When I think about searching online, my first and often only thought is, "how can I do this with Google?" Well, Google's great at search, but that doesn't mean it's the best tool in every situation. Consider searching for PDFs containing specific information; wouldn't you like to see a nice clean list of PDF titles with links both to the PDF in question and an HTML version of it? PDF Search Tool offers exactly that functionality.

To be fair, Google can do this too, particularly if you use the search argument "filteype=pdf", but PDF Search Tool feels somehow more purpose-built. For those that are inclined, it's interesting to see what happens when you search for a well-known author's name; PDF Search Tool almost feels like a pirate ebook finder when used that way. Not that you would. Or should.

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PDF Search Tool helps you find PDF files by content originally appeared on Download Squad on Tue, 09 Feb 2010 12:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

If you're looking or an easy way to increase your touch-typing speed, head over to Klava. Klava's a free, online touch-typing tester that delivers a never-ending stream of words in patterns that help you focus on the most troublesome letter combinations, increasing your overall typing speed.

The tool offers a few different word sets including standard and advanced English, and even a few programming languages for the software developers out there that would like to increase their speed.

As someone who taught himself to touch-type using an ancient piece of freeware on my Windows 3.1 computer, I can vouch for the effectiveness of this type of tool. Dedicate twenty minutes per day, and your typing speed will increase in no time.

[via Lifehacker]

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Klava is a free online touch-typing speed tester and skill enhancer originally appeared on Download Squad on Tue, 09 Feb 2010 10:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Amazon restores Macmillan books, becomes eBook middleman for publishers originally appeared on Download Squad on Sat, 06 Feb 2010 13:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Continue reading ScribbleSquid tries to help new writers -- with one glaring omission

ScribbleSquid tries to help new writers -- with one glaring omission originally appeared on Download Squad on Tue, 02 Feb 2010 16:10:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Rejoice! Apple's iBookstore will be using the international standard EPUB format originally appeared on Download Squad on Mon, 01 Feb 2010 11:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Continue reading After the Deadline grammar, spell check addon for Firefox is a writer's best friend

After the Deadline grammar, spell check addon for Firefox is a writer's best friend originally appeared on Download Squad on Sun, 31 Jan 2010 11:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

CloudPad is a handy, lightweight GTD notepad with tag support originally appeared on Download Squad on Fri, 29 Jan 2010 13:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

The digital footprints we leave as we move along in our daily lives are pretty astonishing. As our lives are transformed by the convenience technology provides, the price we pay is the privacy we give up. Today is Data Privacy Day, and we thought it was a good time to highlight one of the areas where companies are watching your behavior closely.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation published an excellent guide, "The E-Book Buyer's Guide to Privacy " which dishes the goods on E book readers' privacy policies by brand. It might give you pause to think of the powerful information Amazon, Barnes&Noble, Google, and Sony could employ with the information they monitor on what books individuals read or search for.

E-book buyer's privacy guide - reading isn't solo anymore originally appeared on Download Squad on Thu, 28 Jan 2010 14:06:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

If you happen to follow Mac indie software development, you've probably heard of Craig Hockenberry, the developer behind Twitterrific. Hockenberry is known for an online persona he sometimes takes on Twitter, where he types in all capitals. This persona is sometimes known as the CHOCKLOCK, and has resulted in people that are "in the know" referring to CapsLock as CHOCKLOCK.

All of that is background to explain why the utility I'm about to tell you about is called CHOCKSEE. CHOCKSEE is a Mac utility that will show you a pretty floating bezel on the screen if you happen to bump the CapsLock key, much like what you see on a Mac if you hit the Eject key.

And that's all that it does. Cute? Definitely. Useful? Kinda, sorta. I mean, there's already a visual indicator that your CapsLock key is on: ALL YOUR TEXT IS IN UPPERCASE LETTERS.

CHOCKSEE visually warns you when your CapsLock key is activated originally appeared on Download Squad on Mon, 25 Jan 2010 17:23:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

I have a lot of friends that own both a Blackberry and an iPod Touch. When I ask them why they didn't just get an iPhone, I often hear that they "need a real keyboard". I have to admit that when I started with my iPhone, I wasn't sold on the idea of a soft-keyboard (one that exists only in software through the touchscreen), but it took only a short time to be convinced. I feel reasonably fast when typing on my phone now, which is something that I can't say about my years using a Windows-Mobile based PDA.

In fact, if I was to venture a guess, I'd say that I'm as fast typing on my phone as I am writing. It's a revelation to me to be able to take notes digitally at the same speed as I used to be able to write them.

Phil Gyford was even more curious than me about input speed, so he set himself up a test between handwriting, an Apple Newton MessagePad, a Palm Vx, a Palm Treo, an iPhone, and a laptop, using each's primary input method:

• Pen and paper
• The Apple Newton MessagePad 2100's handwriting recognition (1997)
• The Palm Vx's Graffiti (1999)
• The Palm Treo 650's hardware QWERTY keyboard (2004)
• The Apple iPhone 3G's software QWERTY keyboard (2009)
• A full-size QWERTY laptop keyboard

I'm particularly interested in the comparison between handwriting recognition and the iPhone's software keyboard. The results (scroll down!) might surprise you, as they did me. Do they match up with your experiences?

Unscientific text entry speed testing reveals surprising results originally appeared on Download Squad on Mon, 25 Jan 2010 13:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

After Google purchased the collaborative text editing site EtherPad and subsequently screwed up by trying to turn off the ability to create new pads, many people have lost confidence in Google's ability to effectively host their data on EtherPad. Google has been clear that it is their long-term plan to drop EtherPad as a service, but at the same time they have already begun open-sourcing the code for EtherPad so that others may make use of it.

