The app gives you feedback, like “great pronunciation,” or prompts you to try again. When you’ve said your phrase, you have to wait for the other person to get back to the app and respond before you can go on to the next level. Our player in  Barcelona was quick, and we had quite a conversation going. You can try it with others as well. We chose native speakers in Spain, Mexico, Chile and Peru. It seemed better and more fun than most language games, because you’re playing with a real person.

UserTesting.com is a useful site for programmers who want to find out if their apps are user-friendly. Screen capture software creates a video of the user experience, showing where the users tapped and where they got bogged down. Prices start at $39 for one user test or $87 for a panel of three testers.

For example, go to Pixlr.com and click the “Express” link to get some amazing photo effects without having to download anything to your computer. It all happens in your browser window. We clicked on “Webcam” to let the website use our computer’s built-in camera to snap a picture. Then we added a frame and improved the color. Amazingly, we looked younger and better, which is just the way we see ourselves. We also tried uploading a photo stored on our machine. After that, we added text and clicked “autofix” to improve brightness and color automatically. Other tools include “airbrush,” “rotate,” “red eye,” “liquify” and dozens of others.

This was so much fun we wondered why Facebook paid $1 billion recently for “Instagram.” (Oh well, easy come, easy go.) Instagram applies some interesting color filters to your smartphone photos and makes it easy to either monitor the photo albums of others or gain followers for your own photo albums. But Instagram has a lot of competitors, such as Pixlr.com/o-matic, PicYou.com and PicPlz.com, and they don’t require an iPhone or Android phone.

Photoshop.com is another free photo editor. It’s from Adobe and has all the basic fixes, such as red-eye and brightness control, and adds special effects like “pop color,” which turns your photo to black and white except for one color, say the color of your nephew’s shirt, to make it really stand out. Another tool we liked was “sketch,” which makes the photo look like a drawing.

While the Windows operating system on Joy’s computer is sputtering and won’t start, she is using the Linux operating system to rescue today’s column. Linux is a free, lightning-fast rival to Windows and Mac. It looks a lot like Windows and comes with lots of free programs, including a word processor similar to Microsoft Word. It also has the Firefox web browser (excellent) and other familiar stuff. You can download it from Ubuntu.com and install it so when your computer is booting up, you have a choice of systems. Oink: that choice saved our bacon so to speak.

Here are a few freebies we like and have worked well for us.

• Microsoft’s “Windows Live Essentials” has a blogging tool called “Writer,” along with a lot of other good stuff, particularly “Windows Messenger.” Messenger is an oldie but goodie. We hadn’t used it in years and didn’t realize it’s now integrated with Facebook. You get a pop-up every time a friend logs into Facebook Chat, and since it displays posts differently from Facebook’s usual layout, we found a lot of things we wouldn’t have seen otherwise.
• ScreenHunter, from Wisdom-Soft.com is an excellent tool for capturing text and pictures from your screen. If you want to go further and capture video, try CaptureWizPro from pixelmetrics.com. Bob uses the “lite” $20 version every day and Joy finds the Pro version handy when she’s watching a demo on her screen. Though the demonstration is happening in real time, she can capture it and watch it again later. CaptureWiz is easy and quick – Bob’s number one choice.
• iTalk Recorder for the iPod Touch, iPhone or iPad from Griffin Technology. It’s a simple voice recorder, nice for spur of the moment ideas you don’t feel like writing down. If you have the latest iPhone or Android phone however, you can use its built-in functions for dictation. Tap the microphone key when a keyboard pops up and it will translate your spoken words into text.

At first, you’ll think you were snookered into a premium account for $4 a month. But they don’t ask for your credit card and  when the 14-day trial version expires, you can revert to the free version. Here’s a comparison chart. Either way, the downside is a several-second delay before each email sends.