We've noticed a meme traveling around Twitter lately that seems to be making people's days at the office a little more fun. Or, depending on how you look at it, making their coworkers' days just a little more annoying. What is this life-changing trend: old-school sound effects buttons.
If you need a drummer to punctuate all your snappy remarks, like some kind of quirky late-night talk show host, visit Instant Rim Shot. If something doesn't quite go as planned for you or someone in the room with you, go to Sad Trombone. These are perhaps the two most indispensable sound effects in any jokester's repertoire.
Safari users, take note: this is where you finally get some use out of that Web Clip feature, so you can keep these in your Dashboard for the appropriate occasion. We hope you enjoy them -- or loathe them -- as much as we do.
This is primarily for our readers in the UK, but it's part of a growing trend that should concern Internet users everywhere. Phorm is a notorious advertising system that tracks the browsing activities of customers of huge companies like BT (a major British ISP) and Virgin Media. The data is collected and used to sell targeted advertising, which has a lot of people up in arms over privacy concerns.
Information rights activists aren't known for sitting idle when their privacy is threatened by spyware, and that's where AntiPhormLite comes in. The program, available for Windows XP and Vista, runs as a standalone up or within a second browser of your choice. It calls web pages on its own, generating a fake trail of browsing activity that should make Phorm's data completely useless. AntiPhormLite won't hit your bandwidth, because it only grabs the HTML from each page it hits, leaving out the heavy stuff like Flash, and avoiding any dangerous executables.
You can run AntiPhormLite as a standalone app or within a second browser of your choice. The AntiPhormLite has a thorough, and entertaining, FAQ that should address any concerns you might have about running the app. Our favorite bit? "Just run it and go and watch TV if you want. Someone somewhere will assume you like to shop for red shoes and caravans and be rubbing their hands with glee."
Things, the popular personal organization application from Cultured Code, is still in testing, but it already has a large userbase that is thoroughly addicted to its attractive to-do list features. It's no surprise, then, that when the clock turned to midnight in Australia and Things suddenly expired, users were up in arms. Hours later, users in the US experienced the same problem. Several people congregated on the official Things help forum, which had nearly 50 postings on the problem as of 2:30 this morning.
Cultured Code hasn't yet responded with an explanation of why Things was set to expire. The application is still free, but users have already come to rely on it, with more than one person posting that they would gladly pay the $49 pricetag Cultured Code will charge for the 1.0 release to continue using Things right now. Why the expiration, though? We expect to see either a quick fix or an update pushed out this morning -- as the app is currently at version .9.1.1, the highly anticipated 1.0 release is possible, but not likely.
If you're a Things user, visit the help forum for some unofficial ways of resolving the problem. So far, most people are either setting their computers' dates back or using a hex editor to change the expiration date. Despite all the fuss, this could end up working in favor of Cultured Code. Our take: any publicity is good publicity when people are this frantic about your product.
There are hundreds of online file storage alternatives available now, ranging from the very sketchy to the expensively professional. With such a crowded field, Irish startup PutPlace is playing a slightly different angle to win your business: they're making it personal. The service is designed to be a secure, "future-proof" place to put your important family and business documents.
PutPlace is currently in beta, so you can test it for free. When it launches, they'll offer annual subscriptions, presumably with rates varying based on the amount of storage used. This really isn't big news for advanced users who are already on the offsite backup bandwagon, but there are still plenty of people who haven't gotten there yet. If backup were easier, fewer novice users would have to go through the traumatic experience of losing everything to a hard drive failure. PutPlace might be able to help them by putting on a friendly, trustworthy face.
If you've been to college sometime in the past decade, you might have run up against Blackboard. It's an online assignment system that students generally dread logging into, because it usually means new work or more brown-nosing questions from that showoff in your class. That's not Blackboard's fault, though. To show they want to make things easier on their user base, the students, Blackboard is now on Facebook with an app called Blackboard Sync.
A quick Google search shows that some colleges have been hacking together their own mashups of Blackboard and Facebook, which suggests to us that there's already a demand for this product. Granted, the move could have come sooner: now that Facebook is increasingly used by middle-aged PR officers who want to network -- heard of LinkedIn, guys? -- a lot of users are going to pass this by. For the college kids who still log into Facebook every day and use it as a primary mode of communication with friends, this is great. While you're making plans to go out drinking at the nearest fraternity, take a quick look at the Blackboard app to make sure you won't wake up with a last-minute assignment to finish.
The business of Facebook application development has been dying off because nobody wants to lace their profile with annoying pirates, ninjas, mummies, or whatever the latest trend is. Applications that actually have value to Facebook's natural demographic are scarce, so we hope Blackboard will turn out to be useful for students and set an example of what Facebook apps could be doing.
