(Credit: Mercury Mobile LLC)

Ever made plans or laid out action steps in your head while on a business call, and later wished you had taken notes?

Maybe you were on your Bluetooth headset while driving, or you couldn't find a pen. Or maybe you just plain hate scrawling anything on paper at all.

Enter Tote Notes, a brilliantly conceived app that pops up after voice calls so you can dictate notes before you forget any important details.

Here's how it works. Whenever you get off a call, a Tote Notes dialog box pops up asking whether you want to record a note. Say yes, and your note will automatically be recorded and e-mailed to you as an MP3 file, along with the contact info of the caller (if it's saved in your phone's address book), and a transcript of your recorded note in the body of the e-mail. In all of our trials, the app worked like a charm, and the transcriptions (powered by Google Voice) were more or less spot-on.

If you're a busy professional who often arranges meetings, makes deals, or discusses other important details over the phone, Tote Notes might be just the app for you.

Tote Notes (download) is available now for free in the Android Market. There's also a Pro version available for $3.99. Whichever you choose, be sure to che... [Read more]

Black Friday is almost here, and if you're the type who likes to avoid the shopping rush like the plague, I may have the perfect collection of iPad apps for you.

Instead of getting up early and waiting in crowded lines for the doors to open, how about sitting on your couch with an iPad and a cup of coffee, and getting your holiday shopping done in peace? It's true that you probably won't get the super mega deals found by doing the leg work at your local retail outlet, but you'll also run zero risk of being trampled by overexcited shoppers.

While this collection is focused on the iPad (simply because it's easier to see the items you're buying), you could just as easily get any of these apps for smaller iOS devices.

Amazon Mobile No big-store shopping list would be complete without the online behemoth that is Amazon. Amazon Mobile works on all iOS devices and even acts as an excellent shopping companion if you decide to brave the lines. But on the iPad you get nice big images of items and you can sip your coffee between purchases. Read the full review.

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Target for iPad Have you ever been to Target on Black Friday? Here's my official CNET editor's advice: don't d... [Read more]

When it comes to anti-malware utilities, a few prominent names stand out, including Norton, Kaspersky, and Sophos, in addition to some smaller and perhaps Mac-only tools like iAntiVirus and MacScan. Among the popular options for OS X is VirusBarrier from Intego, which I recently gave a spin.

VirusBarrier is offered in two versions: the basic VirusBarrier X6 package and the extended Internet Security Barrier suite that includes VirusBarrier and a number of additional utilities. I chose the latter to see what advantages it may offer over the basic VirusBarrier antivirus scanner, especially given recent malware developments on the Mac and people's interest in keeping their systems safe.

VirusBarrier X6: The center of it all

The main VirusBarrier window gives an overview of all VirusBarrier's features.

(Credit: Screenshot by Topher Kessler) At the heart of the suite is Intego's main anti-malware program, VirusBarrier. When launched the interface looks like a submarine console, with a big round green status indicator in the middle of the window (this turns red when threats are encountered),... [Read more]

Microsoft has streamlined the upgrade and setup process for Windows 8.

(Credit: Microsoft)

People frustrated by the upgrade and setup process in prior versions of Windows may find a more user-friendly experience in Windows 8.

Ensuring that Windows installs properly across a variety of hardware and software configurations has always been a major challenge, and one that Microsoft has never solved to the satisfaction of all users.

Microsoft has already taken some big steps forward in this respect with Windows 7. Its next version of Windows promises further improvements, as described in the latest edition of the Building Windows 8 blog by Christa St. Pierre from Microsoft's setup and deployment team:

For Windows 8, our goal was to continue to improve reliability while also improving the installation experience and raw performance. Not only did we want it to be rock solid, but also faster and easier to use.

Microsoft created the Windows 8 setup process with two types of users in mind:

1. People who want to easily upgrade without any hassle; and
2. People who want to run a clean install and tap into advanced options to control their disk and partition settings.

One of the first enhancements can be found in the delivery of Windows 8.

Beyond offering the ne... [Read more]

Grooveshark released a major update to its popular streaming music service with a slew of new features and changes. We jumped into the waters to play around with the bigger, badder shark and see how it compared to similar alternatives.

Grooveshark's explore option makes it easier to discover new music.

(Credit: Screenshot by Eddie Cho/ CNET)

The first thing you'll notice is a sleeker, cleaner layout. The universal sidebar on the left has been removed and consolidated into the My Music option. We found this change to be welcoming, as it not only frees up space, but also brings the spotlight to the navigation changes. Grooveshark has organized navigation and exploration into four main categories: Search, Explore, My Music, and Community.

