In the latest update to Google Maps for Android (version 5.5), Google turns its attention to the details by adding to the Places pages, transit pages, and Google Latitude.

Places pages now get their own buttons for check-ins and to rate and review businesses--you'll see the new fields at the bottom of the screen. Meanwhile, commuters looking up schedules for public transportation can get a snapshot of routes for all lines serving a location (pictured above), not just the one Google has calculated you need. You'll also be able to see links to nearby transit stations.

The third subtle addition is to a self-stalking feature in Google Latitude. If you're the type of statistics junkie who likes to track your whereabouts to see where you spend your time, you'll appreciate being able to update your addresses for home and work directly from the app.

Originally posted at Android Atlas

A new version of rogue antivirus malware that targets the Macintosh operating system does not need victims to type in their administrator passwords to install and infect the machine, a security company said today.

The latest version of the malware has been overhauled to look like a native Mac OS X application and is using the application name MacGuard, according to an Intego blog post. But particularly concerning is the fact that unlike previous versions, which were dubbed Mac Defender, MacProtector, and MacSecurity, MacGuard installs itself without prompting for the admin password.

"If Safari's 'Open safe files after downloading' option is checked, the package will open Apple's Installer, and the user will see a standard installation screen," the antimalware company's post says. "If not, users may see the downloaded ZIP archive and double-click it out of curiosity, not remembering what they downloaded, then double-click the installation package. In either case, the Mac OS X Installer will launch."

"Since any user with an administrator's account--the default if there is just one user on a Mac--can install software in the Applications folder, a password is not needed," Intego says. "This package installs an application--the downloader--named avRunner, which then launches automatically. At the same time, the installation package deletes itself from the user's Mac, so no traces of the original Installer are left behind."

The MacGuard program is downloaded by the avRunner application from an IP address that is hidden using steganography in an image file in the Resources folder of avRunner, the post says.

Web pages that look like a Finder window and appear to be scanning the computer are bogus, Intego said. Users should leave the page, quit the browser, and quit the Installer application immediately if anything has downloaded, as well as delete any associated file from the Downloads folder. Also, users should uncheck the "Open safe files after downloading" option in Safari's General Preferences, Intego advises.

In an Apple support article yesterday, the company said "in the coming days, Apple will deliver a Mac OS X software update that will automatically find and remove Mac Defender malware and its known variants. The update will also help protect users by providing an explicit warning if they download this malware."

The malware keeps changing names and appearances. It is designed to trick people into paying for supposed antimalware software that they don't need.

More information about how it operates is in this FAQ, and information about how to remove it is here and a comprehensive article about how to secure your computer against MacGuard is here.

Originally posted at InSecurity Complex

Microsoft has shared more details about the upcoming refresh to the online Windows Phone Marketplace application store that the company first teased yesterday in a blog post to developers.

The screenshot below was internally labeled as a final version of the new design, which is scheduled to launch when Microsoft releases its Mango update this fall.

The new Windows Phone Marketplace features a sharper, darker interface, with greater use of black and a new section to spotlight select apps. In addition to browsing and searching the app catalog, a new feature will enable Marketplace shoppers to share favorites through e-mail, Facebook, and Twitter, and via an embedded link for articles.

Mango's Marketplace online will also be able to trigger apps to download over the air (OTA) to your phone. We initially heard that installations would happen via an e-mail or SMS link sent to the phone. However, Microsoft has revised the explanation, saying that the Web store will push apps to the phone similarly to the online Android Market, which has offered OTA Web-to-phone installations since February. However, being sent a link instead of enabling direct downloading will still be an option should you want it.

As with other online app catalogs, Microsoft's Windows Phone Marketplace will also track your history so you can more easily reinstall apps if you switch Windows phones. Parental Controls will be onboard as well.

Marketplace will tie into Bing searches and visual searches in some markets. Tapping an app result will open up details in the refreshed Web store. From a user perspective, it might be more convenient to see app details within the Marketplace app on the phone, so we'll withhold our judgment to see how this affects the browsing and downloading experience with the Mango update.

