Home Dash is a new add-on from Mozilla Labs' Prospector project that re-imagines the Firefox interface for Firefox 4 on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. It removes nearly all defining features from the interface in an attempt to emphasize the contents of the Web page you're viewing. Gone are the status bar, bookmark bar, navigation buttons and URL bar, leaving behind only the dedicated Firefox 4 menu button from the upper left of the interface.

All those components get replaced with a translucent Firefox logo below the menu button. Click the logo or use the Control + T hot key and the new "dashboard" appears, flush against the right margin of your browser. The top row shows your open tabs, with pinned tabs on the left, while the cluster of preview windows below reveals frequently visited sites. The numbers on the opened tabs can be used with the Control key to bring them to the foreground quickly, and you can make a tab an app tab by dragging it to the left. The larger sites in the middle are those that you visit most often. Hovering over a thumbnail will show the full size of that site in the background. Click it to pull it into the foreground and hide the Dash.

A search box appears in the upper left of the browser, which uses an agnostic approach towards your query. It searches your history, opened tabs, and the Internet at large simultaneously, much like the URL bar does now in the Firefox 4 beta but without such strict delineations between sources. You can specify a search engine to use by clicking one of the icons below the search box.

Home Dash is a restart-free add-on, so you won't have to close the browser to get it going. It also only works in Firefox 4 betas 9 and 10. To return to the default interface, you currently must go into your add-ons panel and disable it. Coming in version 2 the developers plan on including a hot key toggle to quickly jump between the two looks.

As befits such a minimalist interface, there are a number of hot key combos to minimize mouse work in the menu. When the Dash is closed, the hot keys function as they normally do: Control + L will bring up your location bar, Control + T opens a new tab, and Control + K opens your default search engine in the current tab. They all open the Dash, too. When the Dash is already open, Control + L will paste the current URL into the search box if it's empty, or select the text that's in the box if it's not; Control + T toggles whether the selected page opens in the current tab or a new tab; and Control + K activates the default search and then cycles through the search engines.

Mozilla has created a lengthy list of keyboard shortcuts for the add-on, including some keys that have double-mapped so that you can use either your left or your right hand. The full list is available in this Mozilla blog post.

Because the add-on is experimental, it wasn't exactly surprising to me that it crashed my browser multiple times, even with only two tabs open. It also had problems rendering thumbnails for the Dash unless I hovered the mouse over them for about 10 seconds. Let me know your experiences with Home Dash in the comments below.

Watch a Mozilla-produced video on how to use Home Dash here.

An interesting news item over at AppleInsider caught my eye the other day, but I'm not sure how I would feel about this particular rumor if it turned out to be true. Apparently Apple is investigating the use of hover gestures on its devices as an alternative to multitouch. A few of the ideas include the ability to make the OK gesture with your hand or use hitchhiker thumb gestures to navigate around. As a tech writer, I can't wait to see how something like this would be implemented, but as an iPhone user who will be using the device in public, the idea of using my hands in front of the screen sounds silly.

I'm trying to imagine the scenario: There I am riding the bus home with several other tired commuters and I'm "That guy" who's doing a complicated hand dance trying to browse my iPhone 7. Just imagine if my hitchhiking thumb gesture didn't take on the first or second try--it would be like I was practicing a dance move out of the disco era.

Don't get me wrong, I am still quite excited to see where this particular rumor goes (and on desktops I could see how hand gestures could be very useful), but I think I'll wait before saying hover gestures are a good idea.

What do you think about hover gestures? Let us know in the comments.

This week's apps include a chat app that could save you a lot of money and an extreme jogging game that's just as challenging and silly as it sounds.

WhatsApp Messenger (99 cents) has been around for quite a while, but it's an app I have come to rely on so much that I thought I should write about it here. With this chat app installed on your iPhone, you'll save a considerable amount of money on text charges through your carrier. The only catch is that you'll have to persuade your most frequent texting friends to download the app, too, but once they see WhatsApp's advantages, they'll probably pony up the cash.

Much like the texting app that comes on the iPhone, WhatsApp Messenger shows your chats in little text bubbles, gives you a time stamp for messages, and lets you include photos, audio notes, and videos within your conversations. But WhatsApp Messenger also lets you change your background, notifies you when a text has been viewed by your recipient, and gives you the ability to send your GPS location on an interactive map. You also get premade away notes such as "I'm busy" or "Available," and you can block specific contacts from within the app.

There aren't that many extra features, really, but the real advantage to WhatsApp Messenger is the money you save. As of this writing, AT&T charges $5 for 200 texts per month, and $15 for 1,500 texts per month. After the first month with your iPhone, most people probably realized 200 texts is incredibly limiting (causing you to go over your allotment and incurring extra charges), whereas 1,500 is probably far too much, but who wants to add on to an already expensive phone bill? With WhatsApp Messenger, and a little cooperation from your most texted friends and family, you could easily go back to the $5 plan and save $10 a month on your phone bill.

