Ubuntu has announced a change to their version of Linux that ought to get hot key junkies and voice control enthusiasts alike to raise their heads with glee.

Ubuntu 12.04 will introduce a new Heads-Up Display for interacting with the operating system in April, wrote Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth. The HUD will allow you to "express your intent" with the operating system and the programs running on it, wrote Shuttleworth.

Currently, it's activated by hitting the Alt key, which opens a translucent box into which you can speak or type your commands. As you start to type the word Firefox, for example, the predictive menu will pull up launching Firefox as an option.

More than a streamlining of how the menu looks, though, Ubuntu 12.04 also will have extensive voice command support. This Vocabulary User Interface, or VUI, is going to let you control Ubuntu by speaking to it. Shuttleworth explained some of the benefits as including fuzzy matching, where imprecise commands are matched to user intent; "smart" learning so the operating system can prioritize habitual behavior; and it will work with the system itself as well as the focused app. This last one means that the VUI is designed to let you go offline in Skype, or change your instant message status, through the HUD because, "those apps all talk to the indicator system."

"When you've been using it for a little while it seems lik... [Read more]

Is there anything more viscerally satisfying than a car chase? Especially a cops-and-robbers chase that ends with the bad guys getting rammed into a concrete median?

That's the premise of Smash Cops (iTunes link), a thoroughly engaging new iOS game. You drive the squad car, chase down criminals, then do your best to smash and crash their getaway vehicles.

At first blush, Smash Cops ($2.99) resembles other top-down racing games, including Reckless Racing and Reckless Getaway. (The latter is pretty much the polar opposite of this game.) But here the view comes from an overhead TV-news helicopter, ostensibly broadcasting the action as it transpires. It's a neat gimmick, particularly the "breaking news"-style status updates.

Another big difference: the controls. Instead of steering your car with an onscreen wheel or left/right arrows or the like, you use a "push" method: you hold your finger behind the squad car to make it go, sliding left or right to steer.

Skitch is now available as an add-on to the Dolphin HD browser.

As the mobile Web matures with phenomenal user growth, the Dolphin HD browser introduced today two add-ons that bring the power of apps to the mobile browser.

The new add-ons for Evernote (download) and Skitch (download) take previously app-only features and port them directly into Dolphin HD for Android only. Unlike most Dolphin HD add-ons, neither of these can be added from within Dolphin. You must go through the Android Market links above to get them.

Taking features from an app and adding them to a browser is common on PCs, but it's still fairly rare in the mobile world. The Evernote add-on lets you highlight text from a Web page and copy it directly to your Evernote account when you tap the Evernote icon, which can live either on your address bar or in the sidebar on the right. It lacks the ability to add richer content, though, such as images or videos.

The Skitch app has a fair bit more going for it. Skitch is a mobile service that lets you edit images and screenshots on the fly. Once installed, you tap the red-heart icon on your right sidebar to activate it. It'll request your log-in credentials or guide you through the ... [Read more]

About a week ago I featured Kingsoft Office Suite Professional 2012 in a bonus deal. Since then I've been test-driving the software on an old laptop. And you know what? I like it!

I mention this because although the Kingsoft Professional giveaway is over, you can still get Kingsoft Office Suite Free 2012 for, well, free. Update: This program is for Windows.

Until last week, I'd never heard of Kingsoft or this product. I had, however, tried all the usual freebie Microsoft Office alternatives: OpenOffice, LibreOffice, Lotus Symphony, Google Docs, and so on.

They're all OK--good enough, certainly, for most users--but I'll admit I've become spoiled by Microsoft's Ribbon interface, which made its debut in Office 2007 and carried over to Office 2010. The famed freebies mostly resemble Office 2003--if not an even earlier version.

Kingsoft Office looks a lot like Office 2010, and consequently I feel right at home in it. (Update: Only the Pro version gives you the option of an Office 2010-style interface. My apologies for the error.) A few commenters last week accused it of being a "Chinese rip-off," but last time I checked, software created in China wasn't inherently bad. (By the way, Kingsoft is actually based in Hong Kong.)

