The speedy Carakan JavaScript engine has finally been added to the stable version of Opera on the Mac. Combined with Opera's extensive toolbox, an interface refresh, Growl support, and Opera Link syncing--hello, Opera Mini on the iPhone--Opera should be a top contender for best Mac browser.

Take a tour of the new Opera in this First Look video, and tell me in the comments below which browser is your favorite for the Mac.

Not long ago, my uncle enlisted my help on a project he was conducting through the hospital where he works.

His task: to create a tutorial that would be used in an ongoing training course for other physicians. My uncle is a neonatalogist, chemist, and hobbyist beer brewer, but no video producer. Furthermore, there was little budget for his leg of the undertaking. He needed simple software to capture mouse movements on the computer screen--in the end, the freeware TipCam saw him through.

TipCam isn't the only screencast software out there, and it certainly isn't a one-size-fits all solution. If you need to produce a series of pro-quality tutorials, Camtasia Studio is the better choice.  If quick captures and easy online sharing is your objective, Jing could be your pick.

Learn about these three screen recording apps, plus one more, in our screencast software roundup.

One of the best features in Windows 7 is its native support for touch screens, and Microsoft has finally allowed the general public to download six touch-centric games and apps built for Microsoft Surface for free.

Newly repackaged and now open to all Windows 7 touch-screen users, the Windows 7 Touch Pack ranges from an interactive globe and collage-maker to fun time-wasters. See what the Touch Pack offers in this First Look video.

Several members of Microsoft's Office team dropped by CNET on Tuesday to deliver the final version of Office 2010 and talk about the changes that the company made since the beta test version.

To be clear, not a whole lot has changed in the version that was finalized earlier this month from the public beta version that has been downloaded some 7.5 million times. The final version of Office 2010, in its many flavors, will be made available to businesses on May 12 and hit store shelves for consumers in June.

Perhaps the most notable shift since beta is the fact that Outlook's new conversation view is no longer turned on by default.

"It clearly works, in some cases," said Microsoft group product manager Chris Bryant. "It clearly doesn't work for everyone. We'll let those folks who want the conversation view find it and turn it on."

My 2 cents is that it is a feature worth trying, at a minimum. A few pet peeves aside, I find this to be one of the most useful improvements in the new Outlook.

One other change Microsoft made was in the nomenclature of its file menu, changing the "share" option to "save and send."

"People didn't understand what 'share' meant," Bryant said.

That follows on the decision to restore the file menu itself, which had been replaced with an Office logo in the initial test versions of 2010.

I did get a clarification on co-authoring that surprised me, though Microsoft says it is not new. I knew that Word only allows one person to be working in any given paragraph at a time, even when collaborating. What I didn't realize is that the co-authoring features in Word and PowerPoint are only in the desktop applications, not in the browser-based Office Web Apps that are due out in June.

That strikes me as a blow to Microsoft's effort to take on some of the collaboration scenarios that are some of the most popular uses of Google Docs.

As is often the case with beta software, one must uninstall the beta and then reinstall the final version of Office 2010. But what I appreciated was the fact that a lot of data and settings are preserved. For example, I was still able to pull up the most recent documents and see the Word files I was working on using the beta. Likewise, my e-mail in Outlook picked up right where I left off, remembering my settings, password, etc.

For those wondering about those browser-based Web Apps, consumers should be able to get their hands on it about the same time in June, as Office hits store shelves. Businesses can run the Web apps today by installing the new SharePoint on their servers, while those looking to have Microsoft host an enterprise version of the Web Apps will have to wait until the SharePoint Online service moves to the 2010 version later this year.

Originally posted at Beyond Binary

Hey, Gmail users. If you've ever wished you could append a private note for a subset of recipients in a group e-mail without having to compose a second message, here's an in-progress application for you.

Bccthis, which was first introduced for Microsoft Outlook and BlackBerry, is an e-mail add-on that hooks into Gmail by way of the Firefox browser and lets you create a secondary e-mail to select contacts without leaving the composition window.

The add-on attaches an expandable Bccthis menu below Gmail's composition window. This is where you'll pen your second, secret message and choose recipients. There are fewer customization and formatting options in Bccthis for Gmail than there are in the Outlook add-on, but the mechanics work the same way. Gmail shoots off the original message, then Bccthis sends the second message through Google's SMTP servers. Since Google handles everything in the end, a record of your private message shows up in Gmail's Sent items.

At this stage, the Bccthis add-on is experimental, so take heed if you're fearful of prerelease extensions. While it worked consistently in our tests and will certainly have its audience, Bccthis won't appeal to everyone. In addition to what we think will be a limited user base is its cumbersome characteristic of sending two separate messages to the same recipient. The Outlook version can consolidate incoming e-mails if the sender is also using Bccthis for Outlook; everyone else has to lump it with two e-mails for now.

The free, experimental Bccthis Firefox add-on is currently only compatible with Gmail in English.

