bar with imagery, this add-on lets you add an image to your browser background in the same way you can with your desktop background. You can choose from a vast selection of images offered within the add-on, or can pick to display your own photo, offering an even more personalized option.

Cost: Donation requested

6. PinkTheme

For just about the girliest browsing experience you could wish for, the PinkTheme add-on really does pink your browsing experience to the max. Look no further if you’re aiming to rouge-tint the online world, as well as see the Firefox user interface elements pinkified. There’s also extra pink modules, such as the pink search and the pink home. It’s basically all very pink indeed.

Cost: Suggested donation of $1.01

7. Canvas

We find it hard to believe you can’t find at least one of the over 35,000 browser skin Personas to like. But if you are all about personalization, then Canvas can help you out by letting you select any one of your own photographs as a background for your browser bar. You can add any photo from your PC, or any image from the web, giving you the option to have a familiar face greet you every time you go online.

Cost: Suggested donation of $2.99

8. Aero Big

If you don’t want to skin your browser but you’re seeking a fresh new look to brighten it up, Aero Big offers some funky, chunky buttons that will liven up Firefox with some fresh graphics for your browser bar. As well as super-sizing and coloring in the icons for all of the browser’s toolbar and context menu items, there are also icons for a number of extensions you might use.

Cost: Free

9. iPhox

If you are iPhone-mad, then iPhox (“if Firefox and the iPhone had a kid together, this is what he would look like”) will iPhonify your browser so you can enjoy the Apple mobile look and feel while you’re at your desktop. The dev promises “the same familiar icons, toolbars, and menus of the iPhone, only instead of being on an amazing little handheld device, it can now be on your favorite browser.”

Cost: Free

10. NASA Night Launch

Looking a little like Darkle, this night-themed add-on is perfect for anyone looking to go to the dark side as far as browsing goes, with its NASA tie-in adding a little space ship chic. Said to have been inspired by the night launch of STS-116, the add-on can be installed as a simple dark theme with a dark toolbar, or after a few extra steps, with a choice of cool NASA toolbar images.

Cost: Suggested donation of $5

This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum

Web forms can be a great asset on your business site. They let you collect pertinent data and contact information from your visitors without exposing your direct e-mail address to the world. They also set specific boundaries on the type of data you receive from customers so that the information fits nicely into a spreadsheet or database as needed.

Building a web form used to require a bit of coding and “wiring” on the back end of your site. These days, there are some great free and low-cost resources on the web that make building and integrating forms into your business website a breeze.

1. Wufoo

Wufoo is a great web-based form generator with a very intuitive interface. Forms are extremely customizable with simple drag-and-drop commands and many style options.

The forms you create “live” on Wufoo, but they are fully embeddable into your own website or blog by pasting a bit of code. But what makes Wufoo especially useful is that your account on the site serves as a hub for all the data that flows into your forms.

While you can download and configure your form to function with your own database, you may not want to when you see all the great looking reports and widgets you can generate just by logging into your Wufoo account. By hosting your data with them, everything is DIY, and easily accessible, with no need to hand your files over to a database expert to get your form up and running. In addition to viewing entries on the site, you can configure Wufoo to e-mail or text you when a user completes your form.

A free Wufoo account allows one user to generate three forms with three corresponding reports. Additional forms, users and reports come at a few price points, starting at $9.95 per month.

2. Icebrrg

Icebrrg has nearly identical features as Wufoo, and similar price points for paid accounts. You can host your own files or integrate the forms easily onto your business website and receive notifications when they are filled. A nice feature is that embedded forms are rendered in HTML, and will comply with the CSS styles of your website to match the look and feel automatically.

Icebrrg no longer has a free account, but at $9 per month, you get 10 forms, 500 entries, and 100MB of storage for customers to upload files.

3. Formsite

Formsite has a focus on a few more complex features that not every business may need in a form, but some will find extremely valuable, such as payment integration for credit cards, PayPal, and Google Checkout. They also offer multi-page and “skip/branch” surveys, which allow you to control the flow of questions based on certain rules and user responses.

Formsite has all of the customization, embedding, hosting, and notification options as the sites mentioned above, and their free account lets you create five forms, with 50 items per form.

4. Google Docs

If you’re already using Gmail, Calendar, and other Google Apps for your business, you may want to take advantage of the forms function within Google Docs.

This form generator is pretty bare bones, but the dead-simple interface and integration with your existing Google account make it useful for internal employee surveys or even the daily lunch order.

Once you create your form document, it’s tied to a spreadsheet and data summary that also live in your Google Docs. The data feedback, in the form of a response counter and various charts and graphs, is extremely detailed and easy to read (similar to Google Analytics), and the timestamped spreadsheet is exportable for whatever your database has in store.