Update, 1 p.m. PT: We've added new information from Microsoft that corrects an earlier statement about OTA app installations.

Originally posted at Dialed In

Soluto makes a nice Windows system optimizer, which the team over at Download.com has secured early access to. I've found it useful and encourage you to check it out. But Soluto also might have an interesting angle on the business of PC utility software.

The latest version of the app features a Windows crash logging and advice component. When Soluto is running, and your PC or an app on your PCcrashes, Soluto gathers system data surrounding the crash and tries to determine what caused the problem. This is what Windows should do itself but doesn't.

Microsoft does actually collects a trove of crash data and makes it available to developers, but according to Soluto CEO Tomer Dvir, the data is not parsed to make analyzing it cost-effective for developers.

Soluto does the analysis, and Dvir says the company can make determinations about app and hardware reliability that Microsoft wouldn't release even if it had the data. "We can tell which machines are best for hardcore Photoshop users," Dvir says. Or which laptops are the crashiest after sleep/wake cycles. Or which software combinations system vendors should never install. Also, if certain apps cause undesirable behavior that's short of a crash, Soluto can help track it down. Say your computer suffers from occasional five-second hangs. "We know why," says Dvir.

The project to collect these crash signatures is called the PC Genome, and Soluto could probably make it into a revenue stream by selling it to hardware and software vendors, but Dvir tells me that the main business model will be selling professional, versions the free single-user Soluto app. (Pro versions will offer capabilities to manage multiple machines--possibly very useful for the "family CIO" as well as in business.)

That's a standard way to make money from a product like this. Soluto also plans to give the crash data away to vendors, so they can make more reliable products. I talked to folks from Soluto about this idea back in November, at which time the plan was to sell this information to the hardware and software companies. The Soluto execs of course know their business better than I do, but this still seems like a solid revenue stream. For the business' sake, I'd at least like to see a paid analysis service for manufacturers on top of a free version of the PC Genome data Soluto is going to make available.

As of the beginning of this year, Soluto had reportedly recorded data from twelve million blue-screen crashes. There should be more than one way to turn that frustration into revenue.

Originally posted at Rafe's Radar

Crashes and their potential to harm productivity and personal data are the bane of many computer users, but the ability to diagnose and prevent them has arrived in the latest version of Soluto (download), available exclusively today from CNET Download.com. Soluto 1.12.113 beta sees two major new features, crash protection and browser add-on management, form a tripartite attack on problematic computer performance with the program's original feature, boot time management.

Called "Heal Crashes" within the program's main interface, the crash prevention feature takes information that Windows logs but ignores, and uses it to analyze the crash, said Soluto Chief Product Officer Roee Adler. Soluto's information is crowd-sourced, so if it's seen the crash before and has logged a solution, the program will offer one to you even if this is the first time the crash has occurred on your computer. The collection of crash signatures that Soluto is building is called the "PC Genome".

"We've been analyzing tens of millions of crashes in the field," Adler said. "Even crashes that occurred before Soluto was installed are logged by Windows, so we pull them in, too." When Soluto finds a crash solution, it highlights the option so it becomes more visible. Also included in the Soluto interface are links to learning more about the crash and data on how frequently other users experience the same problem.

Analysis
• Soluto: Cashing in on Windows crashes

Adler was quick to point out that he thinks that Soluto is unique, with its combination of in-house engineers and crowd-sourcing. "We have 20 engineers working on crashes, and there are very few people in the world who can do crash dump analysis, and solve data dump from a crash. We want to credit the people who can do it and crowd-source their solutions," he explained. Soluto provides people with both links in the crash interface to research the crash on the Web, and suggest crash solutions themselves.

