Download Squad

You know, the reason we do these is in part to educate, in part to entertain, and in no small part because we just find the weirdest stuff on the web and must share it. Like the old Ellen Degeneres joke, "here, this tastes awful, try some!" With that in mind, take a moment to view Welkom op de site van Willy's & Marjetten. Yes, fugly comes in many flavors and languages. In this case, it's Flemish. Read the hilarious Google translation here.*

When you are done wiping the blood from your eyeballs, let's discuss this atrocity, shall we? First off, clearly the gods of GIF smiled upon this site, as we see so often in the fugly department. Look at all those animations, bouncing around and not really doing anything but causing cognitive dissonance. So that's where my migraine came from!

Willy's page isn't all bad, however. Instead of using bgsound or autoplaying a media file, there's an auto-play Flash button which plays some truly atrocious music. But at least you can turn it off. That's a plus.

I should also mention Willy's not entirely living in the stone ages where design is concerned. While I found this page on a hunt for FrontPage atrocities (FrontPage being wanted for browser war crimes, and increasingly tough to track down), the site appears to have eschewed the old FP template for... CSS! Yep, I found a stylesheet attached to the page. Unfortunately the only thing it is used for: setting the font to Marker Felt. Cue the sad trombone. Yeah, the page is otherwise a mess of <td>'s, which makes babies cry.

*Epilogue: I hear this page was supposed to be set up as an example of bad 90's web design. And, in fact, it was built for a Flemish TV series called Willy's en Marjetten. So it would seem the fugly was all in the name of parody. Note that, at the end of the series, all the characters died. Bad design kills, kids, so stay off FrontPage and stay in design school. That said, how many real and serious sites still look like this? Send us your answers in the comments.

Google Translate already provided tools that let users translate snippets of text or entire web pages by entering a URL and choosing the source and output languages. Now you can also upload documents to translate.

Google quietly added the option sometime int he last few days. there's not a ton of information about the new feature available, but it appears to handle TXT, HTML, XLS, DOC, and PDF files reasonably well. It choked on an OpenOffice Sheet ODS file I tried to upload.

The results are spit out in HTML format, so if you upload a spreadsheet you won't get a translated, downloadable spreadsheet in return. Instead you'll get an HTML table. But this isn't a bad start. I wouldn't be surprised if Google eventually adds the ability to open translated documents in Google Docs.

[via Google Operating System]

Since almost all phones can now take photos, many people have both a phone and a regular camera (or four) that they manage with their Mac. By default, you can choose whether to automatically open iPhoto when a camera is connected, but what if you want to do different things depending on which camera you connect? A new application by Flexibits has just been released to deal with this problem.

Cameras installs as a preferences pane, and allows you to very specifically choose what you would like to do with each camera. By default it is set to "Ask what to do" each time a new camera is plugged in, at which point you can choose to open a specific application, do nothing at all, or leave the option to ask what to do each time.

This functionality seems so dead-simple and obvious that I'd be surprised if Apple doesn't adopt it at some point in the future. For the time being, if you have more than one camera and you want to handle each one in different ways, Cameras is your free magic bullet.

[via our close personal friends at TUAW]

Microsoft is offering Windows 7 Home Premium and Windows 7 Professional upgrades for about 50% off to customers who pre-order by July 11th. We already told you that a few weeks ago. But here's what you may not have noticed: July 11th is tomorrow.

That means you've got a little more than 24 hours to decide whether to pick up Windows 7 Home Premium Upgrade for $49.99 or Professional Upgrade for $99.99.

If you plan on buying a new computer in the next few months, odds are it will come with the option of a free or cheap upgrade to Windows 7 once the operating system is released in October. So you can probably afford to skip this offer (unless that computer you plan on buying is a netbook, which probably won't qualify). But if you think you might want to run Windows 7 on your existing PC, you might want to make a note that the prices are going to go up significantly on Sunday.

In Cargo Bridge, your goal is to build a bridge that will support the weight of your workers, and the cargo they need to go and bring back to the hut. You have a limited amount of money with which to build the bridge, and limited materials - walks and connectors. Walks are the only surface your workers and their cargo can travel on, while connectors are beams that allow you to reinforce your bridge.

Bridge building games are not new, but the implementation in Cargo Bridge is well done; the graphics are fun and smooth, and the actual bridge-building part of the game is relatively easy to use. This is the best kind of physics game, where playing the game actually helps you to learn about how various shapes affect the strength of objects.

Unfortunately the game tells you what the cost is of each beam as you are placing it, but not the length, while in planning mode you are given distances between objects. It would be much easier to make symmetrical bridges if you knew the lengths of the pieces you are placing. Also, it would be nice to have a "speed up" function for when you run into a particularly difficult level and are making small changes and re-running tests.

Even including those downsides, Cargo Bridge is a very fun time waster, worthy of your coffee break.