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Tuesday, December 1, 2009

Weird Wednesday: Whip out your clock

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Between the sundial, the dawn of digital watches and now cell phones taking a big dent out of the watch business, I'm not sure why you would need a clock in a browser, let alone one requiring an internet connection. Perhaps you sleep with your netbook by your bedside, complete with relaxing pzizz or other ambient noises. Or maybe you have an Ozymandias-style lair complete with dozens of monitors. Either way, here's a little round-up of clocks for your browser (and beyond). Weird to me, maybe useful to you.*

Oh, and here's something about clocks being the devil (pdf link). Much weirder.

Online Clock - the daddy of them all (if clocks are male). Comes in 4 sizes and 5 colors. But here you will find a list of all the other online clocks from Online Clock, including a stopwatch, space clock, military time, etc. If they set out to corner the market in online clocks, these guys are close. There's even a radio alarm clock. Google better get in the act soon or risk losing the Online Clock Wars.

Aptly-named Timeanddate.com provides a boss World Clock, complete with current time in dozens of cities around the world.

Kuku Klok boasts being "Swiss made" but also uses Flash for everything... here's hoping it doesn't crash as it is supposed to be an alarm clock.

Make your own darn clock using Flash and this tutorial. If you're looking for a real challenge, however, try building a meatspace clock. Yeah, coding is much simpler.

But of course there's a javascript clock, silly. Perfect for that fashion blog you were going to start.

Pixelbreaker created a cross-platform clock screensaver called PolarClock for Mac and Windows, plus an OS X Dashboard version and an iPhone app. There's actually a lot of tweaking for such a simple thing, and 28 languages are supported. Of all the screensaver clocks out there, this is my favorite.

Clockspot allows you to track employees online. It's a web-based punchclock. Now excuse me while I punch myself for bringing it up.

For only $3.99 a month (starting price) you can use Snoozester to send you wake up calls and reminder through the day. That'll get you 35 fresh starts a month.

And if you think the internet should turn into reality, help the Ambient Clock make the jump from Google Gadget to real, live plastic clock.


*Come to think of it, numerous science lab accident movie premises are based on the nerd falling asleep in the lab, so maybe these aren't as useless as I thought.

Weird Wednesday: Whip out your clock originally appeared on Download Squad on Wed, 08 Jul 2009 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Weird Wednesday: how to make a font with your car

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Ok, so maybe you don't have access to all the necessary equipment to pull this off, but if you did...It would look a lot like the contents of this Flickr gallery.

Professional race driver Stef van Campenhoudt, typographers Pierre and Damien of PleaseLetMeDesign, and interactive artist Zachary Lieberman collaborated to create iQ font using a compact Toyota hatchback and an array of computer and video hardware. You can watch things unfold in a Vimeo clip after the break.

The resulting font is actually quite good, with a hand-drawn, script look to it. You can view sample images of iQ font and download it from Toyota Belgium's web site.

Scriptiness is fine and dandy, but let's see if they can pull off something with a nice, scholarly feel to it like Book Antiqua.

Thanks for the tip, Ramin!

Continue reading Weird Wednesday: how to make a font with your car

Weird Wednesday: how to make a font with your car originally appeared on Download Squad on Wed, 22 Jul 2009 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Weird Wednesday: Internet advertising

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Remember back in the early days of the web when all you had to do was punch a monkey to win? Millions of pummeled simians later the online ad industry had to evolve... And evolve it has, with two distinct paths for display advertising:

1. In-your-face gigantic ads or ads that "do something" significant to distract you. Common examples include full-page "interstitial" ads that interrupt your browsing, anything that flies around the screen or busts out of its little box or anything that expands when you hover over it.

2. Creative, "viral" ads that are so clever, weird, gross or unusual that they are passed around despite their more than obvious marketing nature. Let's look at some of these, shall we?

Perhaps unsurprisingly, I prefer the latter. Unfortunately tracking down "weird" ads isn't easy. Ad campaigns, by their nature, are dynamic and ephemeral. The Internet Archive doesn't cache dynamic ads, either, so some of those golden oldies may be lost forever. If you snag a pic, please let us know in the comments.

A few of the more clever online ads are presented for your consumption on the next page.

Continue reading Weird Wednesday: Internet advertising

Weird Wednesday: Internet advertising originally appeared on Download Squad on Wed, 05 Aug 2009 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Weird Wednesday - Virtual Mr. Toad's Wild Ride

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You thought the music to "It's a Small World" would drive you crazy? Try the careening refrains of Mr. Toad's Wild Ride, a blacklight-ridden motorized kiddie ride at Disney World in Orlando, Florida. At least, you could try it until 1998, when the Mouse saw fit to toss the toad and replace him with a cute, cuddly, one-crayon-short-of-a-sharpener bear named Pooh.