PiratePad is a new site hosted by the Pirate Party using the EtherPad code to offer an alternative place to host your pads. Though the domain doesn't instill all kinds of confidence (I mean, do you really want to rely on a service with the name "pirate" in the domain?), it's nice to see what's possible with EtherPad's source code being opened up. And since the Pirate Party has not indicated any intention to shutter the service, it might be a way to ensure that you can keep consistently going back to the same service long after Google's decided that EtherPad's time has come.

I'd like to see someone come up with a very straightforward installer for EtherPad so that I can add the service's functionality to my own site. Do you use EtherPad, and if so, for what? Can you see yourself using Wave in the future instead of EtherPad?

PiratePad is EtherPad, elsewhere originally appeared on Download Squad on Mon, 25 Jan 2010 11:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Swype: a faster way of typing comes to Android devices originally appeared on Download Squad on Wed, 20 Jan 2010 16:07:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

About a week ago I posted about an AppleScript that you can use to create a new text file in the Finder folder that you are looking at. I was a little bit surprised by the reaction; some people thought it was a great idea, while others thought it ridiculous and couldn't imagine why anyone would ever want to do that.

Well, if you fall into the latter camp, you might as well skip the rest of this post.

But for those of you that, like me, find it useful to be able to create a new text file right in the finder, you're in luck. Jonas Wisser, the man behind the original script has created a new version of it with some added ease of use.

Jonas' new script will now ask you for a file name for the new text file (you don't need to add .txt, it will do that automatically), then automatically open the new file in your text editor of choice. Slick.

If, like me, you're using the Alpha version of the new Finder add-on Total Finder that Jay posted about, you'll want to note that there seems to be a conflict between Total Finder's Visor function and the new New Text File Here script that causes all new scripts to be created on the desktop instead of in the folder being viewed. Jonas is aware of the issue, and has promised to look into it, though it may or may not be something that can be solved in AppleScript. The workaround is to turn the Visor feature of Total Finder off, or uninstall Total Finder.

[via MacStories]

Updated script makes creating text files from Mac's Finder even easier originally appeared on Download Squad on Tue, 19 Jan 2010 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

There has been a lot of hype around the release of the new Mac note taking app Thoughts by green&slimy software, and it has now been released. We've already got a ton of note taking applications to choose from -- like Evernote and Notational Velocity -- so what does Thoughts bring to the table to set itself apart?

As far as I can tell, Thoughts wants to be the pretty girl at the party. They're not trying to compete on features with the likes of Evernote, and they're not trying to compete on speed with the likes of Notational Velocity. Instead, they're taking the approach that note taking is more fun when it feels more like actually taking notes in a notebook.

The app is gorgeous, and very much a part of the delicious generation of software that puts a very high emphasis on aesthetics. You can create notebooks, add pages to notebooks, and even do some advanced formatting like adding tables to your pages. It also has wiki-like features allowing you to link to other pages within a notebook, to websites (of course), or even link to a message in Mail.

The fancy user interface includes animated page turns, and you can use mouse gestures to mimic the act of actually flipping pages. While this is a nice gimmick, it's certainly not the fastest way to navigate.

With a substantial price tag of 24 Euros, Thoughts has some stiff competition from the free note taking app crowd. I can imagine that people who are transitioning to using a computer from writing their notes in notebooks might enjoy the familiar interface, though.

Thoughts is a pretty new note taking app for Mac originally appeared on Download Squad on Tue, 19 Jan 2010 11:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Blio, a tablet-ready eBook reader originally appeared on Download Squad on Wed, 30 Dec 2009 16:25:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

• You'll want to plug in a USB disk drive / memory stick for documents you want to save or share with other users or machines.
• When you shut the computer down and remove the DVD, it will come back up just as it was before.

• Dozens of educational, scientific and mathematical software packages ranging from pre-school to graduate school. A partial list is here.
• The Sugar desktop from the One Laptop Per Child project.
• Graphics and desktop publishing. A partial list is here.
• The OpenOffice.org productivity suite, the Gobby collaborative editor, the Okular PDF viewer, PdfMod PDF editor and the Evolution e-mail / calendaring package.
• The Ekiga Softphone voice over IP and video conferencing package.
• The Firefox browser, XChat IRC client, Pidgin and Kopete Instant Messaging clients, Chokoq and Gwibber Twitter clients and many more Internet tools.
• Both the Gnome and KDE desktops.

Best Linux software for new users originally appeared on Download Squad on Wed, 30 Dec 2009 12:33:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Notepad GNU is Windows Notepad on steroids originally appeared on Download Squad on Tue, 29 Dec 2009 17:43:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Amazon sells more Kindle books than conventional tree-murderin' books originally appeared on Download Squad on Sun, 27 Dec 2009 11:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

• Input Formats: CBZ, CBR, CBC, EPUB, FB2, HTML, LIT, LRF, MOBI, ODT, PDF, PRC, PDB, PML, RB, RTF, TCR, TXT
• Output Formats: EPUB, FB2, OEB, LIT, LRF, MOBI, PDB, PML, RB, PDF, TCR, TXT

Calibre e-Book app can now convert books to Nook format originally appeared on Download Squad on Tue, 22 Dec 2009 17:03:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Amazon Kindle app coming soon for BlackBerry and Mac originally appeared on Download Squad on Mon, 21 Dec 2009 17:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.