Search still retains the simple search bar and full-screen advertisement. Despite the size, Grooveshark's implementation of advertisements as a wallpaper (versus a pop-up or static banner) looked slick and unobtrusive. Unfortunately, Grooveshark still pulled duplicate results from user uploads and we hope that the service will eventually clean up and defragment these titles.

The new Explore section is Grooveshark's approach to helping users discover new music in an eye-pleasing and functional way. New or popular hits and albums are showcased with cover art and genre tags. The lay... [Read more]

Google launched WebP to outdo JPEG. Now a new version is designed to take on another dominant graphics format on the Web, PNG.

WebP is based on the open-source compression technology used in Google's WebM video encoding technology, and with it, Google hopes to reduce Web page file sizes and thereby speed up the Net. There are plenty of challenges for the technology, but Google just made WebP a bit more competitive through the addition of two major features.

First is a "lossless" compression option that can image data without loss of fidelity. Second is support for an "alpha channel," which lets designers designate part of an image as transparent.

That's useful for video game graphics, icons in user interfaces, and other objects that aren't simple shapes placed in front of a background. Designers today often must choose between JPEG, which doesn't support alpha channels, and PNG (Portable Network Graphics), which does, but which in many cases doesn't compress images as well as JPEG.

"Photographic images typically encoded as JPEG can be encoded in WebP lossy mode to achieve smaller file size. Icons and graphics can be encoded better in WebP lossless mode than in PNG. WebP lossy with alpha can be used to create transparent images that have minimal visual degradation, yet are much smaller in file size," Google programmers Jyrki Alakuijala, Vikas Arora, and Urvang Joshi said... [Read more]

More valuable than any review: Placement in the app store.

(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

Did Apple kick the ball into its own goal with its campaign against Flash?

By forcing Web developers, and ultimately Adobe, out of the Flash business, Apple made HTML5 apps better. That's good for Safari users, but it's also good for users on other Web platforms, like Android. If there's a truly good universal platform for online apps, it stands to reason that the smart developer will build apps for it, since this way the app will be available to the largest number of users. Right?

Furthermore, now that Adobe has HTML5 religion, the company is releasing high-quality HTML5 developer tools, migrating its Flash developers over to the new platform. So we should be about to see a flood of new Web-based mobile apps.

All this appears to be just as Apple intended: Steve Jobs' campaign to rid the world of Flash is succeeding. The Web is getting better apps and the Web-browsing experience on Apple's mobile devices is getting better.

But this could be bad news for Apple's lucrative App Store business. While Apple takes a 30% cut of all app sales through its store (still the only way for consumers to get apps), Apple gets 0% of "web apps" loaded up through the browser. The better HTML5 gets, the less developers will write apps, less money Apple will make, and the less unique the i... [Read more]

As you can imagine, there are tons of Black Friday apps in the Android Market, most of which do the same thing--aggregate holiday sale items.

Sure, you can download them all to make sure you've got your bases covered, but we're thinking you probably don't want to be fumbling through an unwieldy app drawer while throwing elbows in department store aisles. So, we've taken the time to highlight just the essential Android apps for hunting down all the hottest deals come Black Friday.

(Credit: TGI Black Friday) TGI Black Friday We're listing this app first because it should be your bread and butter. In short, it aggregates all of the latest Black Friday ads floating around--some of which are leaked up to a month in advance--and lists each of the featured items in its database. To use the app, simply sift through all of the discounts by product, store name, or category. You can even download PDF printouts of the original ads. What's more, the app offers a nifty shopping list creator that lets you keep track of items you plan on buying. You can also access its database of deals at TGIBlackFriday.com.

[Read more]

You'll find plenty of keyboard-shortcut launchers floating around for Mac OS X, but Quicksilver's stylish interface, small footprint, and many customization options set it ahead of the pack.

You activate this open-source program via a user-assignable hot key that spawns a small text field for entering abbreviations to locate applications, documents, or anything else. This latest version fixes crucial bugs introduced in the previous version.

Also this week, we have an update for Evernote, the app that lets you create and get to your notes from a variety of mobile devices (including the iPhone and iPad) and any Web browser on any computer. Our game this week is Motorbike, the casual bike-skills game with several graphical improvements in this version on the Mac.

Don't forget to check out the latest iOS app collection: Thanksgiving cooking apps for iOS. [Read more]