Heal Crashes appeared to be a functional and versatile tool during testing, quickly scanning previous system crash logs and adding them to its local database. However, it's currently limited by whether your computer is stable. For Windows XP and Vista users, I'd consider it a must-try. For Windows 7 users, though, it depends greatly on whether your system and the programs that run it have been stable. If you're running a Firefox or Chrome beta, for example, there's little utility in learning that they crash because they're betas that are prone to crashing. Still, if you're experiencing stable program crashes, Soluto's solutions should add stability to your wobbly computer.

Lighten Web Browser is the new browser add-on management feature, compatible with the latest versions of Firefox, Chrome, and Internet Explorer. It tells you when an add-on is impinging on your browser's performance and helping you remove add-ons. As with other Soluto components, the program provides in-depth analysis of an add-ons impact on the browser, including helping you uninstall the add-on and letting you know whether other people chose to keep or remove it. It also lets you easily reset your default search provider in case that was altered by another program's installer.

Add-on performance has started to come into focus in a major way, following news that toolbars accounted for the majority of instability in Internet Explorer 8. While IE9 does its own add-on analysis, and informs people when an add-on is slowing down the browser by more than two seconds, it's exceptionally convenient to have a multi-browser, single-serving sized solution.

If you're familiar with Soluto, you'll find the Chop Boot boot-time managing feature was left untouched in this update to the program.

Going forward, Adler said that Soluto will be working on system slowdowns and non-responding windows. He anticipates the program remaining free for personal use after it eventually leaves beta, with the company making a profit from licensing Soluto to businesses.

The program certainly benefits from a clean interface that uses easily understood iconography. Some of it is even a bit humorous, such as the angel wings that appear after a program crash. Interface traditionalists might not like Soluto's look, though, with its border-free, white-space heavy approach. It definitely stands out against the field of translucent-bordered programs, though.

Overall, it's eminently usable and highly useful for both experienced users and novices. The big unanswered question that only time will answer is whether operating system and hardware makers are getting good enough at improving stability that the program's new core feature of healing crashes comes too late to have a massive impact.

Google has improved the quality of WebP, an image format it promises will speed up the Web--if the company can just convince people to use it instead of JPEG.

WebP, unveiled last year, is a still-image variation of the company's open-source, royalty-free WebM video technology. Google's sales pitch: with its newer compression technology, Web pages will load faster and less network bandwidth is necessary compared to using JPEGs.

Now the company argues that it's improved quality of WebP images through more elaborate encoding software. It can, for example, concentrate its data on the complicated parts of images. And a "fancy upsampler" smooths diagonal edges that otherwise would be prone to artifacts. The improvements don't require new decoding technology, too.

"WebP's compression algorithms have been significantly improved while remaining completely compatible with the previous releases," said Google product manager Richard Rabbat and programmer Pascal Massimino in a blog post last week. Better quality compression means an image can look better at a given file size or match earlier quality without taking up as much storage space and network data.

WebP is one example of the Google obsession to rebuild the Web in faster form. Google is working on many others, ranging from reworking basic communcations protocols with SPDY and preloading some Web pages in the Chrome browser to penalizing slow Web sites in its search-ad business. Another technology, called SSL False Start, cuts the time it takes to set up a Web connection--by 30 percent, the company said at its Google I/O conference.

WebP has major challenges, though. The biggest is convincing backers of the universally supported and very well understood JPEG, but there are others, too: persuading browser makers and Web developers to use WebP, adding features to match JPEG or improve on it, and assure tech companies that they can feel confident in relying on something that's not standardized.

Major new WebP features
Standardization today probably would be premature, though: WebP is being put through the Google wringer of release early, iterate often.

"It's an image format we're looking at to grow in the future. It's still young, and we're adding some more things," Rabbat said in a Google I/O talk. Among the upcoming WebP features:

• Alpha channels for transparency--an important feature that JPEG lacks--will come to the next version of WebP. That will let designers designate areas of an image as transparent, which can be useful in contexts such as overlaying graphics on different colored backgrounds.

• Aiding the transparency technology will be a lossless compression option that can be used for when the highest image fidelity is needed. That, along with transparency, could mean Google might position WebP as an alternative to the PNG (Portable Network Graphics) standard, too.