A rise in fake antivirus offerings on Web sites around the globe shows that scammers are increasingly turning to social engineering to get malware on computers rather than exploiting holes in software, a Google study to be released on Tuesday indicates.

Fake antivirus--false pop-up warnings designed to scare money out of computer users--represents 15 percent of all malware that Google detects on Web sites, according to 13-month analysis the company conducted between January 2009 and February 2010.

That's a five-fold increase from when the company first started its analysis, Niels Provos, a principal software engineer at Google, said in an interview.

Meanwhile, fake antivirus scams represent half of all malware delivered via advertisements, which is becoming a problem for high-profile sites that rely on their advertisers and ad networks to distribute clean ads.

Google analyzed 240 million Web pages and uncovered more than 11,000 domains involved in fake antivirus distribution for the study, which Google is set to unveil at the Usenix Workshop on Large-Scale Exploits and Emergent Threats Tuesday in San Jose, Calif.

Researchers also found that over the course of the study, domains used for distributing the malware were online for shorter and shorter periods of time in the face of Google's Safe Browsing technology. Used in Chrome and Firefox, Safe Browsing helps alert Web browsers to sites hosting malware, Provos said.

"As early as 2003, malware authors prompted users to download fake AV software by sending messages via a vulnerability in the Microsoft Messenger service. We observed the first form of fake AV attack involving Web sites, e.g. Malwarealarm.com, in our systems on March 3, 2007," the report says. "At that time, fake AV attacks employed simple JavaScript to display an alert that asked users to download a fake AV executable."

"More recent fake AV sites have evolved to use complex JavaScript to mimic the look and feel of the Windows user interface," the report continues. "In some cases, the fake AV detects even the operating system version running on the target machine and adjusts its interface to match."

Fake antivirus is easy money for scammers, Provos said.

"Once it is installed on the user system, it's difficult to uninstall, you can't run Windows updates anymore or install other antivirus products, and you must install the [operating] system," rending it unusable until it is cleaned up, he said.

Provos said when encountering a fake antivirus message, Web surfers should close the browser and restart the program. People who are duped by the scam may have to get professional help in cleaning up the computer, he said. They should also monitor their credit card accounts because scammers can use the credit card information for identity fraud.

Originally posted at InSecurity Complex

My iPad arrives tomorrow. (Woo!) Thanks to everyone who shared their suggestions for what apps I should install first.

Of course, as eager as I am to check out popular stuff like iBooks, Netflix, and The Elements, I'm even more eager to test the iPad's acumen as a game console. And from what I've seen of these five new titles, I won't be disappointed.

Avatar for iPad  I liked the movie, but didn't bother with the tie-in game that debuted on the iPhone late last year. Why? I find most action titles a bit too claustrophobic on the small screen. But on an iPad? With updated HD graphics? That's more like it. This combat-packed trip to Na'vi will cost you $9.99.

Heads Up: Hold'em HD  What's better than a good game of no-limit Texas Hold'em? How about a free one? This surprisingly polished title offers 1-versus-1 competition (more would be nice, obviously, but beggars can't be choosers) against the CPU or a friend--someone you can hand your iPad to when it's his turn, or someone who has his own iPad or iPod. (Heads Up supports wireless play via Bluetooth.)

Space Station: Frontier HD  The game most likely to endanger my productivity, Space Station: Frontier puts both sci-fi and RTS twists on the popular tower-defense genre. Harvest energy, build and deploy your weapons, then defend your space station against alien attacks. The HD version has been redesigned to take advantage of the iPad's roomy screen, and the developer says multiplayer is coming soon. That sounds awesome. Price: $4.99.

Well, those are the new games I've got lined up for iPad action. Now hit the comments and tell me what's playing on your iPad.

In the meantime, be sure to check out CNET's recent roundup of the 20 best iPad games.

Originally posted at iPad Atlas

With automatic lens corrections appearing in Photoshop CS5, it didn't take a genius to forecast Adobe Systems would add the feature to Lightroom 3.

But Adobe hadn't committed to the feature--until Tuesday.

"Below is a preview of lens correction technology that will be included in Lightroom 3 and the Camera Raw 6 plug-in that's part of Photoshop CS5...The easiest application of lens correction is to apply the lens profile technology that encompasses geometric distortion (barrel and pincushion distortion), chromatic aberration, and lens vignetting characteristics," Lightroom Product Manager Tom Hogarty said in a blog post. Chromatic aberration, caused by the different paths that different colors of light take through a lens, can produce red and blue color fringes in high-contrast areas; distortion makes parallel lines bow inward or outward; and vignetting causes the corners of images to darken.

Lightroom 2, the current version, provides some manual controls over lens correction. The automated corrections in Lightroom 3 promises to remove some drudgery from the photographic process and illustrates a new trend: computational photography, in which computers step in to address camera weaknesses or expand their horizons. Image post-processing, whether in the camera or on a computer, is increasingly essential to the photography industry.

