Latest Posts from Download Squad

Eight percent of all men suffer from some form of colorblindness, a condition that can interfere with their ability to distinguish things designed for unimpaired viewers. Color Oracle aims to change this by making it easy for designers to see their work as a colorblind person would. Color Oracle overlays the user's screen to simulate three different kinds of colorblindness of increasing severity, the idea being that by designing for the severely colorblind, all your bases will be covered.

It would be great to get some feedback on this app from actual colorblind readers– perhaps even colorblind designer Jon Hicks of Firefox fame?

[via Daring Fireball]

Over 8 million people live in New York City, and for those of them who use Google Earth, things just got a whole lot easier. The NYC Google Earth Mega Pack adds a boatload of new layers to enhance the Google Earth experience, including complete mass transit routes (including into Long Island an New Jersey), neighborhood maps, bike routes, live weather maps, NYPD precinct houses, and city parade routes.

While the Mega Pack has a more complete set of transit routes, Brian Abbott's New York City Subway for Google Earth layer is a bit cleaner and easier to read.

[via Dan Dickinson]

Yesterday afternoon, popular social event website and Yahoo! property Upcoming.org surprised users by redesigning and requiring the merging of existing accounts with Yahoo! accounts. The changes came without warning, possibly in an attempt to avoid a user backlash similar to that which erupted after big brother Flickra few months ago. announced the merging of accounts As way of making it up to their users, Upcoming is giving away a bunch of special Upcoming.org t-shirts to 'old skool' users who've been using the site for a while.

On the redesign side of the news, the new look is cleaner, faster to load, and introduces a whole new way of browsing events which centers around more specific metro's and integrated maps. The new interface is overall more media driven, and resembles in a way the recent Facebook redesign.

In addition to the most obvious changes mentioned above, Upcoming.org is no longer actually upcoming.org, but upcoming.yahoo.com.

Update: Apparently the updates were not unannounced; they were posted on the official blog multiple times. They did not, however, send an email notice to users in the same way Flickr did.

Being a designer requires at least some degree of perfectionism, a fact which often boils to the surface when working with imperfect tools– such as when one needs to create a barcode for a package or book cover design. We know of more than a few designers who have gone so far as to attempt to re-create an authentic looking barcode in Illustrator– something that takes way too much time and energy to be practical.

Fortunately for us and others (who probably need barcodes to, you know, allow the scanning of things), Wolf Software provides professional quality barcode creation software free of charge for both Mac and Windows. In addition to the old standby's of UPC and ISBN, users have the option to choose from a large variety of other barcode formats, including Datamatix (pictured here encoding "Download Squad").

[Via creativebits]

One of my favorite parts of being a college student is the fact that I have access to pretty much any and every scholarly journal and article database on the planet. That's why was so excited to read about The New York Times' decision to provide their premium TimesSelect service free of charge to anyone with an .edu email address. TimesSelect offers exclusive Op-Ed columns, early access to the newspaper's Sunday edition, and access to up to 100 free archived articles (dating back to 1851!) per month.

True enough, I could probably get all that through the databases I already have access to, but the ease of being able to simply log into the NYT site to view an article instead of having to look it up in a database goes a long way.

Unfortunately, it seems that @alumni.school.edu and similar addresses are ineligible for this offer.

[via Consumerist]

Breaking news on the internets right now as Matt over at WordPress is reporting some serious issues with packages of WordPress 2.1.1 downloaded over the past 3-4 days. According to a blog post, a malicious intruder gained access to the wordpress.org servers and modified the files being made available for download. How exactly this happened is still unknown.

The long-and-short of the situation is this: if you downloaded and installed the most recent version of WordPress from wordpress.org in the last few days, you weren't downloading the official release– you were downloading a modified version that likely includes some sort of back-door.

Although only a subset of in-the-wild copies of 2.1.1 contain the vulnerability, the development team has declared the entire release "dangerous," and highly suggest all users upgrade to 2.1.2.

You know we're living in a beta world, and I am a beta girl guy. It seems that we're constantly hearing announcements about "The Next Big Thing" to reach private beta and how totally awesome it is - and then the waiting game begins. True to boom form, most of the services never actually make it public (I'm currently wearing a shirt advertising Life IO, which was supposed to launch in September.)

The Museum of Modern Betas chronicles the 50 most anticipated upcoming services as measured by how often they show up on del.icio.us. Topping the list is Scrybe, which Jason wrote about back in October.

[via UXMagazine]

I'm a very visual person, so when planning a trip, I like to have some sort of idea of what my destination looks like. Google Earth and the 3D imagery it provides a great way to get a feel for where you're going, but it's not always practical to open up such a resource intensive application when you just need a quick glimpse of the area. True to ever-improving form, The Big G this morning updated regular ol' browser-based Google Maps to include simple-n-sexy outlines of buildings.

In another update today, metro stations have started showing up in map and hybrid views. Only a few cities are covered so far, but I expect we'll eventually see most public transport in major cities showing up--perhaps tying into Google Transport?

[via Lifehacker]

This isn't exactly the kind of promotion one normally sees leading up to a major OS update. PowerTogether.com is a promotion put on officially by Microsoft offering full licenses of Windows Vista Business or Microsoft Office Professional 2007 to any US resident (sorry international readers) willing to watch 3 (for each license) informational video or interactive presentations, answer a few questions regarding the content of the presentations, and sign over your first born give them a bunch of personal information.

Now, I can vouch for the legitimacy of this promotion, as Microsoft has done this kind of thing in the past (I participated in one about 3 years ago to get a free copy of Visual Studio, which I to this day have never taken out of the package). The subject matter of the presentations may be imposing to some, but if PowerTogether is anything like the VS promotion, the answers to the questions are more about the quality of the content than the content itself.

The PowerTogether promotion requires IE6 or higher to complete.

Update: Sean from Microsoft has confirmed that the site is part of a legitimate promotion. The site is struggling under the weight of all you guys hitting it at the same time. Patience is a virtue.

Cabs are expensive, especially when considering that in most situations one can take public transport for about a fourth of the price. But for those times when you simply have to get somewhere quickly and with minimal hassle, taking a taxi is often the only option. Readers in large megalopolis's will be familiar with the idea of sharing a cab with a stranger, and the rest of us might have seen the idea come up in movies or TV. Most of the time cab sharing arises out of one of two situations: Two people standing on a corner on a Saturday each trying to flag down the one available cab, or friends going to or from a common location. Hitchsters takes the concept to a whole new level with their service (now in beta) matches people up to share taxi's and allows users to specify start and end points, co-rider preference (male or female), and even flight information for cabs in and out of the airport. Though the site currently only supports New York City, they promise to expand to other cities soon (San Francisco, please!).

[Via Product Dose]