A Google form is embeddable in an external website, but its cumbersome formatting and limited customization means that it probably won’t agree aesthetically with your sites. For now, linking to these forms is a quick and dirty way to gather data on a simple, clean interface.

Chrome: We love Gina’s Better Gmail Firefox extension, a bundle of user scripts that improves the Gmail experience. Now that Google’s beefed up support for Chrome extensions, reader Dimitar Gruev has taken a shot at bringing an unofficial Better Gmail to Chrome. This new Chrome extension is an unofficial Better Gmail for Chrome that was inspired by Gina’s Firefox extension and our earlier Better Gmail for Chrome bag o’scripts.

Once installed, access Better Gmail’s options by clicking the wrench -> Extensions -> Better Gmail Options. Tick the boxes of the features you want activated and you’re good to go. You can choose to hide little used fields like “Invite Friends,” remove ads, show the number of unread emails in the favicon, and more.

Gruev says future versions of Better Gmail will hide spam count, move to next message on delete or archive, and include support for POP3 email. A big round of applause goes to Gruev for putting this together. What kinds of features do you hope for in future versions of Better Gmail? Share your ideas in the comments.

If you’ve ever wondered about the flow of your mouse around your computer screen, a free downloadable application, called “mouse pointer track,” can help you follow these esoteric movements and turn them into a fascinating blur between art and information.

The  simple application was developed by Anatoly Zenkov, a Russian graphic designer and programmer, and has been downloaded tens of thousands of times since he first released it in late January this year.

The software runs on any Macintosh or Windows computer and tracks every movement and click of your mouse.

Mr. Zenkov explained in an interview that the project began as a simple attempt to create something visually interesting with computer code. “It was just for fun,” Mr. Zenkov said. “It was meant to be an experiment for me, and then I saw the interest from so many other people, so I decided to share it for free on the Internet.”

As you can see from the images on Mr. Zenkov’s Flickr page, he has been tracking different mouse movements in different application settings.

Between Twitter, Facebook, and Google’s new social networking tool, Buzz, it’s hard to turn a corner without running into another social network. But how do you know which networking tool fits you best? We’re here—with big charts and all—to help.

Last week Google Buzz made us ask ourselves what we wanted out of social networking. To answer that question, we charted what we liked and disliked about setup, privacy, usability, and other aspects of Buzz, Twitter, and Facebook. Here’s the result.

This chart doesn’t cover everything about every network out there. MySpace is (seemingly) on the decline or, at best, re-purposing itself. LinkedIn is really a business contact pool, FourSquare a geo-location game, and other networks generally too niche to be compared in the same aspects and categories.

For the simple read, here’s the full chart of our Buzz, Twitter, and Facebook comparison. We color-coded each answer to give a context of where it stood, in comparison to what we know is possible and what a smart user would like to see. Red means that you can’t rely on this network for this feature. Yellow indicates that the network offers it or makes due, but could definitely be better. Green means something works, and can be considered a selling point.

Netbooks—the low-power and lightweight mini-notebooks that have surged in popularity—practically beg for some tweaking and customization to increase the functionality of their diminutive screens and relatively wimpy processors. Find yourself the perfect netbook operating system from this fine selection.

Earlier this week we asked you to share your favorite operating system for giving your diminutive mobile-computing companion a boost. You shared your favorite netbook OS, and now we’re back to highlight the five most popular options.

Jolicloud (Linux-based, Free)

Jolicloud is the most distinctly netbook-oriented operating system in this Hive Five. It’s not just pretty good on a netbook—it was actually designed from the ground up to be a netbook operating system, so it’s a great fit. (For the curious, it’s a combination of Debian and Fedora Linux with WINE mixed in to support Windows-only apps.) Jolicloud has been tweaked and tuned to make it shine even on systems with low resources and small displays. The emphasis is not on a traditional computing experience but on harnessing web-based applications and storage services so that much of the heavy lifting and deep-storage of the netbook is transferred from the netbook to more powerful and larger servers. The application launcher—see in the screenshot here—makes it easy to organize and select your applications. The launcher emphasizes easy to read and identify text and logos, and all applications launch in full-screen mode by default. In addition to the default applications, you can browse the app directory to find new applications—the Jolicloud team curates the list to ensure compatibility. Jolicloud can be installed over any other operating system, but it has a handy express installation tool for installing from Windows.

Windows 7 (Windows, $165 for Home Premium)

Although it would seem counterintuitive given the history of Windows—new edition comes out, everyone grabs bigger and better hardware, etc.—the newest offering from Microsoft, Windows 7, runs amazingly well on netbooks with just a little more oomph in their processor. The biggest concern among netbook users is usually battery life, and despite have truckloads of features and improvements over Windows XP—the other most popular version of Windows installed on netbooks—battery life doesn’t suffer thanks to improved power management. The most obvious benefit of running Windows 7 on a netbook is how easily the netbook then integrates with the rest of your—most likely—Windows-based life.

