As Oklahoma City residents reel from a major tornado, the Red Cross has a free app that tracks disaster shelter availability. The Safe and Well site will help you connect with loved ones.

While the shelter app is Apple only, you can download the Red Cross tornado app in Google Play for an Android tool to find shelter. Follow this link to download the iOS app:

Shelter data reflects all Red Cross managed disaster shelters across the United States. Information is updated at least daily, and more often during disasters, including location, capacity, current number of shelter residents, and the date and time of the last update for each activated shelter … The application uses data about open shelters from the American Red Cross National Shelter System (NSS). The NSS contains information about 60,000 potential disaster facilities and is used to track and report on shelter information during disasters. The NSS enables emergency managers and disaster relief workers to identify relevant information for all shelters in use and to develop effective response strategies before disasters strike.

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Do you wish your Facebook posts had a wider reach?

PostRocket shared a long list of practical Facebook tips in an infographic, looking at how you can optimize your stories, images and posts for Facebook’s EdgeRank algorithm. EdgeRank decides how many people see your posts, so you should follow all these useful tips.

Click here to see the whole infographic. Above, we’ve embedded PostRocket’s ideal dimensions for a Facebook photo post.

(Via Alma Katsu)

For your weekend reading pleasure, here are the most popular AppNewser headlines of the week. They include apps to clean your Android device, recommended apps for kids, and an amazing way to save handwritten notes wirelessly. (trailer embedded above).

Click here to sign up for AppNewser’s daily email newsletter, getting all our publishing stories, book deal news, videos, podcasts, interviews, and writing advice in one place.

1. Recommended Apps for Kids

3. Memory Cleaning Apps for Android Devices

3.  Google Timelapse Shows Changes to Earth’s Terrain in Past 25 Years

4. Best iPad Stylus for Writers

5. How to convert ePub Books for use on Kindle

6.  Send Free International Texts with These Apps

7. Best Writing Apps for Android Users

8. Save Handwritten Notes Online Wirelessly

9. Free eBooks of the Week

10. Apps for Cleaning Your iOS Device

In this digital age, basic programming is one of the best gift you can give a kid.

The free Hopscotch HD app will help kids explore a simple programming language and create their own games. The brand new iOS app has already found a bustling community of users. Check it out:

So, we launched Hopscotch last week, and it’s been quite a ride since.  It’s been downloaded more than 20,000 times, we cracked the Top 10 iPad Education apps, and were featured in New and Noteworthy on the App Store.  After the initial press we got all sorts of other great coverage on various ed tech blogs. We’ve had folks volunteering to translate it into nine different languages. We’ve had some totally awesome projects sent to us by parents and kids. And perhaps most importantly, we’ve begun our process of refining our feature set based on real data and feedback.

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As the shutdown of Google Reader nears, one reader has created a simple and free tool to replace Google’s soon-to-be discontinued tool.

You can explore the demo online or visit the simple sign-up page. CommaFeed inclues an easy organizational structure and simple settings. The interface will be easy for most Google Reader users to pick up quickly.  Here’s more about the free app:

When Google announced Reader shutdown, I started to work on a clone. It is now available. It’s simple, bloat-free, and it’s open-source. Say hello to CommaFeed … CommaFeed is a bloat-free feed reader. It aims to replace Google Reader while keeping things simple.

I’ve struggled for a long time to find the best apps for my daughter in overcrowded and badly sorted app marketplaces. To help our readers both share and discover better digital content for kids, I’ve started our growing Recommended Apps for Kids directory.

To share an app, fill out our simple form below. Once you complete it, your app suggestion will be stored in our growing database of great apps for kids. We will use this directory to plan features and share new digital tools with our readers.

You can also download an Excel version of the directory to sort the results for yourself. I’ve added a few of my favorite apps for kids to get things started. What’s your favorite app for kids?

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For your weekend reading pleasure, here are the most popular AppNewser headlines of the week. They include apps to clean your Android device, the best iPad stylus and a gloomy documentary about the future of books (trailer embedded above).

Click here to sign up for AppNewser’s daily email newsletter, getting all our publishing stories, book deal news, videos, podcasts, interviews, and writing advice in one place.

1. Memory Cleaning Apps for Android Devices

2.  New Documentary Explores the Sad Future of Reading and eBooks

3. Best iPad Stylus for Writers

4. How to convert ePub Books for use on Kindle

5.  Send Free International Texts with These Apps

6. Free Transcription Tools for Writers

7. Imgembed Lets Photographers Connect with Online Writers

8. Websites Where You Can Download Free eBooks

9. Free eBooks of the Week

10. Apps for Cleaning Your iOS Device

At the Digital Hollywood conference in Los Angeles last week, the nonprofit Copyright Clearance Center (CCC)  held a panel discussion about “Copyright, Content & Congress.”

Amelia Wang, the chief of staff for U.S. Representative Judy Chu, talked about the Creative Rights Caucus initiative that Congresswoman Chu helped create. CCC’s Chris Kenneally asked how the caucus would help creators, and received an app-specific example from Wang. Check it out:

the congresswoman serves on the House IP subcommittee and when the SOPA debate was happening, she was right in the middle of the whole thing. During this debate, she noticed that the voice of the creator, the individual creator, was not heard or understood. So she saw this need to advocate for their rights, specifically. The caucus – basically the core principle is protecting creative rights. The congresswoman also sees an opportunity to stress that creators are where innovation begins. Technology cannot exist without creative works or vice versa. Truly, it’s a symbiotic relationship … Take, for instance, app developers, who basically create in the tech space. With the dramatic growth of this industry, they too have now become increasingly concerned about protecting their IP – intellectual property. At the end of the day, we can all agree that protecting creators’ rights is in the best interest of everyone. It’s of upmost importance. It drives American ingenuity and creates jobs. In the creative sector alone, it creates 5.1 million jobs.

Do you use a stylus for your iPad?

In the video embedded above, you can see how a stylus can help you in different aspects of your reading and writing life. I recently tested a review copy of TruGlide Pro Precision Stylus and found the super-small point worked best for scribbling on the iPad.

Last year, Evernote acquired Penultimate, the note-taking and handwriting app for the iPad–pointing towards a future where more people scribble notes on tablets. To help iPad writers adapt, we’ve rounded up stylus recommendations from different review publications…

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At the Digital Hollywood conference in Los Angeles last week, L.A. Tech & Media Law Firm founder David Sharifi predicted how the Jumpstart Our Business Startups (JOBS) Act will change fundraising for movies and tech startups.

You can read the complete JOBS Act at this PDF link. Sharifi outlined what still needs to be implemented with the bill and how the SEC could make it much easier for larger projects to raise funds. Sharifi explained:

[Hypothetically] I can’t offer you guys a thousand dollars per share and raise a million dollars right now. Unless you’re an accredited investor and I’ve registered with the SEC and I’ve done basically the amount of legal legwork needed to do an initial public offering. So it’s tremendous hurdle for today’s entrepreneurs or any startup. And that barrier is being relaxed a little bit through the JOBS Act.

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