• WebP will be able to accommodate metadata, the increasingly important mechanism to embed data such as camera exposure information or photo captions within the photo file, but it won't use the EXIF technology that cameras use to record some data. Specifically, Google will use Adobe's XMP (Extensible Metadata Platform) technology.

"We want to support people's need for metadata, and we're adding XMP support," Rabbat said. "We know some people are used to EXIF, but EXIF has been painful for lots of people because there's no real standard around it. It just creates problems for the Web. Because this is a format we want to have for many years in the future, we're focusing on better, cleaner technology."

• 3D "Because we're now in a much newer world, we're adding 3D stereoscopy," Rabbat said. It'll use a multi-image technology that can package several images into one file--in this case right-eye and left-eye images. That approach will help when people want to use a single image file to reach both 2D and 3D displays, he said.

"If you look at 3D images that out there now that are in JPEG, if you display them on a 2D display, they just don't make any sense," Rabbat said. "With our ability to put multiple images in the same image file, we can call the left image vs. the right image separately."

• The multi-image technology also will help Web developers trying to use the Web pages' CSS background image technology.

"Instead of having to figure out what coordinates you're going to pick the image from, you can just refer to to the image within that multi-image format," he said; each image within the file can be referenced with a simple hashtag label. "There won't be any weird CSS to correct."

Massimino also described some plans in a mailing list message yesterday. Among features he announced is experimental support for more detailed color information using 4:4:4 chroma subsampling rather than WebP's coarser 4:2:0 approach.

He said the WebP encoding software speed has doubled by tapping into an x86 processor feature called SSE2, but that more optimizations can be added. WebP decoding, which is more of a bottleneck when it comes to displaying a Web page, will get faster with similar SSE2 support, but it's still about three times slower than a good JPEG decoder.

The search for WebP allies
Google has found one notable ally. Opera uses WebP for its browsers' Turbo mode, which translates Web pages for mobile or limited-bandwidth Internet connections, and Google's own Chrome supports WebP images too.

But most of the Web's users can't see WebP images, making Google's WebP gallery look pretty lopsided. Google's Android browser also can't view WebP.

Mozilla, maker of the Firefox browser, considered the possibility but decided against WebP support for a number of technical reasons. Mozilla has marked WebP support as a "won't fix" item, at least as WebP currently is defined.

Mozilla's reluctance is notable given that it's perhaps the most prominent Google ally for WebM video.

WebP is missing some useful features that even comparatively ancient JPEG has, said Mozilla graphics programmer Jeff Muizelaar.

"Every image format that becomes 'part of the Web platform' exacts a cost for all time: all clients have to support that format forever, and there's also a cost for authors having to choose which format is best for them," Muizelaar said. "Personally, I'd rather the effort being spent on WebP be spent on an improved JPEG encoder or even an improved JPEG XR encoder."

JPEG XR is a Microsoft-led effort to improve JPEG, and it's resulted in an actual standard; Google hasn't discussed its plans for standardization, but that's an important step for some parts of the computing industry--particularly camera makers considering baking support into their hardware.

The plight of JPEG XR is illustrative. It's made little headway, at least publicly, despite some real advantages such as extended dynamic range and years of Microsoft promotional labor.

WebP has an interesting difference, though: Google. The company has some of the world's most popular Web properties, and it's got a browser used by more than 10 percent of people worldwide today. By controlling what's going on at both ends of the Internet connection, Google can make WebP relevant for a large number of people, even if it's a small fraction of the overall Internet user base.

It's begun expanding WebP use on its own properties. Picasa Web Albums users can upload WebP images and view them with a compatible browser now. Gmail, too, can handle WebP images, and Google's App Engine service for cloud computing will get it. And to try to build software support, Google has released a WebP codec to let Windows software such as file manager thumbnails, Office 2010, and Windows' print engine handle WebP.

It takes a long time to move an entire industry. Google has more patience than most, though, so don't count WebP out yet.

Originally posted at Deep Tech