You're itching to test drive an iOS application, but the lack of a free trial, the limited screenshots, and no demo videos are holding you back from pulling the trigger on a purchase. Such hurdles could soon be toppled with a new service called the Pieceable Viewer.

Parent company Pieceable, which is working on a tool to let people create mobile applications with a visual editor as opposed to writing lines of code, has come up with a viewer that can demo iOS applications on the Web, sans iOS device. Developers send their finished .app file to Pieceable, where it's hosted to the Web letting people use it just like they would on their phone, except with a mouse.

The company is pitching it as a way for sharing applications that are still in development, as well as getting around Apple's device ID-driven system, which places limits on side-loading unpublished applications outside of the company's App Store. Ironically enough, the application also makes use of Adobe's Flash to demo apps, a technology Apple does not allow on its iOS devices.

For now the service works with iPhone apps, but the company says it will add support for iPad apps in a future iteration. According to TechCrunch, Android apps are next on the list.

In an e-mail to CNET, Pieceable Software co-founder Fred Potter said that the company had attempted to get in touch with Apple about the product, but had not heard back. As far as security goes, Potter said that the company isn't collecting anything sensitive from developers. "They only upload their compiled binary and never raw source code," he said.

The service itself is offered to app makers at three levels. The free version lets only one person view one app at a time, with application links expiring after one hour. The basic plan, which runs for $30 a month, brings the viewership up to three people at a time, with up to five different applications with links that never expire. The $60-a-month "pro" plan takes it up to 10 simultaneous viewers, with an unlimited number of applications.

The idea of full-functionality versions of applications with an expiration date brings up a very interesting potential for App Store publishers who want to give users an interactive taste of their creation without offering their wares free of charge. Apple has set up a system where free apps can be upgraded to include paid features via in-app purchase, though many developers still opt to create "lite" versions of their applications that exist separately. With the inclusion of expiring working copies, this also opens up a way for developers to offer a full version of the software that can be made available for only a limited amount of time.

One obvious question that remains is how well the system holds up with games, something Potter said the company is still working on. "OpenGL content (which is most graphics-intensive games) doesn't currently show up in the viewer. We also need to figure out a workable solution for doing multitouch and sound," he said.

Even so, Potter says the company has been pleased with the overall speed of the technology for pushing regular applications. "When we were first working on the prototype, we actually assumed everything would be much slower and we'd have to put disclaimers all over the place about how 'it's much faster on the device,' etc.," Potter said. "But, we're very happy with how it's worked out."

Pieceable joins the ranks of still-in-stealth BlueStacks, a company that's working on a solution for letting Windows users run Android applications and the Android OS itself natively on the desktop. There have also been a wealth of companies that have sprung up over the past few years that let people build and publish iOS applications without having to know how to code.

Pieceable Viewer is rolling out with demos from six companies, including Yelp, travel service Hipmunk, Loopt, Foodspotting, Convore, and Airbnb. You can give all six a spin over on Pieceable's viewer demo page.

Update at 4:23 p.m. PT: Here's an embedded version of the Hipmunk app (pictured above) that you can use:

Originally posted at Apple Talk

Microsoft today urged customers to apply fixes for holes in Internet Explorer, including one being exploited in attacks, and for vulnerabilities in Windows Server Message Block (SMB) client and server software as part of a whopping Patch Tuesday.

The company released 17 bulletins resolving 64 vulnerabilities, nine of them rated "critical" and eight rated "important." However, 30 of the vulnerabilities are addressed by one bulletin, a kernel update that is rated "important," that was discovered by one researcher.

First priority is MS11-018, a cumulative security update for IE that is rated critical for IE6, IE7 and IE8 on Windows clients, but does not affect IE9. The company is aware of limited, targeted attacks against one of the holes, Jerry Bryant, group manager for response communications at Microsoft's Trustworthy Computing Group, told CNET. The bulletin also addresses problems uncovered in the Pwn2Own contest at CanSecWest last month.

Two vulnerabilities associated with the bulletin are being exploited in the wild, but they require attackers to set up a malicious Web site and lure victims there to compromise their computers in a drive-by attack, said Josh Abraham, security researcher at Rapid7.

