CCleaner hasn't seen many major revisions since Piriform launched it in 2004, but debuting today, CCleaner 3 includes some extremely useful new features that make it worth the upgrade.

One of the biggest is a drive-wiping tool that can wipe all the data from your hard drive, but can also scrub only the available free space. As with many of the tools in CCleaner, it's fairly nuanced and allows for a simple one-pass overwrite and three levels of secure deletion. These include a Department of Defense-level three-pass option, a National Security Administration-level seven-pass cleaning, and a 35-pass Gutmann-level deep scrub. Note that the more passes you select, the slower the deletion process.

Another key improvement to CCleaner 3 has been adding more options to pre-existing features. You can now select specific Internet cookies to keep, across all your browsers, while CCleaner deletes the rest in Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Opera, and Safari. The internal scanning tech that powers CCleaner has been improved, according to Piriform, and the interface received some minor tweaks. There's also a new native installer for x64, and environment variables have been added for %SystemDirectory%, %SystemDirectory32%, and %SystemDirectory64%.

Version 3 supports more Windows programs than before, including added support for Microsoft Silverlight Isolated Storage, AVG 2011, Audacity, LogMeIn Hamachi, BitTorrent, and Windows Game Explorer. Pre-existing support has been improved for Google Chrome, Internet Explorer 9 beta, and the torrent managing client Vuze.

In empirical testing, CCleaner 3 appeared to be marginally faster than previous versions. This is probably system-dependent, so users with older computers could likely see significantly faster scanning and cleaning times than in previous versions.

Remember the old coin-op game Qix? Your job was to corral a morphing, moving entity into increasingly smaller areas. If it touched your marker while you were drawing a line, it was game over.

iSlash is a thoroughly modern twist on Qix, one designed with iPhone sensibilities. Each level starts with a uniquely shaped play area. Within that area, several ninja-style stars bounce around unpredictably. Your job: to corral them into increasingly smaller areas.

This is done by slashing away sections of the play area with your finger. If you touch a star mid-slash, it's game over. (Well, not really--you do get three tries.)

As you progress through the game's 70 levels (the developer promises to release more free of charge), you'll encounter new kinds of stars, new bonuses, and so on.

iSlash is a breeze to learn and a challenge to beat. It's one of those perfect diversions when you need to kill five minutes. Social-minded players can connect with Game Center or OpenFeint.

The game costs all of 99 cents, but if you want to try before you buy, the free iSlash Lite gives you a good taste of what's to come.

What are other "slash" games are you into these days? Cut the Rope? Fruit Ninja? List your favorites in the comments.

Originally posted at iPhone Atlas

Opera Software, continuing to develop its mobile browsers, today released a beta update to Opera Mini for Nokia's Symbian S60 smartphones.

Opera Mini 5.1 beta (mobile download) makes some small but significant tweaks to the Opera Mini browser for the Symbian platform, including integrating support for the phone's native copy and paste, as well as the native e-mail client.

That means you'll be able to use the phone's copy and paste functionality and also trigger the Nokia smartphone's e-mail composition window when you click a mail-to link in the Opera browser.

Other additions include back-end tweaks to page loading and page scrolling in an effort to speed them up, work on fonts in an aim to improve their readability, and support for more Nokia handsets.

The mobile browser is currently available in English, with support for more languages to follow as the beta develops.

REDMOND, Wash.--Microsoft kicked off its Professional Developers Conference today, releasing an updated test version of Internet Explorer 9, the company's effort to reassert itself in the Web browser market.

"We've tried to make the Web feel more like native applications," CEO Steve Ballmer said as part of a keynote speech this morning.

The update is a new platform preview that developers can use to test Web sites, but is not an update to the more full-featured beta version that Microsoft released earlier this year. Microsoft had said it would continue to update the platform preview versions for developers even after releasing the beta. Unlike the beta, the platform preview can be used alongside earlier versions of the browser. Microsoft said there won't be a second beta of IE9, but there will be a near-final "release candidate" before the final version is released.

Ballmer also talked about coming improvements to Windows Azure and noted that it expects to have more than 1,000 apps for Windows Phone when the devices go on sale November 8.

"We're driving hard," Ballmer told a crowd at the Microsoft conference center here. Although he talked about Windows 7, phones, and the browser, Ballmer stressed the role the cloud is playing in all areas of computing. "The cloud is a backplane on which to program and rapidly deploy applications. These are powerful new platforms."

Ballmer said that HTML 5 is the glue that will allow all kinds of new programs and devices to emerge.

Microsoft changed the format of its conference this year, having fewer people at the conference itself, but broadcasting it on the Web and having 30,000 people at local events worldwide.

Ballmer also took a moment to tout Microsoft's consumer efforts, touting Windows 7 PC sales, the release of Windows Phone, as well as the gesture-recognizing Kinect add-on for the Xbox 360.

"It is really remarkable," he said.

As for the phone, Ballmer said, "I think we really kind of nailed it," noting that it is more personal, offering more options than a one-size-fits-all approach (i.e. Apple) while offering more coherence (clearly a knock on Android).

Microsoft showed several Windows Phone apps including Facebook, a TurboTax title from Intuit, and, for the first time, the Kindle app for Windows Phone 7.

Ballmer also excited the crowd by telling the developers in attendance that each of them would be getting a free Windows Phone. Paid attendees will also get a free registration for the Windows Phone marketplace and Ballmer urged them to write some cool programs for their phone.