What's more, the developers may have borrowed heavily from Microso... [Read more]

Following its successful runs on the iPhone and Mac platforms, Producteev now makes its way onto Windows 7 desktops and Android mobile devices.

With the circle of cross-platform access now essentially complete, users can keep track of personal tasks or create, store, and collaborate on group tasks, no matter what devices they're using--Windows, Mac, iOS, or Android.

But that's not all. To go with the shiny new Windows and Android native apps, Producteev is also announcing a host of new features. First, users get built-in integration with TaskRabbit, so they can offer up any of their tasks to TaskRabbit's community of short-term hires. Since more and more small and midsize businesses (some of Producteev's core users) are beginning to open themselves up to crowdsourced labor, the partnership will surely be a useful one.

Another new feature, Task Followers, lets users add members to a discussion about a task without actually assigning the task to them. This is a great way to encourage collaboration without having to necessarily increase members' accountability.

And finally, the apps will all be able to export to CSV, create printable task lists, and add subtasks.

Meanwhile, to reflect all of the new features, the original iPhone app, Mac app, and Web interface have all been refreshed as well.

The Producteev apps (... [Read more]

Threat Tracker's information screen shows some interesting facts about mobile security threats.

Lookout Mobile Security's latest project app peels away some of the secrecy and uncertainty surrounding mobile threats. Debuting today, the Threat Tracker provides information about mobile threats going back two weeks.

The app is meant to help people understand that mobile threats do exist, explained Derek Halliday, senior product manager for Security at Lookout. "We're showing people what they're being protected against," he said. It was originally created by a Lookout summer intern in 2011.

Here's how it works. Tap the home screen that opens when the app launches, and the app jumps to a spinning blue globe of Earth. It populates the globe with green dots, representing people around the world that Lookout says it has protected from threats. You can drag the globe around to see how different parts of the world are affected.

Below the globe is a timeline chart of mobile malware threats over the past two weeks. It gets updated hourly, and you can slide your finger along it to change the map of blocked threats above. At the top of the app are three links. The one in the upper left corner g... [Read more]

Has a slow Web been getting you down lately?

Just imagine if your multibillion-dollar business depended on it, as Google's does. Then imagine the glee in Google's corridors at a significant new victory in the company's attempt to build a Web-accelerating technology it calls SPDY into the Internet.

Earlier today, Mark Nottingham, chairman of the HTTPbis Working Group, announced support for SPDY in an overhaul of one of the networking foundations of the World Wide Web. That foundation is HTTP, the Hypertext Transfer Protocol, and Google hopes SPDY will open up some of its bottlenecks.

The HTTPbis group, part of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), has been been sprucing up the 1999-era HTTP 1.1 for several years. But Nottingham said it's now time to look to the future.

"There seems to be broad agreement that the time is ripe to start work on a new version of HTTP in the IETF, and that it should happen in this Working Group," Nottingham said. When work refurbishing HTTP 1.1 began, there wasn't interest in a new version of HTTP, but SPDY and its adoption shows there's interes... [Read more]

How many contact lists do you have? A new iPhone app from Xobni unifies your contact lists into one app (already available for Android), helping you quickly find contact information from a number of sources.

Smartr Contacts for iPhone (Free) unifies your contacts by scanning your iPhone contact list and e-mail contacts, then grabbing information from social sites like Facebook and Twitter, to merge all the available data into a searchable supercharged contact list.

View phone numbers, e-mail addresses, and social accounts on info profile pages.

You start by adding your Gmail account, then social sites like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Once connected, Smartr Contacts goes to work tying your contact data together, scraping social sites to get you all the latest info. Now if you search from the Smartr landing page in the app, you'll get a compiled list of info including alternate phone numbers and e-mail addresses for each contact.

Even if you don't remember the name of a specific person from a company, you can search on the company name and hit the Common tab on the upper right of the interface, which may turn up the contact in question (through a Facebook friend of t... [Read more]