Latest Posts from Download Squad

So you think you can type fast, eh?

Not soooooooo fast. Here comes Fast140.

What is it you ask? Well, it recycles tweets from Twitter and turns them into a speed typing game. No longer will you be testing your speed to mundane and correctly spelled sentences like "The dog ran quickly.", now you get stuck with winners like the one pictured above.

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The Lockergnome brand and Chris Pirillo know their technology, and now they're opening the doors up to a new iPhone App tracking site just for you and run by you.

The idea is similar to Digg in that you can submit iPhone apps and people can vote them up or down, giving you a nice community snapshot of what app is performing, and what app isn't at any given time.

It also has implications for when new apps come out, and you want to be the first kid at school to get it.

Sure, you can read reviews in the Apple Store, but you don't get the full story like you do on a site with simplicity and ease of use.

It's rough around the edges but the idea seems clear. Submit, rate, and interact. But the difference here is that it's so granular and dedicated solely to iPhone Apps.

Chris gave us the early link to the Apple App Tracker too, and we'd like to see one for PC apps and maybe even Linux distributions. Since he can build communities, it'll be interesting to see how big of a community pops up around this new venture.

Sometimes the best web services are the simplest ones. Drivepricing lets you calculate the cost of gas for your road trip.

With gas prices so high its nice to be able to know how much to put in the piggy bank to save up for the trips you have coming up this summer.

So when you're going to visit grandma in Albany from Philly, you can drop your gas mileage in there and get an estimated cost of what you're going to have to beg her for so you can get home.

Even if you don't know your gas mileage they have a link to FuelEconomy.gov for you. Drop your zipcode in there, start address, end address, the type of gas you use (which is a great feature) and whether its a round trip or not.

After a few seconds of loading, booya there you have it. Price per gallon and cost for trip.

Who doesn't like Legos?

Bricksmith brings Lego building to your Mac. And in a big way. Sorry PC folks, Mac only.

When we say a big way, we mean this isn't just a drag and drop of lego parts, this is full modeling. You don't have to have a degree to do it, but you definitely have to have some time on your hands....but the payoff could be awesomesauce.

This sucker is like Photoshop for lego designs.

You have thousands of parts to choose from, some of which we've never seen in our lego pails.

There's a full color palette, copy/paste/undo, drag and drop modeling and more.

Best part is, you don't have to step on them in your bare feet in the middle of the night!

We used it for 5 minutes and it hurt our heads, but we bet you can come up with something great. Take a screenshot and put the link to it in the comments.

[via chris pirillo]

PCIncubator aims to help you find the right parts at the right prices to build your dream PC.

We've all built a PC at some point. It's fun, isn't it? Pick our your case, the mother board, memory, GI Joe Stickers.

What?

The pain in the neck part of the process is finding the right parts that you need and not paying too much for them...or buying really crappy parts as a default because you don't want to break the bank.

The parts are all out there, the internet is vast, but PCIncubator keeps tabs on the stuff that you need, the prices that are right, and does so very nicely if we may say.

They use NewEgg which is the geek chic place to shop for parts. They also keep a price history of all items so you can wait for prices to go back down if they go up. It's kind of like shopping for airline tickets. It also gives you that Dell and Apple builder feel

Once you've picked your perfect PC parts, you can toss them all into a NewEgg cart and away you go!

Too bad that you can't get Windows XP anymore :(

Please let us know in the comments if you have found this site helpful.

Some of us aren't good with numbers. The whole addition, subtraction, division, it's just not our forte.

Sure Windows and Macs have built in calculators but we're web people so we need something on the web to make us not feel like we're totally mathstupid.

Ecalc to the rescue. It's not just any calculator though.

It's pretty and webified.

They also have a scientific calculator for those who are past just trying to add up this months shopping list with the rent, which is as far as some of us go.

All kidding aside, scientific calculators are expensive...so it's pretty cool to have this tool available online.

They also have a rundown of all types of calculators if you're really into that.

So go be a mathematical genius...we're counting on you.

Get it? Oy.

Launching stuff is cool, and doing so in a flash game online is even cooler.

VivaLaGames brings us a new Time Waster with "HedgeHog Launch".

The premise is simple, you go through a series of days and launch HedgeHogs with a nice launcher gear, much like you would water balloons. Except these aren't balloons, these are dangerous little beasts called HedgeHogs. it's not quite Sonic, but we think it's way more fun.

The name of the game is to only get distance, but to grab money in the air while your HedgeHog flies.

The controls are quite easy, and you can play in fullscreen mode too. Just don't do it at work, because we can't be held responsible for having "HedgeHog Screwoff" on your permanent record. But that would be pretty schweet though.

You can dig in and tweak your thrusts left or right, and as you go through the days, your skills will get better and the stakes will get higher. Collect money, buy better rockets, some stylish goggles, and even a parachute to get better scores.

The music is addictive too.

So launch your hog and share your scores in the comments.

Have you ever been working somewhere and needed to focus on what you were doing, writing, saying, but there was too much ambient noise around you?

You know, peoples iPods crankin' or chitter chatter chattin'.

SimplyNoise is about to become your best friend.

At desk jobs (ewwww), they sometimes pump in "White noise" to push out sound and give you a bit more privacy, but you can't control how much of it you get.

SimplyNoise works kind of like an air conditioner in that you can amp it up to as much as you need. SimplyNoise's site states that white noise can help get you in a zen state, give you more privacy while on the phone, help you fall asleep, and even ease migraines.

Since we're all writers, and some of us have annoying construction going on outside of their condo during the day, we'll put it to the test and you should too.

Let us know in the comments if white noise is the right noise for you.

Remember, that whole Firefox download day thing that we got so amped up about? Us too.

Remember when their servers screwed the pooch for most of "Download Day"? Us too.

How about that vulnerability that affected all 8 zillion of us who downloaded version 3? Yep, we remember that too.

Now you can put all those rough memories behind and sleep easy. Today, Mozilla "officially" announced setting the record, with 8,002,530 downloads on the release day of Firefox 3. It's fair to point out that, nothing was broken here... this was a new record, hence "setting" and not "breaking".

Will you remember Mozilla set the Guinness World Record for the most software downloads in 24 hours on June 18th, 2008? Neither will we.

But congrats on still being #2 Firefox. Let us know when that changes and we'll jump around and party like it's 2035!

Mario Paint Composer lets you do what you know you've wanted to do all of your life...compose music in the key of Super Mario. You'll remember this from the Super NES days, but everything is way more fun on the computer.

This baby is free and it's available for Windows AND Mac and it comes from unFun games. Yay.

Don't have any music writing chops? No problem, neither do we. It makes fun noises and has cool Mario icons. 'Nuff said.

The default song when you load up Mario Paint Composer is a jazzy version of your favorite video game theme song ever. But it's up to you to write the next masterpiece.

And not just any masterpiece, you get to use pigs and cats and hearts.

Best part is that when the app is loaded, everywhere you click on your computer, the sounds follow. I like hearing a nice Yoshi sound when I click on an email or on iChat.

unFun built an interface for you to lo in and download all the songs you want, for your personal listening and partytime enjoyment, but it took forever to log into the system, so we wouldn't hang our hats on that feature.

[via chris pirillo]