Filed under: Google, Open Source, Beta, Browsers

Chrome gets a real extension manager in dev channel build originally appeared on Download Squad on Wed, 30 Sep 2009 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Sponsored Topics: Google Chrome - Google - Open Source - Firefox - Mozilla Firefox

Filed under: Security, Google, Beta, Browsers

A number of Download Squad readers have been echoing the same sentiment in recent posts about Google's browser: as soon as LastPass is available, we're leaving Firefox for good.

Well, gang, grab your parachutes, it's time to bail! The LastPass crew has released an alpha version of their Google Chrome extension, and it rocks. Check out the screens after the break!

Continue reading LastPass extension for Google Chrome now available, and it rocks

LastPass extension for Google Chrome now available, and it rocks originally appeared on Download Squad on Wed, 30 Sep 2009 14:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Sponsored Topics: Google Chrome - Google - Software release life cycle - Mozilla Firefox - LastPass

Filed under: VoIP, Web

There was a time when mobile phones were the size of a small suitcase and they were firmly tethered to automobiles. These days they're small enough to easily lose track of. If you've ever left your phone in your jacket or pants pocket, dropped it under the couch, or just pulled your hair out trying to figure out where the thing is, you've probably realized that the easiest way to locate a phone (if it's in you're house) is to dial your own number using another phone.

If you don't happen to have a second phone handy, Where's My Cell Phone can help. The web site is covered with annoying ads, but it provides one marginally useful service. If you need to make your phone ring, all you have to do is enter your number and hit the "Make it Ring" button. Your phone should start ringing a few seconds later.

Once you place a call you have to wait a few minutes before making another, so make sure to spend the 30 seconds or so that you have while your phone rings wisely.

[via TechnoSpot]

Misplace your cellphone? This single-purpose web site can help originally appeared on Download Squad on Wed, 30 Sep 2009 14:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Sponsored Topics: Download Squad - Mobile phone - Voice over Internet Protocol - Cell Phone - Website

Filed under: Utilities, Windows, Open Source, Windows x64

If you don't know the app, don't let its name fool you. Vista Services Optimizer is capable of more than just tuning your Windows services to squeeze out some extra performance.

It also allows you to create different profiles, provides a one-touch gaming mode, can take automatic service state snapshots, and offers painless recovery of Windows default settings. Version 1.2 is also Windows 7 friendly (64-bit builds included).

VSO is also a nice app for casual tweakers -- you don't have to know what each Windows service does or whether or not you can do without it. Just answer the (mostly) plain English questions VSO asks, and it takes care of making the necessary changes to your services. The built-in Rescue Center makes undoing changes totally painless.

Vista Services Optimizer is offered both with an installer and as a portable utility (host machine must have .Net 3.5 installed). Downloads from the developer's site can be a bit slow, but you can also find VSO over at Softpedia.

Open source tweaking app Vista Services Optimizer adds Windows 7 love in v1.2 originally appeared on Download Squad on Wed, 30 Sep 2009 13:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Sponsored Topics: Windows 7 - Microsoft Windows - Windows Vista - Download Squad - Open source

Filed under: Fun, Games, Kids, Time-Wasters, Web

Dynamic Systems is a physics-based puzzle game. As is common for this type of game, your goal is to get the ball into the goal. In this case the ball is metal, and the goal is a cup. You move certain objects into place and rotate them into the correct orientation to allow the ball to roll, bounce, or otherwise be moved into the cup. Thankfully, unlike most puzzle games, Dynamic Systems offers solutions to each level's puzzle right in the game.

The feel of the game is somewhat like Collider, with floating metal bars and dirty industrial graphics everywhere. The background music in Dynamic Systems is relatively soothing, but as the game gets more challenging, the repetitive nature of the music becomes pretty frustrating. Thankfully, you can turn it off.

The difficulty in Dynamic Systems grows slowly but steadily, making it a fun game to come back to.

Dynamic Systems - Time Waster originally appeared on Download Squad on Wed, 30 Sep 2009 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Sponsored Topics: game - Download Squad - Puzzle - Video game - Physics

Filed under: Web services, Google, Social Software, Beta

According to the official Google blog, 100,000 invitations to Google's most hotly-anticipated new service, Google Wave, are going out today. Wave is being touted as a communication tool that reimagines the way email should work. When Download Squad took a look at Wave back in May, Lee explained it this way:

Create a Wave, add people to it, toss in some gadgets, feeds, and photos, and mix with a rich text editor. You'll see new content in near-real time as your friends add it, and you can even hit the rewind button and watch your Wave evolve from scratch.

So, who's getting invited to use this next-generation communication tool? Well, it helps if you signed up early for an invitation and wrote the Wave team a message offering to give feedback. If you're a developer who's been using the developer preview of Wave, you might also get an invitation, and some are going out to paying customers of Google Apps.

