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Filed under: Weekend Review

Download Squad Week in Review

Download Squad logoTrying to figure out whether to see Indiana Jones or Sex in the City this weekend? Why not just skip the movies and catch up on some of the week's best software news?
  • Windows 7 says hello world, then runs and hides away
    After months of speculation, Microsoft has finally lifted the veil of secrecy surrounding Windows 7. And by lifted the veil, we mean one tiny little corner. We now know that Windows 7 will feature multi-touch capabilities. And that's about it.
  • Flipping the Linux Switch: Banshee learns to sing
    While Microsoft is busy keeping secrets, the open source Linux media player Banshee is free for anyone to use. The latest beta version adds a ton of features, allowing you to play MP3s, rip CDs, organize your music collection, burn discs, aggregate podcasts, or even connect to your Last.fm account.
  • Mozilla - They're unbeWeavable
    Mozilla launched Weave last year as a way to keep your Firefox settings synchronized across multiple computers. But for some reason Mozilla left out one of the most useful features: password synchronization. Fortunately, this week an updated version of the Mozilla Weave browser plug-in was released, which lets you synchronize your bookmarks, saved form data, cookies, and passwords.
  • Bubbles single-site web browser updated, adds extensions
    Before there was Mozilla Prism, there was Bubbles, a tool that lets you launch pretty much any web site in a stripped down web browser. Bubbles has been around for a few years, but the developers recently relesed a new beta version that adds support for user-generated extensions that give you more control over how the browser interacts with web pages. Extensions include a Gmail notifier and a Facebook chat application.
  • OpenOffice.org keeps getting slower with each new release
    Free and open source office suite OpenOffice.org has a dirty little secret. It's slow. Like, you have to wait 20+ seconds to open a document sometimes slow. And it keeps getting slower. It turns out that OpenOffice.org 2.4 opens documents slower than version 1.1.5. And OpenOffice.org 3.0 beta is even slower still. But you can't beat the price.
  • Adocu: Nanoblogging gets even nano-er
    Twitter took the world by storm by launching a blogging platform that limits your posts to just 140 characters. So it stands to reason that the only way to beat Twitter is to launch an even more limiting service, right? Adocu lets users post just a single word.

Relevant Posts

Featured Time Waster

Build the highest tower with 99 Bricks - Time Waster

Wrapping your mind around a simple game like 99 Bricks is harder than you might imagine. The object of the game is to build the highest possible tower using only 99 pieces. Sounds easy enough, but you're playing with Tetris pieces and distinctly non-Tetris physics. If you screw up, you don't just leave gaps that you could have used to score points, you cause your whole tower to wobble and collapse.

Pieces also don't lock to a grid in 99 Bricks, the way they do in Tetris. You can wind up with pieces slanted diagonally, and there's an edge of the board that your toppled bricks can fall off of. 99 Bricks is kind of like Jenga, in that it's almost as satisfying to watch your tower crumble as it is to play seriously. Once you get the hang of the way the pieces behave, it's an addictive little game.

View more Time Wasters

Featured Galleries

Defective by Design, London: Protest Pictures
Cooking Mama: Mama Kills Animals
Android First-look: Amazon.com MP3 Store
Android First-look: Twitroid
Google Reader Android
Android Hands-On
Twine 1.0
Photoshop Express Beta
SXSWi 2008 Schwag Unboxing
SXSWi 2008 Day 1
Mozilla Birthday Cake
Palm stuff
Adobe Lightroom 1.1

 


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