The concept of a best-buddy wingman has thrived at the cineplex, but it's much harder to find one in real life. That's where the Bro Lifeline app steps up to watch your back when you're picking up chicks or getting in trouble.

The app features a menu of options that include pick-up lines, excuses, pep talks, and background noises. It's available in free and ad-free 99-cent paid versions for Android and iPhone.

The pick-up lines include such cheesy, painful standard fare as "What time do you have to be back on heaven?" and "Do you have a map? I just keep on getting lost in your eyes." Do those really work?

There are also some creepy lines. "You are the reason why even at the saddest part of my life, I smile. Even at confusion, I understand. Even in betrayal, I trust. Even in fear of pain, I love." That's almost guaranteed to get you a restraining order.

The background noises sound fairly convincing, but you can't make a call on your phone and play them at the same time. You'll have to convince your buddies to also download the app so you can pretend you're at a train station rather than a strip club when your mom calls.

The excuses are designed to get you out of a bad date or avoid a speeding ticket. Good luck with that. The officer might get suspicious when she sees you reading your lousy excuse off of your iPhone.

The pep talk section is stocked with platitudes designed to encourage you to talk to that lady, get through a breakup, or take the plunge and get married. "You have the greatest pre-nup in the world. It's called love." Now, go pop the question, Romeo!

Originally posted at Crave

The latest major updates to Kaspersky Internet Security 2012 (download) and Kaspersky AntiVirus 2012 (download) debuted today, including a new method of protecting computers using a combination of cloud and local detections, expanded and smoother-running Safe Run, and a major interface overhaul that makes the program easier to use than ever before. Kaspersky Internet Security is available exclusively from CNET Download.com today. However, while Kaspersky has made significant improvements in some areas, the program still takes a noticeable hit on your system performance.

The cloud-based and locally based security combo is a major under-the-hood change in how Kaspersky works. This hybrid approach allows the program to lighten its load on your system resources, keeping most of its definitions off your system and in the cloud, and leverage Kaspersky's anonymously contributed user-base data to protect against a wider range of threats. Independent testing groups have found Kaspersky 2012 to be highly effective at detecting and blocking threats.

Other improved features include an expansion of the Safe Run sandbox to include both programs and Web sites, a Windows Explorer context menu-accessible scanner for on-the-fly single-file threat scanning, Google Chrome support for the URL adviser, and improvements made to the System Watcher and its Rollback feature that will return your system to a previous if an infection does happen to get through.

The new interface is impressive, too. Based on a mobile app-drawer design, it presents your security status at the top and stashes the four major security features of scanning, updating, parental controls, and access to ancillary tools at the bottom. You can slide the features sideways to see more options, or click the arrow at the bottom to pull up drawer-style the full list of options. Settings and Reports live in the upper-right corner, and both use terminology repeated throughout the interface. This creates a solid level of consistency and ought to appeal to basic security consumers and power users alike.

Initial scans by Kaspersky 2012 were slow, although subsequent ones took less time because of the caching of files marked as safe. However, there's an undeniable system impact on start-up and shutdown times, so if you're used to a high-powered computer getting to your Windows 7 desktop quickly, Kaspersky is likely to add a delay of around a minute, according to tests done by CNET Labs. While using the computer, though, CNET Labs found that Kaspersky does a reasonable job of staying out of your way.

Update: The full Kaspersky Internet Security 2012 review is now available.

Adobe bills its newest Web design software, codenamed Muse, as coding-free site creation for InDesign and Illustrator users. And as far as the interface goes, the development team did a good job mimicking what it could from those applications using the lighter weight, far less mature AIR programming platform. But as I see it, in a market glutted with site creation tools for all levels of sophistication and budget, Muse looks like Adobe's first real chance to wrest designers away from using tools like Photoshop for designing and prototyping sites. However you plan to use Muse, it needs a lot more cooking before Adobe's ready to stick a fork in it. (Note: I try to distinguish beta bugs from what I consider architectural problems in my criticisms, but some frustration leakage may result in inappropriate attribution.)

Related links
• Adobe debuts Muse, a no-code-required site builder
• Adobe's new subscription model

Muse is split into four logical workflow task areas: Plan, Design, Preview, and Publish. In Plan, you build the structure of the site using a combination of hierarchical thumbnail org charts and "master" pages. I like the org chart metaphor for designing a site, and I think it's the way most people still think about a Web site: as a series of linked pages. It's also great for architecting on the fly if you're responsible for all the Web site content or if you're visualizing the site architecture with a client.

I also really like the concept of master pages as a way of dealing with repeated content. But the implementation is a lot more basic than I'd anticipated. It seems that to Muse, a master is really just a place to park page design elements you plan to use on multiple pages. It doesn't, for example, use them to group CSS that you plan to use repeatedly for a set of pages. Though you can define some tags to associate with the styles, you can't even redefine the default font or associate a default style with the p tag. In practice, that means that every new text box reverts to 14-point Arial. And when I exported my test site for publishing, there was a separate CSS file for every page and the global CSS was completely generic. It would also be really nice if I could take existing CSS and just paste it into a page header. But you don't have code access to any element that doesn't live in a body tag.

I also think the Masters are kind of unintelligent; you can duplicate them, but you're basically forking the design every time you do. On one hand, this is similar to the way they work in design software, but it's less of an issue in static documents than on a dynamic site that will require frequent updating. You have to plan your master strategy carefully, using a reductionist approach--first building the most complex, then deleting elements, duplicating that one and deleting, and so on. Furthermore, Muse goes so far to resist templates that it doesn't even provide basic page settings for different types of sites, such as optimal sizes for mobile display, or offer up some typical screen sizes. But it handles dynamic page sizing well, allowing you to easily pin page elements to a footer.