Also high priority, according to Microsoft's TechNet blog, are two SMB-related bulletins. One, MS11-020 is in SMB Server and affects all supported versions of Windows. It could allow an attacker to take over a server by creating a specially crafted SMB packet and sending it to any open SMB network share.

Meanwhile, MS11-019 addresses two vulnerabilities in the SMB Client that could enable an attack if an attacker sent a specially crafted SMB response to a client-initiated SMB request.Bryant said that with an exploitability index rating of "one," he expects to see exploit code in the wild within the first 30 days after the release of the bulletin.

Other software affected by the updates, which are detailed in this security advisory, include Visual Studio, .NET Framework and GDI+.

Also today, Microsoft unveiled a new Rootkit Evasion Prevention tool and said it would apply Office File Validation, which is built into Office 2010, to Office 2003 and 2007.

The Rootkit Evasion Prevention tool for 64-bit Windows systems will make it easier for antivirus products to detect and remove installed rootkits, which offer admin access to a machine and remain hidden from view by bypassing driver signing checks done by winload.exe.

Adding Office File Validation to older versions of Office, which Microsoft announced in December, enables files to be scanned before they are opened and opens in Protected View or alerts the user if anything out of the ordinary is detected, Bryant said. It is included in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Publisher. "About 80 percent of Office vulnerabilities have to do with file parsing and this functionality mitigates the majority of those," he said.

"While this is obviously a good development this feature doesn't stop the recent Flash zero-days we've seen," said Roel Schouwenberg, a senior antivirus researcher at Kaspersky. "After all, those are simply using a feature from Word and not a bug. Hopefully Microsoft will be able to back-port the Office 2010 sandbox at a later date, as the sandbox is able to stop the Adobe Flash zero-days."

Adobe warned yesterday of a critical hole in Flash Player that is being exploited in the wild to take control of computers or cause them to crash.

Originally posted at InSecurity Complex

RIM's official Twitter for BlackBerry app will be getting a visual refresh and some new features with version 1.1. For starters, the app will push "@" mentions to your username and will autocomplete hashtag options (#).

The app will also tag locations after you enable the feature in the Options, then tap the icon of a compass for tweets you want to geolocate. You'll also be able to view the locations of people you follow on a map within the application.

When you retweet, Twitter for BlackBerry will indicate that the message was retweeted by you, a nod toward user feedback from the beta testing group. In addition, the app supports simplified and traditional Chinese, Polish, Czech, and Thai languages.

The Twitter for BlackBerry 1.1 app sheds its beta and will be fully available, for free, in the BlackBerry App World within the next 24 hours.

Originally posted at Dialed In

LAS VEGAS--Just weeks after launching Internet Explorer 9, Microsoft previewed an early version of Internet Explorer 10 at its Mix11 developer conference here today.

Microsoft went to great lengths to illustrate how deep its commitment is to HTML5 in IE9--the Web standard is pushed hard the new browser. That allows developers to create programs more simply so that they can be used on a variety of devices.

"It's just closer to what people expect from apps," said Dean Hachamovitch, corporate vice president of Internet Explorer, in a keynote address.

By putting its considerable weight behind the HTML5 standard, Microsoft is hoping to convince other developers to follow.

Hachamovitch's speech focused on the geeky details that the Web developers who come to Mix11 love to hear. The first platform preview of IE10 includes support for standards such as CSS3 Gradients on background images and CSS3 Flexible Box Layout. Hachamovitch was joined on stage by Steven Sinofsky, president of Microsoft's Windows and Windows Live division, and the pair ran IE10 through the paces next to Google's Chrome. Not surprisingly, the demo showed Microsoft's browser rendering faster and more smoothly.

Developers can download the preview of IE10 on its IE Test Drive site.

Microsoft has been criticized for being slower than rivals in updating the builds of its browser. Hachamovitch addressed that head on, saying faster isn't always better. "Increased cadence just means bigger version numbers," Hachamovitch said. That makes Web developers lives more difficult, as they try to keep up with the latest builds.

Hachamovitch added that developers should expect new builds every 12 weeks, instead of the eight-week pace Microsoft held with IE9 development. "It just wastes less of your time," Hachamovitch said.

Seperately, Sinofsky mentioned, before heading off stage, that Microsoft has scheduled a Professional Developers Conference for September 13 through 16 in Anaheim, Calif. PDC's are benchmark moments for Microsoft, where the company lays out its vision for developers. It's likely the spot where Microsoft will unveil details of Windows 8.