Lightroom, like Apple's competing Aperture, uses a nondestructive editing approach that overlays editing changes onto an unaltered original. The changes are stored as metadata that can be easily changed since the underlying original image is unaltered.

But nondestructive editing is computationally difficult as multiple adjustments are layered in. Distortions are particularly complicated: when a photographer edits an image, for example by brightening a couple faces, the computer must apply those changes not to the underlying grid of pixels, but to the mathematically warped version that the distortion correction produces.

Adobe will supply support for a "handful" of lenses, but also will let users create and share their own profiles through Lens Profile Creator tool that the company plans to post on Adobe Labs, Hogarty said. In a video demonstration, Hogarty said the company will support a number of Canon, Nikon, and Sigma lenses. The demo showed 18 Canon lenses at one point, though, so it sounds like more than a handful to me. I'd also expect the company to add more support with Lightroom updates, the same way it adds support for new proprietary raw image formats from newer cameras.

The video demonstration used Photoshop CS5, which has the same raw-processing engine and features as Lightroom but a different interface. The lens correction features he showed will be in Lightroom 3, Hogarty said in the video.

In one part of the demo, Hogarty showed the software altering the converging parallel lines of a shot taken with the camera pointed upward. This is a common situation architectural photographers often try to avoid, sometimes by using expensive lenses called tilt-shift or perspective correction.

Also in the demo, Hogarty showed the feature correcting more complicated "wave" distortion, in which a Zeiss lens bowed parallel lines outward (barrel distortion) near the center but squeezed them in (pincushion) toward the periphery of the image.

The settings can be adjusted manually--for example, in the demonstration, restoring some vignetting that was desired as a photographic effect.

To use the Lens Profile Creator, photographers have to take a few shots of a checkerboard pattern they print out, import the photos into the software, then import the profile into Lightroom.

Originally posted at Deep Tech

GIVEAWAY: The first 50 CNET readers to retweet this story and follow @Sound_Hound on Twitter.com will be eligible to win a $10 gift card from SoundHound. SoundHound will contact winners directly via a direct Twitter message.

When most software companies offer free versions of premium apps, it's not unusual to see a substantial portion of the feature set fly out the door. Not so with SoundHound.

The company, formerly known as Melodis, is now giving away a new version of its song-tagging app for the iPhone and iPad. The SoundHound app, which used to be called Midomi until last December, competes with the better-known Shazam to name that unknown track you hear playing nearby. Instead of tagging only recorded music (a Shazam requirement,) SoundHound can also match songs that you type, speak, hum, or sing into the microphone. Despite SoundHound being the superior tune-IDing app for some time, it managed to capture only 5 percent of the iPhone market.

The free version SoundHound wisely keeps advanced features like the four search methods, a lyrics finder, and integration with your personal iTunes library intact, while just limiting the number of song-matching queries to five per month.

Banner ads recoup some of the loss of the free app, as do two paths to in-app upgrading. One option buys you five more IDs for another dollar; the other upgrade choice sells you the whole enchilada with no ads and a lifetime of unlimited song-tagging for $4.99. Course, you can also gain another credit by tweeting or Facebooking your SoundHound activities from the app as a reward for your participation in viral marketing.

In the meantime, the SoundHound team continues its trigger-happy renaming proclivities by calling the premium version of its app SoundHound "Infinity," (insert mathematical infinity symbol here.) Shades of Prince back in his "Artist" days?

Although the iPhone and iPad version of SoundHound share the same software installer, the app manifests differently on each device. Thanks to the iPad's roomy 9.7-inch display versus the iPhone's 3.5-inch one, SoundHound can keep the search menu pinned to the left sidebar while showing everything from search results and music videos to user ratings in the right pane.

Originally posted at iPhone Atlas

It's news enough to make a Mac-using Opera fan sing: the browser has officially ditched its old JavaScript engine Futhark for the speedy new Carakan. Available for both Intel and PowerPC, the final version of Opera 10.52 for Mac comes 11 days after the second beta, although two months after the public encountered the first Mac beta of Carakan.

Besides the impressively fast JavaScript engine, which Opera claims is 10 times faster than the previous Mac version, the new browser comes with an interface overhaul and has been completely rebuilt in Cocoa. There's Growl and multitouch trackpad support, support for some HTML5 including the video tag and extensive hooks between Opera Widgets and the desktop. This means that widgets can be used as standalone apps, previously limited to the Windows version. Opera Unite and its deep feature set are now available to Mac users, and there have been extensive interface tweaks, too.

The multitouch trackpad support means you can now take advantage of pinch-to-zoom, two-finger swipe to scroll, and three-finger swipe to navigate your browser history. Smooth scrolling is now enabled by default. Most notably, Opera has decided to make the browser compatible with older Macs. Unlike many competitors, this version will work on legacy PowerPC machines. The browser will also run on OS X 10.4 Tiger.

The development process took so long that bug-fixes were implemented beyond those originally planned for version 10.50, which is why the browser is now at 10.52. The full changelog for Opera 10.52 can be read here.