"We need your best work," he intoned, promising that in return Microsoft is going to put its full marketing muscle behind the new phone operating system.

Ballmer also showed the crowd some of the advertising for Windows Phone 7--ads that depict the phone as easy to access at a glance, contrasting humorously with current smartphones which often have users with their heads buried in their device as life passes them by. "Man, are we going to pump and thump," Ballmer said of the company's ad push for the new phones. "You're going to see a lot of these ads."

On the PC front, Ballmer said, as he has frequently, that Windows 7 machines will take new shapes and forms in the coming year, but didn't announce any new efforts on that front. The company has been under pressure to offer up a competitive response to Apple's iPad.

"You'll see people push," he said, noting ink (the ability to write onscreen using a stylus) and touch is built into Windows 7.

Ballmer gave way to server and tools boss Bob Muglia, who talked about Microsoft's effort to move from selling server software to offering tools and services for a world in which businesses can move more of their efforts to the cloud.

Muglia noted that, while it is a major shift, the move offers the ability to shift work from IT managers who today spend much of their time dealing with patches, updates, and other maintenance work.

"You are dealing with a lot of changes that aren't helping you," Muglia said. "That is all a lot of work," he said.

Windows Azure, Muglia said, allows businesses to offload much of that work. Even other virtualization options, he said, require hands-on work from businesses. "With today's world there is a lot of assembly required."

Microsoft announced some new options for Azure, including a lower-priced tier of the service as well as enhanced capabilities for moving existing virtual machines and applications onto the cloud-based operating system. The company also plans to add the ability to create virtual machines on Azure.

The goal, Muglia said, is to give businesses more time to spend on the applications that benefit the bottom line. To highlight the point, Muglia brought Disney's Pixar on stage to talk about how Azure will allow smaller moviemakers that can't afford their own huge data center farm the ability to use high-end rendering software.

Pixar's Chris Ford said the company has moved its RenderMan rendering software--an application that runs on Windows, Mac and Linux--to Windows Azure, which allows smaller studios to tap into the cloud only when they need server capacity.

In addition, Microsoft announced it has finalized a new marketplace for Windows Azure including a way to get data feeds, known as DataMarket. Formerly known by its "Dallas" code name, DataMarket allows companies to sell or make available for free various feeds that application makers can include in their programs.

Originally posted at Beyond Binary

Mozilla has pushed back the planned Firefox 4 release to 2011, a delay that's no surprise given the difficulties in releasing the first full-featured beta of the open-source browser--but that also gives breathing room for several competitors.

Mozilla had hoped to release Firefox 4 in 2010, but a newly updated Firefox 4 schedule shows the first release candidate arriving in early 2011.

"Development on Firefox 4 has not slowed down, and strong progress is being made daily. However, based on the delays in completing the 'feature complete' Beta 7 milestone against which our add-on developers and third-party software developers can develop, as well as considering the amount of work remaining to prepare Firefox 4 for final release, we have revised our beta and release candidate schedule," said Mike Beltzner, vice president of engineering for Firefox, in a mailing list message yesterday. "The frequent beta releases have been extremely helpful in identifying compatibility issues with existing web content, so we plan on continuing to release beta milestones through the end of December. Our estimate is now that release candidate builds will ship in early 2011, with a final release date close behind."

Six beta versions have arrived in recent weeks, but Firefox 4 beta 7 hasn't appeared, despite more than six weeks of frenzied development. One big issue holding up release has been the integration of Firefox's older Tracemonkey engine for running Web-based JavaScript programs and the new JaegerMonkey engine that draws on Google's V8 engine in Chrome.

Mozilla's arewefastyet.com site shows progress matching Safari and Chrome JavaScript execution speed, but new JavaScript engines can be tough to tune. Several JavaScript bugs are blocking Firefox 4 beta 7.

Among other changes in Firefox 4 are a revamped interface, a Bing search option, hardware-accelerated graphics, the new Jetpack foundation for add-ons to customize the browser, an HTML5 parser to interpret Web pages with the new standard for creating them, and WebGL for 3D Web graphics.

And presenting a major new front in the browser wars, Firefox 4 also works on Google's Android operating system for phones and other mobile devices. Today, the cutting edge in that market is dominated by the WebKit engine used on Android, Apple's iOS, and several other mobile operating systems.

Releasing the new version is important for Mozilla. Firefox remains the second most popular browser as measured by Net Applications usage statistics, but the browser market hasn't been as competitive as it is now in more than a decade.

Firefox and Opera kept the independent-browser fires burning during the years when Microsoft's Internet Explorer was dominant but somewhat dormant after its victory in the first browser wars of the 1990s.

Web technologies started picking up steam again, with Apple's Safari engineers joining the development effort begun by Opera and Firefox, and Firefox started wrenching significant share away from IE. But in the last two years, Google Chrome burst onto the scene, rising rapidly to third place and flattening Firefox's growth.

And even more recently, Microsoft began fighting back again with IE9, currently released in a first beta version. This browser was developed more in the open, letting outside developers get more of a say in its workings, and features many new modern abilities. Perhaps chief among them is ambitious hardware acceleration.

Firefox 4 has hardware acceleration, too, and unlike IE9 offers it for Mac OS X, Linux, and most important the vast number of Windows XP systems still in use.

Originally posted at Deep Tech