One of the biggest complaints about Apple's iPhone App Store has been the lack of any way to try an app before you buy it. Apple has addressed that issue by allowing free-to-paid app upgrades. This means apps that used to have two separate versions, free and paid, will now be able to merge into a single download, with the ability to buy an upgrade from within the app.

Apple has been pretty strict about rejecting demo versions of apps although "lite" apps have been allowed. Basically, developers weren't allowed to give away a feature-crippled free version of an app for the purpose of upselling customers to a feature-complete paid version. That rule made Apple look harsh compared to competitors like Android, which offers a trial period after which users can get a refund on an app they don't like. If Apple isn't going to do something like that, allowing demo capabilities is the next best thing.

[via TUAW]

10/GUI from C. Miller on Vimeo.

Kitschy soundtrack, good voiceover and an intensely thorough demo add up to one cool re-imagining of our conventional human/computer interaction. In other words: this looks as close to the UI in Minority Report as I've ever seen. The key seems to be rewarding the user for having 10 fingers, and using all 10 to do a high number of operations in clever ways. This is really, really clever, too, just check out the name: 10/GUI. Check it out, you won't be disappointed. Well, if you hate using your fingers you might.

If you're not a developer, you're probably not aware that Google Docs has an API available for various document-related services. Recently Google added a new feature that allows developers to create applications that will pass an image-based (.png, .jpg, or .gif) document to the API, and using OCR (Optical Character Recognition) technology, generate and pass back an editable text-based document. Currently the service can handle documents up to 10 MB in size.

For non-developers, this is certainly interesting, but not terribly useful. Well, a live demo is available that will allow you to test the service yourself. At the time of this writing I was successfully able to convert a single page document, though there are reports that the service has become overloaded and is slow or sometimes fails to respond. Given that this is a demo, that's probably not terribly surprising.

If Google is exposing this functionality to developers, it seems at least possible that it could become a built-in feature of Google Docs for regular users at some point in the near future. With Google's recent acquisition of reCaptcha, it seems likely that Google's document-scanning capabilities will soon be better than anyone else's. That would make for an incredibly powerful feature for Google to offer its users.

[via Google Operating System]

At any given time on the planet, there's a technology trade show in progress. Some are more significant than others, and there's no formula to figure if any given one will be worth the airfare. We're guessing that a few ultraportable laptop manufacturers, as well as a few of us (cough) normal folk, are a little intrigued with the news emerging from the Computex exhibit halls today.

Canonical let slip some further information and screen shots of Ubuntu Netbook Remix, the Ubuntu derived operating system for ultraportables. The quick and dirty information: it looks suspiciously as if the Ubuntu image is made to work solely on Intel Atom processors. How radically different is that from the other Intel processors used previously in ultraportables? Will it be a significant enough difference that it won't run with other Intel chips? Are VIA machines left in the dust? Maybe, maybe not, but we're guessing it'll affect performance on some level.

It seems that Canonical and Intel are working with various manufacturers to get Ubuntu Netbook Remix into our hot little hands, but it probably won't happen much before late 2008. They were so kind, however, as to release some screenshots of the demo version.

Ubuntu Netbook Remix looks... well, a little bit like the "Easy Mode" settings in the Eee PC's customized Xandros. Maybe not quite as simplistic, but we have this funny feeling that many people picturing "Ubuntu on an ultraportable" were thinking more along the lines of the traditional look with a few GUI tweaks. We're not sure if this is really a good or bad thing, as yet. Ultraportables are different animals, and used in a different manner than a desktop. Perhaps a different looking user interface is enough of a disconnect to make it all work (and keep us from trying to install the sorts of things on our ultraportables that they aren't intended to run due to processing limitations).

What will be interesting, and promises to push Linux on ultraportables to the next level, is all that scary stuff on the backend. The most intriguing bit of this conversation seems to focus on the use of Moblin, and the push for developers to get Ubuntu packages to work well -- really well -- with the specific requirements of the processor and ultraportable hardware.

The problem with search engines (if you're one of those people who believe there's a problem with search engines) is that they don't know who you are. Google and other search companies are tackling this issue by compiling your search history in a way that could eventually help the search engine decide which results will be most relevant. But for the most part, right now when you, your mother, and that mad scientist down the street search for information on building a nuclear bomb in your basement, you'll all get the same results.