Yahoo! Fire Eagle got a lot of attention when it launched back in March, and for good reason: a cross-platform system for building location data into an application? The buzz died down, though, because there weren't any cool applications using Fire Eagle. That's changing now, though, as the first wave of Fire Eagle stuff rolls out. Metosphere for the iPhone is one of the best of this bunch.
Metosphere has several uses. Like any app that takes advantage of Fire Eagle, it can update your location using your GPS or a WiFi hotspot. It also shows you nearby events on Eventful and Upcoming, and nearby Wikipedia pages. There's a map that shows you all of this, plus meetups, emergency alerts, and the best part: messages and geocaches you can create directly from Metosphere. There's no signup required, just use your existing Yahoo! ID.
Geocaching is going to be a big deal very soon, and Metosphere is a great way to play with it on a platform you already know how to use. Show it to your friends and leave each other messages at your favorite hangouts, or start a city-wide scavenger hunt. We'll keep covering new Fire Eagle tools as they advance -- that monthly renewal email is a good reminder to see what developers have been working on.
On Monday night, Google launched its entry into the growing field of programs that attempt to share your "social graph" -- your collection of friends and relationships -- across many social networks. The program is called Friend Connect, and it's starting with a handful of sites, including Facebook, Plaxo and Hi5. Friend Connect is also going to support applications under OpenSocial, Google's social network application platform that has been around since last November.
For the average web user, Friend Connect means you're going to see social data cropping up on a whole bunch of websites that never included social networks before. You'll basically be able to plug in your information from any of the participating networks where you have a profile, and then you can interact with other users of the site who do the same. It's basically like a mini-Facebook built into any site.
What does this mean for site owners? Well, Google is promising to make setting up Friend Connect on your site ridiculously easy -- which is why we think you're going to start seeing it everywhere on the web. It basically generates the entire code for you, to be pasted into your existing site. If you're interested in trying it out, you can apply to Google now.
Comic Life Magiq is the latest and greatest version of the familiar Comic Life app you've probably seen bundled with some Macs. It takes the Comic Life concept of building comic strips using your own images, and gives you a fully-loaded toolbox that makes the job easy and a lot of fun.
To build a nice-looking page, all you have to do is grab one of the many pre-loaded layouts and drag it to your new page. The panels drop into place, and you can begin dragging in images, which fit your panels by default. Then you can add some text, using a wide range of speech balloons. Voila! Easy comics!
Comic Life Magiq is definitely not hard to use, but it also doesn't force you to color inside the lines. You can do everything by hand, if you're so inclined. Plenty of advanced options (grouping panels and adding reflections, for example) are included, but we found no need to use them to pack the recommended daily allowance of POW! ZAP! and BLAMMO! into our test comic. If you liked the idea of Comic Life, but found its lack of image editing and customization a bit boring, Magiq won't fail to impress.
Silverback, a new OS X application from the renowned UK-based design team Clearleft, was a mystery for quite a while. The app had a site with some neat visual tricks and a gorilla with a clipboard, and it said the application was for designers, but what did it do? The suspense was killing us! We finally had a chance to test Silverback this week, and if you design websites or application interfaces, this program is worth the wait.
Silverback basically turns your Mac into a full-featured usability testing station. Add a new project, add some users, and have them come sit down and test out your interface. Silverback hangs out unobtrusively in the background, capturing video of the the entire screen, including a cute (and useful) effect that marks where your tester is clicking. This in itself would be handy, but Silverback also takes advantage of your built-in iSight camera to include a picture-in-picture of the tester's reactions, on top of the screen capture.
This way, you can see everything the user is doing in real time, and they can speak comments aloud as they come up, rather than pausing to write them down. Usability testing the old-fashioned way generally involves expensive setups and lots of instructions, but Silverback is intuitive to use and provides straightforward and informative results. Silverback is currently in private beta, so some testers can test its testing functions (this makes our heads hurt a little bit.)
Remember making new friends without the help of the Internet? Thanks to a new service called rmbrMe, you can convert those messy real life acquaintances into easily manageable social networking formats! rmbrMe lets you send a code via text message that will link people you just met to your profiles on Facebook, Myspace, LinkedIn, or whatever other networks you choose.
There is a bit of a missing link between having someone's phone number and having their URLs. Not everyone has an iPhone, so it's not always easy to send a hyperlink that won't have to be retyped into a browser later. RmbrMe is a clever concept, but it makes us wish for something even easier. Instead of going to a browser and typing in a five-digit code to get to a profile that aggregates all of your other profiles, it would be nice to see a service that generated friend requests straight from the text message.
