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Dan Lurie

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Filed under: Design, Utilities, Windows, Macintosh, Linux

Color Oracle


Eight percent of all men suffer from some form of colorblindness, a condition that can interfere with their ability to distinguish things designed for unimpaired viewers. Color Oracle aims to change this by making it easy for designers to see their work as a colorblind person would. Color Oracle overlays the user's screen to simulate three different kinds of colorblindness of increasing severity, the idea being that by designing for the severely colorblind, all your bases will be covered.

It would be great to get some feedback on this app from actual colorblind readers– perhaps even colorblind designer Jon Hicks of Firefox fame?

[via Daring Fireball]

Filed under: Internet, Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Office, Google

NYC Google Earth Mega Pack


Over 8 million people live in New York City, and for those of them who use Google Earth, things just got a whole lot easier. The NYC Google Earth Mega Pack adds a boatload of new layers to enhance the Google Earth experience, including complete mass transit routes (including into Long Island an New Jersey), neighborhood maps, bike routes, live weather maps, NYPD precinct houses, and city parade routes.

While the Mega Pack has a more complete set of transit routes, Brian Abbott's New York City Subway for Google Earth layer is a bit cleaner and easier to read.

[via Dan Dickinson]

Filed under: Internet, News, Web services, Yahoo!, Social Software

Upcoming.org Redesigns, Merges With Yahoo Accounts, Gives Stuff Away


Yesterday afternoon, popular social event website and Yahoo! property Upcoming.org surprised users by redesigning and requiring the merging of existing accounts with Yahoo! accounts. The changes came without warning, possibly in an attempt to avoid a user backlash similar to that which erupted after big brother Flickra few months ago. announced the merging of accounts As way of making it up to their users, Upcoming is giving away a bunch of special Upcoming.org t-shirts to 'old skool' users who've been using the site for a while.

On the redesign side of the news, the new look is cleaner, faster to load, and introduces a whole new way of browsing events which centers around more specific metro's and integrated maps. The new interface is overall more media driven, and resembles in a way the recent Facebook redesign.

In addition to the most obvious changes mentioned above, Upcoming.org is no longer actually upcoming.org, but upcoming.yahoo.com.

Update: Apparently the updates were not unannounced; they were posted on the official blog multiple times. They did not, however, send an email notice to users in the same way Flickr did.

Filed under: Business, Design, Windows, Macintosh

Free Barcode Creation Software

Being a designer requires at least some degree of perfectionism, a fact which often boils to the surface when working with imperfect tools– such as when one needs to create a barcode for a package or book cover design. We know of more than a few designers who have gone so far as to attempt to re-create an authentic looking barcode in Illustrator– something that takes way too much time and energy to be practical.

Fortunately for us and others (who probably need barcodes to, you know, allow the scanning of things), Wolf Software provides professional quality barcode creation software free of charge for both Mac and Windows. In addition to the old standby's of UPC and ISBN, users have the option to choose from a large variety of other barcode formats, including Datamatix (pictured here encoding "Download Squad").

[Via creativebits]

Filed under: Internet, Web services

Free TimesSelect for Higher Education


One of my favorite parts of being a college student is the fact that I have access to pretty much any and every scholarly journal and article database on the planet. That's why was so excited to read about The New York Times' decision to provide their premium TimesSelect service free of charge to anyone with an .edu email address. TimesSelect offers exclusive Op-Ed columns, early access to the newspaper's Sunday edition, and access to up to 100 free archived articles (dating back to 1851!) per month.

True enough, I could probably get all that through the databases I already have access to, but the ease of being able to simply log into the NYT site to view an article instead of having to look it up in a database goes a long way.

Unfortunately, it seems that @alumni.school.edu and similar addresses are ineligible for this offer.

[via Consumerist]

Wordpress 2.1.1 may contain nasty surprise

Breaking news on the internets right now as Matt over at WordPress is reporting some serious issues with packages of WordPress 2.1.1 downloaded over the past 3-4 days. According to a blog post, a malicious intruder gained access to the wordpress.org servers and modified the files being made available for download. How exactly this happened is still unknown. The long-and-short of the situation is ...

The Museum of Modern Betas

You know we're living in a beta world, and I am a beta girl guy. It seems that we're constantly hearing announcements about "The Next Big Thing" to reach private beta and how totally awesome it is - and then the waiting game begins. True to boom form, most of the services never actually make it public (I'm currently wearing a shirt advertising Life IO, which was supposed to launch in September.) ...

Google Maps adds 3D(ish) buildings, public transport

I'm a very visual person, so when planning a trip, I like to have some sort of idea of what my destination looks like. Google Earth and the 3D imagery it provides a great way to get a feel for where you're going, but it's not always practical to open up such a resource intensive application when you just need a quick glimpse of the area. True to ever-improving form, The Big G this morning ...

Microsoft Gets Desperate - Free Vista Business, Office Pro 2007

This isn't exactly the kind of promotion one normally sees leading up to a major OS update. PowerTogether.com is a promotion put on officially by Microsoft offering full licenses of Windows Vista Business or Microsoft Office Professional 2007 to any US resident (sorry international readers) willing to watch 3 (for each license) informational video or interactive presentations, answer a few ...

Hitchsters

Cabs are expensive, especially when considering that in most situations one can take public transport for about a fourth of the price. But for those times when you simply have to get somewhere quickly and with minimal hassle, taking a taxi is often the only option. Readers in large megalopolis's will be familiar with the idea of sharing a cab with a stranger, and the rest of us might have seen ...

Featured Time Waster

Graveyard Shift - zombie-busting Time Waster

With Halloween fast approaching, it's a great time to get in some practice defending your territory against zombies. In Graveyard Shift, you take aim at zombies and other creepy-crawlies, blasting them into splatters of cartoony green guts. It's a casual first-person shooter, and it's very easy to get the hang of - use the mouse to aim, click to fire. Graveyard Shift has at least 15 levels, and it might even have some secret stages I haven't unlocked yet. They key to getting good at Graveyard Shift is learning to use ...

View more Time Wasters

Featured Galleries

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Safari 4 Beta
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IE8 RC1
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Download Squad at the Crunchies
WordPress 2.7
Cooking Mama: Mama Kills Animals
Windows 7 Hands On
Comodo Internet Security
Android First-look: Amazon.com MP3 Store
Android First-look: Twitroid
Google Reader Android
Android Hands-On
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Palm stuff
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