Enter obsessive compulsive behavior, computers and nostalgia wrapped in the tasty HTML and QTVR layers over on the shrine to Mr. Toad's Wild Ride, aka Virtual Toad. Do not lick Virtual Toad, but do be patient as you wait for the actually quite awesome QTVR walkthrough of the doomed ride. Was Mr. Toad scary? Nah, I remember riding it as a kid and being more concerned with the smell of 20,000 Leagues, which was directly across from Mr. Toad and is now a playground.

Is it weird? Well, if you consider fans of "dark rides" weird, then yeah. It's weird and wonderful, really. And how can you not call a mix of QuickTime VR, Walt Disney, an oddball British story and a website/museum/protest weird?

If you're looking for more info on the retired 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea ride in Orlando, this list of links is pretty complete. On the topic of toads, I would be remiss if I did not mention the all-glorious Hypnotoad.

Weird Wednesday - Virtual Mr. Toad's Wild Ride originally appeared on Download Squad on Wed, 14 Oct 2009 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Weird Wednesday: what does an iPhone know about making love?

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Welcome to a special "hump day" edition of Weird Wednesday (pun very much intended). An iPhone can do a lot of things, but can it make you better in bed? A new app called Love Vibes says it can. It works like this: Install Love Vibes on your iPhone, set the firmness of your mattress, and then, ummm, engage in activities. The app uses the iPhone's accelerometer to measure vertical and horizontal movement, and somehow manages to convert that into a score that indicates your prowess at making love.

On top of the obvious challenges of getting a partner to let you bring your iPhone to bed, it's not really clear how Love Vibes determines your score. The "duration" rating is obvious enough: how long did your session last? Stamina, variety and passion are a little more dicey. Although the science behind the app is based on surveys that indicate these are all desirable qualities, it's not clear how Love Vibes gets scores out of your accelerometer data.

I tried faking it out by moving the phone around wildly for a bit, hoping this would provide enough passion and variety to rate an impressive score. "Shaking the phone won't get you a high score," it told me. Huh. Well, what if I just move the phone rhythmically back and forth for a while as I do the exact opposite of making love - eating Doritos? SPOILER: just as in romantic encounters that don't involve an iPhone or anything Cooler Ranch flavored, rhythm is the ticket to a good review. You didn't need an app to tell you that, right?

Weird Wednesday: what does an iPhone know about making love? originally appeared on Download Squad on Wed, 21 Oct 2009 19:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Weird Wednesday: Billy Mays app awesomes up your CAPS LOCK KEY!

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John Haller is pretty well-known in software circles - he's the guy behind PoartableApps.com. What you may not have known is that he's a big Billy Mays fan. And like a lot of Billy Mays fans, John was a little misty when Billy shuffled off this mortal coil earlier this year.

What better way for a coder to commemorate a fallen icon than with an awesome app? Enter BILLY MAYS CAPS LOCK!

While it won't make your whites whiter or fix the broken handle of your coffee mug, it is one of the greatest remedies I've ever found for computer-induced boredom. Need a quick, random jolt to break you out of your ennui? Hit your caps lock key, and virtual Billy Mays will chime in with one of his trademark catch phrases.

It's probably worth noting that the app does override your caps lock's real functionality, but only overexcited douchebags on Twitter use it anyway, right? Haller does build in shift + caps lock as a workaround in case you do need to enable cruise control for awesome.

HERE'S HOW TO ORDER:

Sorry, I got caught up in the moment there. It's a free download and is available as an installer or in PortableApps format - so you can take Billy with you and fire him up wherever you've got Windows and a CAPS LOCK key.

Weird Wednesday: Billy Mays app awesomes up your CAPS LOCK KEY! originally appeared on Download Squad on Wed, 18 Nov 2009 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Mozilla scores enterprise email win: 130,000 French government PCs switch to Thunderbird

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A French website [Google Translate link] is reporting that 130,000 Tax Authority computer systems are soon to make a major switch to open source software. Email and calendar duties are being handed over to Thunderbird and the Lightning plugin. The move also includes a transition to OBM's open source groupware/collaboration/messaging platform.

When the General Directorate of Public Finance was formed, two tax agencies were combined. Their users were split, with 80,000 using Lotus Notes and 50,000 running Microsoft Outlook. In the end, the new agency's decision had a lot to do with a desire not to re-license Lotus Notes and Outlook and to simplify operations by supporting a single client.