Originally posted at News - Microsoft

After announcing two new smartphones today, Nokia has released stats about its Ovi Store.

According to the company, its app store is marking 5 million downloads each day. Owners of some of its latest phones, including the Nokia N8, Nokia C6-01, Nokia C7, and the Nokia E7, account for 15 percent of all the daily downloads in the Ovi Store.

Nokia launched the Ovi Store in May 2009. Although it got off to a rough start--it was criticized for poor navigation and an overall subpar user experience--Nokia has done a fine job of making it more user-friendly by improving navigation.

In addition, Nokia and AT&T announced a $10 million contest last fall to promote the Ovi Store. The contest, which ran through the end of March, required developers to create applications and register. The companies are offering more than $4 million to 51 developers who create high-quality and popular applications. The four top winners will receive $5.8 million in prizes, including being featured in Nokia's 2011 marketing campaigns.

All that effort at improving the appeal of its Ovi Store is seemingly paying off. Back in October, Nokia announced that its marketplace had hit 2.3 million daily downloads. Just over a month later, it reached the 3 million mark. At that time, just 92 developers had more than 1 million downloads for their apps. Nokia said today that that figure has grown to 158 developers.

Nokia's store now has more than 40,000 applications, measuring an "eight-fold" increase year-over-year, the company said. About 1,000 applications are being added to its store each week.

Even so, the Ovi Store is still easily overshadowed by the competition. According to Apple's Web site, its App Store has over 350,000 available applications. Google told CNET last month that its Android Market offers over 150,000 applications.

Moreover, Apple's App Store has easily overshadowed Nokia's mobile marketplace in downloads. Apple announced earlier this year that less than three years after its App Store's launch, 10 billion apps had been downloaded. At the time, approximately 1,000 apps were being downloaded from Apple's store every three seconds.

Originally posted at The Digital Home

The latest stable version of Opera 11 debuts today with a faster Turbo, an expanded Speed Dial, and some plug-in tweaks. Opera 11.10 for Windows (download), Mac (download), and Linux (download), also makes a handful of other changes to the browser, notably adding in more HTML5 support, mail client improvements, an updated rendering engine, and better battery management on laptops.

The changes to Opera Turbo and Speed Dial are the most apparent changes in Opera 11.10. The Norwegian company says that Turbo is four times faster than before, and Opera spokesman Thomas Ford said that those speed improvements are likely to filter down to Opera's mobile versions since the improvements were made to Turbo's servers. The gains were achieved in part by adopting support for Google's WebP image format, which resulted in higher image quality in Turbo mode. This still allowed sites to render 35 percent smaller and 15 percent faster than in Opera 11, according to Opera's internal benchmarks.

Speed Dial, the feature that Opera developed to show frequently visited site thumbnails in a grid format, can now be configured to show an unlimited number of dials. The layout is customizable, and a new slider helps users zoom to show more or fewer dials by default.

Other changes include the improved plug-in support that now offers to download and install plug-ins like Adobe Flash if missing from your system, a feature long-present in other browsers; partial HTML5 File API support, which means that Opera ought to be added soon to the list of official browsers that support Gmail; Web Open Font Format support, for next-generation font rendering; and search hijacking protection.

IMAP has been improved in the built-in Opera Mail e-mail client, so that it better manages "special status" folders such as Trash, Spam, and Sent Items. You can read the full changelog for Opera 11.10 here.

Back in the 1990s, Microsoft's browser competed fiercely with Netscape's and won, but then the company sat back and left the innovation to others. Even though Internet Explorer remains the most-used browser on the Net today, convincing one of our reporters that the latest, IE9, is a real browser was quite an accomplishment. Find out what made Stephen Shankland decide that Microsoft is back in the browser game.

For those of you fond of SMS payments, don't forget to think about security because some evil-minded folks have found ways to take the profit themselves. There's a new twist with the appearance of some fake antivirus scareware that accepts payment via SMS. Of course, a payment does nothing to "fix" a system and means criminals now have your money and possibly your credit card information.

And in happier news, it's almost time to gorge on massive amounts of chocolate bunnies. While you're waiting, check out six awesome Easter apps.