Keeping track of airport information can be a challenge even for a nonstop, there-and-back trip. Multiple legs increase the number of things that can go wrong geometrically, but I recently took the risk, in a week-long loop from Los Angeles to Los Cabos, Mexico, then to New York City (Newark, to be precise) and back to LA. In other words, I had an ideal test environment for Mobiata’s FlightTrack app.

Xvidcap is a small tool to capture whatever goes on within the borders of an X-Windows display. It lets you capture what you do either as individual frames or as an MPEG video. Recording your computing activity keystroke by keystroke is not a need every computer user has. However, this is an ideal tool if you need to make a visual record of the steps you take to complete a computing task.

The Book of GIMP: A Complete Guide to Nearly Everything combines a step-by-step approach to learning how to use this epic graphic image-manipulation program with a handy reference manual supplemented with very useful appendices. Whether you are a GIMP beginner or a veteran user, this book will save you hours of trial and error when editing graphics files.

Linux Mint 14, released in December and dubbed the “Nadia” version, is loaded with a horde of improvements to all four of its desktop environments. It is not usually necessary to grab every new release to a distro, but Nadia is a significant upgrade to an evolving Linux OS. This one is a keeper.

Some of the best apps available take existing mobile phone functionality to the next level, and all of our Top 5 featured here are outstanding examples. Our No. 1 choice is WhatsApp Messenger. The attaching of multimedia to messaging alone is a good enough reason to get this app. However, you can also chat and group chat as much as you want globally without paying SMS fees.

Subtitle Editor is a capable video editing tool kit to transform, edit, correct, create or refine existing subtitles on GNU/Linux/*BSD. Based on GTK+2, It also shows sound waves, which makes it easier to synchronize subtitles to voices. You will not find too many capable applications in Linux that specialize in adding or editing subtitles.

Falcon Pro (for Twitter) pitches itself as “the ultimate Twitter experience on Android,” and while one can usually take these app-store hyperbole laden statements with an idiom-laden statement — in this case a grain of salt — there is one thing that I’m looking for in a Twitter client that Falcon Pro promises.

With its brand-new, tablet-friendly version, Flipboard takes online news reading to a sybaritic new level — the bigger screen, along with Flipboard’s elegance, surpasses poky smartphone screen real estate, and anything that has come before. Flipboard pulls together social media, news, and website feeds into one aggregation.

Unless you are an atypical Linux user, you tend to accept the default apps featured in your distro of choice. After all, if what you use works just fine, why scavenge around for a replacement? If saying yes to that question means you miss out on adding the Listen audio player to your desktop tools, you might change your answer after trying it.

There’s a tool out there that you may not have known you needed. Writing a statement like that make me think I should have gone into the marketing business — but wait. Gardeners, photographers, outdoors enthusiasts, outdoor events organizers, architects — you name it — will all benefit from this miracle tool made possible by the magic that is the magnetic-compass enabled smartphone.