We've been following "Software Jedi" Dana Hanna's
An App A Day for a couple months with much enthusiasm. Two interesting side-effects of his project to write a program every day for a month is that he's releasing a lot of open source code and inspiring a lot of people to make their own apps. One such person recently created a cool mash-up of two of Hanna's best apps,
JediConcentrate, which darkens the screen outside of whatever app you're currently using, and
WPM Tray, which monitors how fast you type. The mash-up, called
JediWPMConcentrate combines the two by darkening the screen around the active window whenever you typing speed passes a certain threshold. That way, if you really get in "the zone" writing or coding or whathaveyou, all other distractions will fade out of view. Very cool. Like its parents, JediWPMConcentrate is an open source download for Windows.
Dana "Software Jedi" Hanna's App a Day experiment--now sadly concluded--has proven to be fertile ground for Download Squad fodder. Broadcast Clipboard is a perfect example. How many times have you wanted to copy a bunch of text from one computer to another across the room or on the other side of the building? Okay, well, I have enough times for the both of us. There are lots of ways to accomplish the task--e-mailing things to yourself is pretty standard--but all of them require a few clicks, when what you really want is to copy here, paste there. Broadcast Clipboard makes that possible. All you have to do is install it on each computer in question, and when you copy something on one of them, it will be broadcast across the network and inserted into the clipboard on all of the others for quick-and-easy pasting. Very cool. As with every App a Day program, Broadcast Clipboard is an open source app for Windows.
So, just how good at time waster games are you? Think you've got the stuff? Well, The World's Hardest Game 2.0 doesn't think you do.
Yes, amazingly, it's possible to have a sequel to a game called "The World's Hardest Game". It doesn't seem logically possible, since if the first one was actually the world's hardest, how could another one come along and share the moniker? It made me doubt the name in the first place. That is, until I tried the game.
The mechanics of the game are very simple. You are a small red square, ...