In their blog post, the Google Wave folks stress that - if you do land an invitation - you're not going to be playing with a finished product. Wave is still missing some crucial features, and bugs are going to be par for the course until the team starts using the feedback from these 100,000 new users to start identifying problems. Unfortunately, you won't be able to directly invite friends to Wave, but you will be able to nominate them for invitations.

Do you have a Wave invitation yet? What do you think of the service so far?

Google Wave opens to 100,000 users today originally appeared on Download Squad on Wed, 30 Sep 2009 11:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Sponsored Topics: Google - Google Apps - Download Squad - Searching - Social Software

Filed under: OS Updates, Windows, Microsoft, Windows x64

Microsoft has unveiled some of the details of the company's Windows 7 Logo program. Basically the program governs those little stickers that are affixed to computers and other hardware that have been tested to play nicely with Windows 7.

In the past the Windows logo program has been something of a mess. Some hardware that received the sticker barely worked with Vista, and there were separate stickers for Windows Vista Home Basic, Home Premium, and so on. Now there will be a single sticker for all versions of Windows 7. And in order to qualify, every version of Windows 7 needs to work with the hardware. And that includes the 64-bit version of the operating system.

As Engadget points out, that means that virtually every netbook on the market today won't qualify to wear the sticker, since the Intel Atom N270, N280, Z520, and Z30 processors found in most netbooks are 32-bit only. Interestingly, the Atom 230 and 330 chips found in nettops (small, low power desktop computers) are 64-bit processors which means that these devices will be able to sport the new logo. And the next-generation laptop Atom processors due out in early 2010 will also be 64-bit chips.

You can find a list of companies that ahve already certified their hardware as Windows 7 compatible at readyset7.com.

Windows 7 Logo program: 32-bit only hardware need not apply originally appeared on Download Squad on Wed, 30 Sep 2009 10:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Sponsored Topics: Windows 7 - Microsoft Windows - Operating system - Windows Vista - Microsoft

Filed under: Web services, Social Software, Microblogging

Invitations to Brizzly, a new web-based Twitter client, have been flying around all over the place in the past few days, and I finally got a chance to try it out. Brizzly offers a lot that the standard Twitter website doesn't, but it also introduces a couple of annoyances that ultimately led me to stick with Twitter.com.

On the plus side, Brizzly allows you to save drafts of tweets, a feature I wish Twitter.com would incorporate. Its threaded interface for direct messages is also nice, and looks a bit like a Google Talk window. If you DM a lot, Brizzly will definitely make it easier to follow your conversations. Brizzly also tells you when there are new tweets in your stream, so you're not fruitlessly hitting refresh to read Twitter. Keyboard shortcuts are handy, too: The j and k keys scroll up and down, which Gmail and Google Reader users will be familiar with. On top of that, photos and videos are displayed inline, instead of making you click through.

Brizzly's not all great, though. It's unfortunately just not a very pretty website, and I don't think I can look at it every day. I'm not saying we're in Fugly Friday territory, but the design is weak, especially the prominent trending topics box. I also miss having my follower/following numbers and my friends' icons in the sidebar, the way Twitter.com does it. Some people might find that useless, but I would say the same about trending topics. It's all a matter of taste, so if Brizzly's array of features fits your needs, and you don't mind its appearance, you should definitely give it a shot.

Brizzly: full-featured web client for Twitter originally appeared on Download Squad on Wed, 30 Sep 2009 09:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Sponsored Topics: Twitter - Google Reader - Download Squad - Google Talk - Google

Filed under: Office, Web services, Google, Web

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]

Google Docs API now provides OCR service originally appeared on Download Squad on Wed, 30 Sep 2009 08:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Sponsored Topics: Google Doc - Optical Character Recognition - Google - Download Squad - Search Engines

Filed under: Utilities, Productivity, iPhone

Dropbox, the über-slick cloud storage and backup app, now has an iPhone version. You can use the iPhone app to get to your Dropbox on the go, sync media files from your phone to your Dropbox, and share links. You'll need a free Dropbox account - which comes with 2 gigs of storage space - to use the iPhone app, but you can sign up directly from your iPhone.

The iPhone app works with Dropbox's photo gallery feature, so it's easy to upload and view photos on the go. You can also download any of your stored files that you can view on an iPhone, which strikes me as pretty darn brilliant: now, instead of just using Dropbox to back up your computer, you can use it to back up all the media on your phone, too.

If you're away from a computer and your iPhone's music and photos get wiped, they'll still be safely waiting for you in your Dropbox.

Update: Although you can obviously store music (and anything else) on your Dropbox account, there's not actually a way to sync music to your iPhone via Dropbox. Oops. Photos and videos definitely work, though.

Dropbox drops onto the iPhone originally appeared on Download Squad on Tue, 29 Sep 2009 19:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Sponsored Topics: iPhone - Download Squad - Dropbox - Handhelds - Smartphones