Ubuntu (Linux, Free)

Ubuntu received votes not only for the “stock” edition of Ubuntu, but also for the netbook-centric edition—seen in the screenshot here—Ubuntu Netbook Remix. Both the regular Ubuntu and the netbook remix benefit from how smoothly Linux runs even on very low-spec netbooks. Running regular Ubuntu gives you the benefits of taking one of the most popular versions of Linux with you in full desktop form, while running the netbook remix alters the menu structure for higher visibility and adjusts the user experience for comfort.

OS X (Mac, $24)

Although it’s not the most straight forward installation—compared to installing Windows or Linux on a netbook that is—many Mac fans go out of their way to install OS X on their netbook. How far out of your way do you have to go? Unlike Windows and Linux, you can’t simply install OS X wherever and expect full compatibility. Apple doesn’t acknowledge or support the installation of OS X on non-Apple hardware, so they couldn’t care less if the Wi-Fi chip and the webcam on your netbook don’t work under OS X on your netbook setup. That said, if you’re willing to do some research ahead of time and select your netbook based on OS X/Hackintosh compatibility, then you can have the experience of OS X on your netbook and not worry about which components won’t make the transition.

Linux Mint (Linux, Free)

Linux Mint is a Linux distribution with a very strong emphasis on accessibility and out-of-the-box ease of use for new users. It’s lightweight, snappy, and should you need more than Mint offers with the initial installation, it provides access to the vast Ubuntu repositories of packages and software. The focus on immediate functionality is great for netbooks—the Linux Mint community has worked to ensure compatibility with a wide range of standard hardware found in netbooks.

Aviary is easily one of the best online image editors out there — maybe the best. But to take full advantage of all it offers, you had to pay for its full suite, which cost you $24.99 a year. Well, that is until now. Starting today, the full service is now available for free to all users.

While there has always been a free version of the service, you could not do some of the more advanced things without this subscription. But now you get access to things such as saving private files on Aviary’s servers, adding your own watermarks or go watermark-free, and access to all of their nice tutorials.

So why go free? Well, Aviary always wanted the product to be free, but they previously couldn’t justify it. But now, “our recent round of funding (by Spark Capital, Bezos Expeditions & others) enables us to finally achieve this goal as we shift revenues to other areas that don’t limit individuals in any way,” co-founder Michael Galpert tells. He goes on to note that the focus is on building an app marketplace where people can buy and sell goods and services which Aviary would take a cut of. So really, this is a shift in strategy to a new type of model.

Existing paying customers will no longer be billed, and those that signed up in the last 30 days will get a full refund.

Aviary competes with Adobe’s online version of Photoshop which is also free, but requires you to pay if you go over their 2GB limit.

With 400 million users, Facebook is seeing 2.5 billion photos uploaded every month. Scrapblog, a startup that allows you to make beautiful Flash-based online scrapbooks, is hoping to help Facebook users make pretty collages of their photos via a new Facebook app,Share the Love.

When you first start using Share the Love, the app will employ Scrapblog’s recently launched QuickMix technology to instantly generate a photo collage with up to ten Facebook photos. The photos will be automatically arranged with a set theme, which you can change easily (Valentines themes appear to be set at the moment). Similar to Scrapblog’s online site, the app offers users coordinated stickers, backgrounds and captions. And users can easily change photos from the photos they are tagged in and from their personal albums. You can also bypass Scrapblog’s technology and start from scratch by picking a theme and choosing the photos to feature. Once you are finished designing your collage, you can publish the scrapbook to your Facebook page and photo albums.

Scrapblog is monetizing the app by offering premium content, which you can purchase through Scrapblog credits. On their first visit, new users are granted 100 credits to spend in Scrapblog’s Share the Love Marketplace, which features stickers, backgrounds and text. You can buy credits through a credit card or PayPal. And users can earn extra credits for free if they use mobile payment platform BOKU’s system. Additionally, users can earn credits by simple using the application and creating collages. The startup is also trying its hand at creating a gaming atmosphere with the app by employing a points system. By using the application and sharing collages, you can unlock various levels of the app. Each level promised exclusive content, such as premium stickers and backgrounds, with which users can customize their photo collages.

It’s wise for Scrapblog to begin to leverage the power of Facebook photos; especially considering that the startup provides a compelling technology to users. Of course, Facebook just rolled out their own slideshow feature and there are other Facebook apps, such as Photo Books, that allow users to create scrapbooks and collages from their photos.

Scrapblog, which recently brought on Jill Braff as CEO, just raised $2.5 million in series B funding from Disney’s Steamboat Ventures, bringing the startup’s total funding to $10 million. The company was first introduced back in 2006, briefly went offline, and relaunched in March 2007. The site has grown to over 2 million registered users who have created over 4.4 million Scrapblog pages.