Download Squad

One upon a time, Joost was supposed to be the future of online video. The project was founded by the makers of Skype as a way to deliver high quality video over a peer to peer network using a standalone application because, let's face it, web browsers weren't really made for video.

But over the past few years, YouTube has continued to grow in popularity, and a little site called Hulu came along and showed that people were pretty gosh darned happy to watch full length TV episodes in a browser if they could access the content they wanted.

Eventually Joost gave up on the standalone media browser idea and relaunched as a web-based video portal. The only problem is that while Joost had a handful of videos you might want to watch, it's content library always paled in comparison to Hulu and other sites.

Today Joost announced a plan to relaunch as a white-label video provider. In other words, Joost will offer up its technology to other companies looking for a way to other companies looking to start their own video portals.

Joost's web portal will continue to exist... for now. But the company is reducing its staff, closing offices, and I'd be shocked if Joost signs any new content deals anytime soon. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised to see some of the existing premium partners start to disappear from the site.

Ninja Roll 2 is a simple ball rolling game that has you drawing a line for your "ninja ball" to roll and bounce down. The goal of the game is to collect all of the stars on each level.

The game has a very sparse look, and the physics of the ball remind me of the superballs that I played with as a kid. It's actually frustrating how bouncy this ball is. Sometimes it's hard to maintain momentum because just as your ball is about to ascend a ramp, it hits some tiny bump and bounces off in an unexpected direction. To be fair, part of the fun of playing Ninja Roll 2 is watching the ball make crazy moves.

Some of the levels appear physically impossible at first, but that's where your ball's incredible bounciness becomes an advantage - you can make it perform moves that you would have never thought possible.

My only gripe with the game is that for some reason it was choppy to the point of almost being unplayable when running in Firefox, but in Safari it is perfectly smooth.

3RVX is a utility that lets you control your computer's volume using global hotkeys including keyboard or mouse shortcuts. If you don't have a keyboard with volume controls on it, this can come in handy and save you the valuable fraction of a second it takes to click on the over the Windows volume icon and adjust the volume the old fashioned way.

As an added bonus, 3RVX also has a rather attractive volume indicator that shows up when you adjust the volume. The default view looks a lot like the OS X volume indicator. But you can choose from a number of skins or create your own. You can also change the global hotkeys, choose whether to show a system tray icon, and tweak a number of other settings. You can check out some of the settings in the image after the break.

3RVX is available as a free download. The developer's page is a bit sparce, but just look around until you find the installer for the most recent version. You can also check ou the documentation for more information.

[via Freeware Genius]

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KissTunes is an online service that makes it easy to play and record music using your computer's keyboard. It offers three different instruments, and all the home row keys (and a few from the row above) represent notes. You can save your song, along with any comments from friends, as a .kiss file that will open from the KissTunes on any computer.

The "kiss" in KissTunes probably refers to a show of affection, but it could also very well stand for "Keep it Simple, Stupid!" KissTunes isn't a complex compositional tool, and it's not aimed at professionals. It's more akin to a greeting card, except instead of sending cheesy canned music, you play and send the music yourself. Obviously, this isn't going to revolutionize the Internet, but it's a fun idea.

Firefox 3.5 is available for download today, following months of testing. The latest version of the web browser adds a ton of new features and bug fixes. Probably the most important thing is that it feels faster, thanks to a new Javascript engine and updated rendering engine.

But there are also a few new bells and whistles including a private browsing mode that lets you surf the web without saving any data to your computer. You know, because you don't want your spouse knowing what you're buying for their birthday. Because that's what you'll use this feature for.

There's also support for "tab tearing," which lets you drag and drop tabs between browser windows. Or you can drag a tab out of a browser window to create a new window. Firefox 3.5 also supports HTML video which lets you watch some videos embedded in web pages without any plugins.

Mozilla hasn't updated the official Firefox download page yet. But you can download Firefox 3.5 from a number of other sites including Softpedia and Filehippo.

Update: The change is now up at getfirefox.com.

Added: Direct download links (US English) straight from Mozilla:

Windows: http://download.mozilla.org/?product=firefox-3.5&os=win&lang=en-US

Mac: http://download.mozilla.org/?product=firefox-3.5&os=osx&lang=en-US

Linux: http://download.mozilla.org/?product=firefox-3.5&os=linux&lang=en-US