Delver wants to change that. The company came out of stealth mode at this week's DEMO conference. The idea is that you can search for information that's relevant to you by gathering search results from your friends' social networking pages. All you have to do is enter your name into Delver's service (no registration necessary) and it will try to determine who you are, and then search your public profile on sites like Facebook, Flickr, and YouTube to determine who you friends are. Then when you enter a search term, like say "pizza places," you should get a list of places your friends recommend or at least have talked about.

If you do register for an account Delver will let you associate yourself with accounts on social networking sites. But as you've probably guessed, other users will be able to search your social network without knowing your password. Theoretically they can already do this, since all Delver does is draw publicly available information together in one place. But it's still mildly creepy. Then again, why would anyone care where your friends buy pizza?

[via TechCrunch]

While mobile web browsers have come a long way in recent years, so has the web. Today's mobile browsers like Opera Mini and Safari for the iPhone let you zoom in and out of web pages and let you scale text and images to fit on a small screen. You can even watch some web video. But mobile browsers still have a tough time handling pages that make heavy use of Ajax, Flash 9, JavaScript, and other modern technologies.

Skyfire is a new browser for Windows Mobile smartphones launching in private beta at this week's DEMO 2008 conference. The Skyfire team claims that the mobile browser is the first to support Flash 9, and as you can see in the video above, the browser seems to handle YouTube and other multimedia content much the same way a desktop browser would. You don't have to download and convert files to view them or open them in a separate video player.

According to Webware, the way Skyfire achieves this is by acting as a proxy browser. In other words, the Windows Mobile application isn't really a full web browser. Instead, Skyfire hosts an application on its servers that does all of the hard work of rendering the web content and then delivers it to the client software on your phone. On the one hand, this makes it easy to deliver full web content to the underpowered device in the palm of your hand. On the other hand, we're a bit concerned about what would happen if Skyfire actually becomes popular and the company's servers start to get hammered by users making web requests from their mobile phones.

Skyfire currently supports Windows Mobile 5.0/6 phones with full QWERTY keyboards. A Symbian client is coming soon.

Ever wish your PC desktop was just a little bit bigger? Need more space for program shortcuts, documents, and temporary files? There are a number of ways to virtually increase the size of your desktop by creating multiple virtual desktops. Microsoft has a free power toy that lets you toggle between up to 4 desktops. Dexpot is a freeware program that lets you have up to 20. And virtual desktops are built into many Linux distributions.

But what if you don't want a separate desktop? You just need one, but you'd like it to b wider than say, your 17-inch monitor. That's where 360desktop comes in.

360desktop launches in private beta today. The application takes a new approach toward virtual desktops., Rather than toggling between desktops, 360desktop lets you expand your existing workspace past the edge of your monitor. You can either hover your mouse near the edge of the screen or use a pull-down navigation panel, which results in much quicker and smoother scrolling.

The program takes a panoramic photo and lets you treat it as an extended background. True to 360Destkop's name, your desktop is treated as a big circle. Scroll far enough and you'll wind up right back where you started.

Ever wish Google would let you see what a website looks like before you click a search result? Yeah, neither did we. But Exalead has solved a problem that may or may not exist by putting thumbnail previews of websites next to search results.

Overall, the search engine performs reasonably well. There's a nice "related term" feature that lets you narrow your search results. And you can search the full web or just blogs. But the way we see it, there's two problems:

1. The thumbnails are far too small to really tell you anything. If you're searching for a product, you might have enough info to determine if you're looking at a web store or review site. But you might not. And for more esoteric searches, good luck.
   
2. The site includes 2-3 sponsored results at the top of the page. That would be fine for text results, but with images, your browser window can easily show 3 sponsored items and just one genuine, unbiased (we hope) search result. If you have to scroll down to get to the good stuff, people are just going to choose a different search engine.

In other words, the pictures aren't big enough to be useful, and they may also be too big to provide you all the information you want at a glance. The simplest solution would probably be to use fewer paid links, or to make the images for sponsored results a bit smaller.