Overall, WhatsApp Messenger is not much different from the text app on your iPhone, offering a few neat extras that make it a little more fun. But if you do a lot of texting, this app is a must-have, giving you unlimited texts with other users without having to worry about extra charges.

Grim Joggers (99 cents) is an interesting take on the running game genre made famous by the innovative and artistic game Canabalt. As in all games in the running genre, your goal is to survive as long as possible in a dangerous, fast-moving landscape. While you'll mostly be trying to beat your previous high scores, Grim Joggers also supports Game Center so you can match up your best distance with other players around the world.

What sets Grim Joggers apart is, instead of just one character to control, you're controlling an entire team of joggers you'll need to keep alive as long as possible to shield you from your impending death. With a long train of extreme joggers behind you, you not only have to be aware of timing your own jumps, but also whether your timing will send members of your team over a ledge or into the waiting mouth of man-eating plants (in the opening jungle level). Apparently, in the sport of extreme jogging, pits and walls of spikes are commonplace, so you'll need to be extra-quick to save both yourself and your team.

Grim Joggers currently comes with three levels and you'll need to complete various achievements to unlock the second two. The developers have plans for at least one more level with a placeholder already in the game that says "Coming soon," but there is plenty of content here to keep you busy in the meantime.

Overall, if you like the running game genre, Grim Joggers adds a couple of unique gameplay twists that make it both fun and challenging. The overarching humorous theme of extreme jogging and the somewhat gruesome (but funny) deaths of your team members is just icing on the cake.

What's your favorite iPhone app? Am I being to hard on hover gestures? Are you new to WhatsApp Messenger? What do you think of extreme jogging? Let me know in the comments!

Dead Space is all the rage right now, and with good reason. The original console game was widely regarded as one of the scariest survival-horror adventures ever, and the new sequel delivers even more sci-fi terror.

You might assume that any iOS version of the game would be little more than a port of the original, a slapdash effort to drive sales of the sequel. But you'd be wrong.

Dead Space for iOS is an original chapter in the saga, with a new story and even some new weapons. It's visually stunning, thoroughly engrossing, and genuinely scary--especially if you play with headphones on.

I don't want to give away too much of the plot, other than to say you're a pawn in a conflict that's unfolding between the church and the government. Your mission--well, it's not entirely clear what your mission is, but it involves fragging hordes of scary monsters.

On top of console-quality graphics, what really sets Dead Space apart is the audio. The game sounds amazing, from the "BOO!"-style orchestral music cues that make you jump from your seat to the professional voice actors that help drive the plot. If you don't wear headphones, you're cheating yourself of the full experience.

And trust me: the full experience is scary. Try to play over a padded surface for when you inevitably drop your device in terror. (Okay, maybe that's an overstatement, but I did yelp out loud at least once.)

If there's a problem with Dead Space, it's the controls. They're about as good as they can be--movement "joystick" on the left, aiming on the right, tap to shoot, and so on--but I usually end up fighting the controls at the same time I'm fighting the monsters. Oh, to have an actual game pad I could plug in!

Dead Space is available for iPad and iPhone/iPod, and priced at $9.99 and $6.99, respectively. It's one of the few games I've played that merits its premium price tag. You won't be disappointed.

Originally posted at iPad Atlas

In the competition between native applications for mobile phones vs. Web applications, hardware support often makes native apps an obvious choice for programmers. But the World Wide Web Consortium is tackling one area, touch-screen support, in an effort that could help Web apps catch up.

The W3C published an editor's draft of a new touch-screen standard for Web apps today. The draft specification is designed also for devices such as drawing tablets that don't have a screen, but today's hot market for smartphones makes touch screens the more important focus.

A standard--if designed well and adopted--would make programmers' lives easier by making it possible to write Web application software that would work on multiple browsers. And with touch screens expanding from the high-end smartphone market to lower-end models and to tablets, touch screens are becoming a dominant technology for user interfaces.

Of course, touch screens work to an extent with mobile browsers today. But they chiefly just reproduce the mouse era, and touch screens can be different. Multitouch is one obvious difference, but the draft specification also accommodates subtleties such as the pressure of a touch event and the radius of the spot being touched.

The specification defines how a browser would report information in a standard way to a Web application, letting programmers write software that responds to the events. And as with many Web specifications, it uses a real-world browser as a starting point. In this case, Apple's Safari.

"Editor Doug Schepers did the sensible thing and started with Apple's specification," said Peter-Paul Koch, a consultant who closely monitors browser issues and in particular mobile browsers, in a blog post.

Originally posted at Deep Tech