For now, rmbrMe is a fairly elegant solution to the problem of helping people, well, remember you. The catch, and the reason we probably won't become frequent users of the service, is that it charges 49 cents a message, on top of whatever your carrier charges. Asking for an e-mail address might be a little bit dorkier, but it's also cheaper.
The whole point of Twitter is that it's fast and mobile: if you see something interesting, you can post about it right away and see the responses right away. That's why it's been so frustrating that no Twitter client for iPhone and iPod Touch has distinguished itself with a good-looking user interface and all the features the advanced Twitterer demands. Well, problem solved: meet Hahlo 3.0.
We've been playing with the beta version of Hahlo 3 for a few weeks now, and it has everything iPhone Twitter apps have been missing. The navigation is quicker and more intuitive than in previous versions, user profiles look better, you can view your direct message outbox, and following and DMing people from Hahlo now works flawlessly. This stuff should be the bare minimum for a good Twitter client, but there's more.
Hahlo now has built-in support for Summize Twitter Search, and displays search results within the Hahlo interface. This is invaluable if you're as popular as we at Download Squad are (you're following us, right?), because you'll inevitably miss a few messages and find it handy to catch up by searching your username. Before Hahlo 3.0, lots of messages went unread, from friends who buried our @names in the middle of a tweet -- now we're not skipping a beat.
FriendFeed is a service that keeps track of the activity of your contacts across pretty much every social network. The problem with FriendFeed is that people want to view different sets of contacts in different ways. There are third party desktop clients for Twitter and Pownce, for example, that let you follow along and respond to comments more easily. But when you lump those services in with less-immediate ones like Yelp, Flickr, or the RSS feed to your friend's blog, the slower stuff starts to gum up the works.
Alert Thingy to the rescue! If you use FriendFeed, and you've been looking for a faster way to read updates, you're in luck: a desktop version is here. Alert Thingy is an Adobe Air application, which gives it the advantage of being lightweight and cross-platform. There aren't a lot of bells and whistles to it, but it will display your feed and allow you post items directly to FriendFeed.
Pownce, the social network that's all about sharing with your friends, just made sharing a whole lot easier. Now you can grab an RSS feed of all your incoming Pownce messages, for more convenient reading. This is cool, but RSS is par for the course on social networks these days. It would be bigger news if Pownce still didn't have it.
What is actually quite unique about Pownce is the variety of video and photo hosting sites it now supports. If you post a video link to Pownce -- under the link tab, not as a regular post -- it will now display inline on your Pownce page. This goes for the big players in online video, like Vimeo, Viddler, YouTube and the new Flickr Video, as well as a smattering of other sites. CollegeHumor video support seems sort of arbitrary, but hey, we guess some people watch it.
We've met a lot of users who take their to-do list applications very seriously. It seems every task management system -- from old-fashioned pen and paper to OmniFocus -- has its own fanatical following. Listaculous is a web-based to-do list that keeps it simple, but still offers tabbed organization, and it could be the right to-do list for you.
There's not much to Listaculous, which is what might make it useful for a lot of people. It's just tabs and to-do items, all in one window. Opening Listaculous in a pop-out window is appealing; the tabs make for a small footprint, even with multiple lists. For those who like their action items embedded in a home page, Listaculous also comes as an iGoogle widget.
Flow has been in the works since the days of OS X Tiger, but the freshly released version takes things up a notch with a slick UI and a feature set that takes advantage of the power of Leopard. Flow is an FTP client, a text editor with a useful live preview feature, and a bookmark generator for drag-and-drop uploading. Add tabbed navigation and phenomenal ease-of-use, and it's got everything we want out of a new Leopard app,
Flow does have some neat extras, but first and foremost, it's an FTP client. When we tested it, it smoothly handled multiple connections to FTP, SFTP, WebDAV, and even the often-criticized .mac service. The only thing we would have changed about the interface: a "recent connections" button or menu item would be nice. The bookmark button in Flow is easy to find, but sometimes we just forget to use it. Speaking of bookmarks, Flow has a unique feature that lets you save any bookmark as a droplet - a tiny app that quickly uploads anything you drop on it, without even opening Flow itself.
Once you've got some files on the server, Flow really sets itself apart from other FTP apps. You can edit your html and css files on the fly, and watch the results in a live preview. This is amazingly powerful, and saves a lot of time when you just need to make a quick change. Forgot to close an html tag? Don't bother uploading a new copy of the file, just edit it in Flow! It even supports Quick Look, so you can preview images right on the server.
We've noticed a meme traveling around Twitter lately that seems to be making people's days at the office a little more fun. Or, depending on how you look at it, making their coworkers' days just a little more annoying. What is this life-changing trend: old-school sound effects buttons. 
Silverback