Thunderbird had already made inroads with the French Department of Defense as well as the Misitry of Culture. The new migration brings the total number of installs to more than 200,000.

Always nice to see Mozilla adoption in the enterprise!

[via OSOR.eu]

Mozilla scores enterprise email win: 130,000 French government PCs switch to Thunderbird originally appeared on Download Squad on Thu, 29 Oct 2009 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Firefox 3.6 Beta 1 now available!

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Let's not beat around the bush: Download the new version of Firefox now.

With that out of the way, here are the new features that debut with Firefox 3.6, straight from the release page:
  • Users can now change their browser's appearance with a single click, with built in support for Personas.
  • Firefox 3.6 will alert users about out of date plugins to keep them safe.
  • Open, native video can now be displayed full screen, and supports poster frames.
  • Support for the WOFF font format.
  • Improved JavaScript performance, overall browser responsiveness and startup time.
  • Support for new CSS, DOM and HTML5 web technologies.
These new changes mostly come from an upgrade to version 1.9.2 of Gecko, the HTML engine that does most of the rendering work in Firefox (and its light-weight sister Camino) -- and as with all version revisions, you will have to update most or all of your add-ons (there's even a compatibility checker!)

Developers should check out the notes for 3.6, if they haven't yet updated the add-ons they administer.

If you've heard enough, here are some direct download links to get you upgraded to the Beta ASAP:

Firefox 3.6 Beta 1 now available! originally appeared on Download Squad on Fri, 30 Oct 2009 22:50:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Mozilla release mockups for upcoming Firefox Linux releases

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Firefox 4.0 Linux mockup
The folks at Mozilla have released the first mockup showing what Firefox 4.0 may look like on Linux... and it looks an awful lot like the Windows version.

Firefox 4.0 isn't due out for another year or so, but the developers have already stated a few goals for the project. One idea is to move the browser tabs above the location bar. Another is to consolidate the menus into a few tabs that will hang out next to the location bar. Both movies will free up space, allowing more of the browser to be dedicated to displaying web pages.

If the end result looks familiar, that's because it looks an awful lot like the default layout in the Google Chrome web browser.

Mozilla has also released some mockups of Firefox 3.7 for Linux. One of the most notable changes is that the interface will be more consistent across platforms. Firefox 3.7 for Linux will use the same Forward/Back buttons as the Mac and Windows versions, for example. The edges of the browser, tabs, and other elements will also be curved rather than angled, which will make the browser look more like the mac and Windows versions.

At this point, both the Firefox 3.7 and 4.0 mockups represent proposed changes and not finished products, so things may change by the time these browsers are actually released.

[via OMG! Ubuntu]

Mozilla release mockups for upcoming Firefox Linux releases originally appeared on Download Squad on Sat, 31 Oct 2009 10:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Firefox 3.6 has juicy Superbar integration with Windows 7 (and you can disable it)

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Yesterday I told you about the new Firefox 3.6 Beta -- and today, I can show you a neat bit of Windows 7 integration. Windows 7 uses Microsoft's Aero window manager and theme -- you've probably heard about it, or learnt to hate it in Vista -- and in it there's a cool technology called 'Aero Peek'. As you can see in the screenshot above, in Firefox 3.6 Beta, Aero Peek is now fully enabled, and smoother than its implementation in 3.6b1pre.

Aero Peek lets you see what's going on in a particular program without having to actually click anything -- you can just mouse-over it on the alt-tab running-programs menu or on the Superbar. In Firefox 3.5 this works for the Firefox window itself, but not the tabs within. Now, in 3.6 Beta, you can see what's going on in any tab by hovering your mouse over the thumbnail. I do wonder if this requires massive disk-swapping though, or if it takes snapshots -- but I'm pretty sure Aero shows you the window contents in real-time. Either way, it's cool, and beats the hell out of tabbing through 20 different tabs to find what you're looking for.

Those of you that are already using 3.6 might have noticed another neat thing: when you have a bunch of tabs (10+ in our testing) open, you get a "buttonized" list of favicons and page titles, instead of thumbnails. You can still jump straight to a tab or see a preview from the Superbar.

Don't like the Aero Peek integration? You can easily disable it -- if you're worried about the potential performance hit -- just whack about:config into your Firefox address bar and set browser.taskbar.previews.enable to false.

[Download Firefox 3.6 Beta here]

Firefox 3.6 has juicy Superbar integration with Windows 7 (and you can disable it) originally appeared on Download Squad on Sun, 01 Nov 2009 09:15:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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