The design interface is logical and should be nonthreatening to the code-phobic. It's got the usual assortment of tool palettes and features familiar to all Adobe Creative Suite users, including character, paragraph, and graphic styles, and color swatch palettes. The typography tools let you control character and line spacing and paragraph alignment. Unfortunately, there's no equivalent to Illustrator's Glyph palette for inserting nonstandard characters. There are some rudimentary fills--solid and gradient--with opacity, stroke, and corner controls, plus background image handling. There's text wrap with user-defined offsets, but I couldn't get that to work in my beta.

Bafflingly--and the company has done this before--Adobe leaves out align and distribute tools in this version. Somehow, early versions of Adobe software frequently drop this capability into the "nice to have" rather than "users will beat us with rulers in protest" bucket. The Smart Guides make up for that a bit, interactively displaying gaps between objects in pixels and lighting up when you're equidistant between to objects or aligned with another.

For basic interactive content and navigation, Adobe supplies some widgets (Spry and jQuery, if you care) which in their beta state still feel a bit glitchy to work with; for example, when trying to select widget "previous" and "next" text in one of the slideshow widgets, it instead goes to the previous or next image. The selection feels a bit thin, too. Still, they're mostly customizable. The biggest issue is that at least for the near term, Adobe will be the only source of those widgets; there's no framework in place for allowing third parties to write their own widgets, or to allow in-house developers to provide drop-in parts for the designers to use. Muse also has a States palette for defining Normal, Mouseover, Mousedown, and Active appearances, but in the beta at least it's really underdeveloped. You can't add more states, and you have to use a workaround (create a graphic style) to apply the state design to other objects.

If you want to add basic HTML, it's pretty easy as long as it is self contained--in other words, as long as it would normally go between the body tags. Anything grabbable can be added to a page using Insert HTML; I added a YouTube embed, Twitter follow button and stream, Facebook widget, and a Google map. You'll still need to know how to customize the colors via coding or diagnose errors, because Muse's code "editor" is just a basic text editor. (Ironically, the only code I couldn't successfully embed was a Flash SmugMug slideshow, which crashed the program.)

I think the biggest disappointment is the type handling. Adobe purposely limits the initial implementation to "exposing what's appropriate for the Web so far," which in this case means the typical set of Web-functional fonts and creating rasterized versions of any custom typography. There's no support for any type of Web fonts. For me, working with Web fonts is still one of the more confusing but desirable capabilities to evolve lately, and I think Adobe's really missing an opportunity here. To its credit, for unsafe type, Muse rasterizes it and automatically generates alt tags of the text so that it's SEO-friendly. But if any users want high-class typography tools, wouldn't it be this market?

Furthermore, according to Adobe, a large chunk of its InDesign users still have a print-first workflow. You'd think, then, that Muse would allow you to repurpose a lot of your InDesign work. Nope. At the very least, say, it would be lovely if it could map document styles, support cutting and pasting of formatted text, paste a logo, import a swatch palette...anything. Is it the fault of the Muse team that InDesign doesn't use the system clipboard and requires specific application support? No. But it is an Adobe problem.

As for Preview, it's just an embedded WebKit browser that renders individual pages. It's also a bit too stripped down; you can't preview navigation or go back.

What do you do with your site once it's done? You have two choices: export to HTML or publish directly to Adobe's Business Catalyst hosting. HTML export supports complete overwrite or incremental export. One of the nice things about the BC hosting is that you can publish 30-day free trial sites, which is a great way to run the design by other people. But given how confused most people are about how to get a site from their hard disk to the Web, this aspect of the program needs a lot of fleshing out.

The best part about Muse is that at various points I could actually forget I was doing Web design. And you can generate some attractive sites from it. But the code isn't very pretty. Dreamweaver doesn't exactly choke on it--it renders properly in Live View, but comes up a complete blank in Design view. That makes it less impressive as the prototyping solution I was hoping for, since you may still be better off just handing off flat images to someone to re-create in a coding tool.

Once it comes out of beta, Muse--which will have some other, probably less interesting name at the time like "Adobe Web"--will only be available by subscription and cost $20 a month or $180 a year if you get 12 months up front. To that I say "ouch." I think this highlights one of the problems with the subscription model for new software. Basically, Adobe is relying on the revenue stream from the subscriptions to fund further software development on the product. But for version 1.0, $180 doesn't seem worth it to me, which is typical for early versions of software. Maybe the next version would be. But if not enough people sign on for version 1.0, we may never see 2.0. And I think that would be too bad, because it really shows promise. And I have to say, as a proof-of-concept of how far you can push AIR, it's pretty impressive. Best of all, perhaps, it handles crashing quite gracefully, with periodic autosaves in the background. That makes trying out the beta a lot less painful than it otherwise might be. You can download it at http://muse.adobe.com/.

Originally posted at Webware

The latest updates to Kaspersky Internet Security 2012 (download) and Kaspersky AntiVirus 2012 (download) debuted this past week, and CNET's Seth Rosenblatt gave us a rundown. In short, the improved suite features a new method of protecting computers using a combination of cloud and local detections, expanded and smoother-running Safe Run, and a major interface overhaul. While the program is said to be easier to use than ever before, it still takes a noticeable toll on your system performance. Check out our First Look video here.

Meanwhile, it was an interesting week in browsers, as all three heavy hitters, IE, Chrome, and Firefox found themselves in our headlines. IE users got a significant security patch, Chrome 14 beta showed off some Native Client support, and Firefox decided to stick it to aggressive third-party add-ons.