The search engine does let you turn off the image preview, but if you do that, there's really not much reason to use Exalead over competing products.

Exalead will demonstrate its search engine at the DEMO conference next week.

[via Silicon Alley Insider]

Announced Tuesday at DEMO, SplashCast is a Portland, Oregon start-up bringing a new publishing platform to the masses. Users create "channels" - a collection of audio clips, photos, video clips, text, or an RSS feed of content, which you can share or embed into your blog. The content is presented in slide show format and you have the option to include background music. As far as content goes, either upload your own, or you can pull photos and video directly off Flickr and YouTube, respectively.

I think that this is a really ambitious but really cool idea - it provides a place where user-generated content can be user-rebroadcast and reach a broader audience. Instead of people nibbling away at single videos on YouTube, or single photos on Flickr, they can bring it all together into one easy to digest kibble of media. It's like a simple to use mash up interface.

The one thing that concerns me is that it doesn't seem to have any controls in relation to copyrights. There's a cute warning when you go to upload media which says, "We don't allow copyright infringement, porn, or hateful stuff." but that seems pretty weak. I can only assume that they are monitoring uploaded content, which seems like a daunting task when faced with policing user-generated content. It would be cool if it endorsed Creative Commons licensing, or was able to detect CC content. Also, the entire interface is Flash based, which can be a turn off for some folks. It's also not as flexible as I would have expected (I can't specify a Podcast RSS feed, for example). All my gripes aside, it looks like a cool concept and will be interesting to see where it heads.

[Via PodTech.net]

I've never made a very convincing pirate, even on International Talk Like a Pirate Day, but like you I can enjoy a hearty "yarr" now and again. What I enjoy even more, though, is Ninja Loves Pirate, a gorgeous side-scroller for Windows in which you play the dual roles of (wait for it) stealthy ninja Ichiro and dread pirate Blackbeard, who must battle their way through (wait for it) evil zombies and robots. I'm not even kidding. Blackbeard and Ichiro each have their own special moves and skills, and the characters, enemies, and environments are composed of lush 16-bit-inspired graphics and excellent animations. The game does have a manual, but it's hidden on the Ninja Loves Pirate web site. Unfortunately only a demo is currently available, but it's challenging and satisfying to play, and I don't recommend you miss it. Matey.

Know any good pirate-themed time-wasters? Post them in the comments and I'll add them to this post.

Apple today previewed the next major update to Mac OS X, version 10.5 (aka: Leopard), at their annual World Wide Developer Conference in California today. Our sister sites Engadget and TUAW covered the event well, but there are some great new features in this next version that are definitely worth a look here at DLS.

The big 10 new features (with more secret ones promised) can be previewed at Apple's new Leopard preview site, complete with video tutorials. If you're not down for watching all those videos though, I'll summarize some of the big ones for your shortcut pleasure.

Steven Frank, founder of Mac software company Panic Inc., certainly thinks so, and I agree. With the slew of new web apps that are being introduced almost on a daily basis, it's becoming a pain to create a registration for each one, verify, then jump back in to finally start playing. Not to mention this process completely breaks that initial 'ooh, a slick new [insert service here]!!' excitement.

I think it would be great if these hot new web 2.0 startups would offer a public, no-registration-required sandbox to further boost their convenience and cool factors, but what about you, DLS readers? Are we splitting hairs here, or might this be a good idea? Sound off.

Want to give Office 2007 Beta a try but don't want to bother downloading it? You're in luck, because Microsoft is doing a Test Drive program which lets you try the product in your web browser. Well, their web browser-unsurprisingly it's IE-only and requires you install a plugin and sign in with Passport. If the server is busy (and it is right now) you'll be put in a queue, but my estimated wait of 35 minutes turned out to be 5. The real wait was for the thing to load, but after about 10 minutes and few hiccups, it did. Once it's loaded you can play around with live, working copies of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, Outlook, OneNote, Project, Publisher, Visio, InfoPath and SharePoint. Microsoft provides a tutorial for each, which is nice for getting acquainted, but if you just want to poke around you can kill the tutorial easily. There's a lot to see, and if you've been on the fence about Office 2007, this test drive will probably tip you one way or the other.

[Via Netscape]