Google Cloud Connect plug-in connects Microsoft Office to your Google Docs originally appeared on Download Squad on Mon, 22 Nov 2010 13:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

For better or worse, Adobe's latest iteration of Reader is now available for both Android and desktop OSes. From the sandboxed Reader 'protected-mode', to the new multimedia implementations, there's quite a bit in the new Acrobat X suite of software.

Gallery: Adobe Reader X for Android

Continue reading Adobe Reader X now available for Android and desktop OSes

Adobe Reader X now available for Android and desktop OSes originally appeared on Download Squad on Fri, 19 Nov 2010 04:54:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Microsoft Office 2011 for Mac is significantly faster than 2008/2004 originally appeared on Download Squad on Thu, 18 Nov 2010 05:18:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Microsoft Lync 2010 replaces Microsoft Office Communications Server for workplace collaboration originally appeared on Download Squad on Wed, 17 Nov 2010 20:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Continue reading Google Docs gets mobile editing support on Android 2.2 and iOS

Google Docs gets mobile editing support on Android 2.2 and iOS originally appeared on Download Squad on Wed, 17 Nov 2010 13:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Evernote for iPhone and iPad updated with multi-photo select and 90 minute audio notes originally appeared on Download Squad on Fri, 12 Nov 2010 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Google Chrome gets official Google Calendar, Docs, and YouTube extensions originally appeared on Download Squad on Fri, 12 Nov 2010 07:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Tether releases Android tethering app, works on Android 1.5 and up originally appeared on Download Squad on Thu, 11 Nov 2010 20:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

WorkFlowy is deceptively simple. It's just an outliner - a list-maker! You click on a new line, write whatever you have to write, and hit Enter. Done - you now have a bullet, a "to-do item," or whatever you want to call it. Hit Shift+Enter, and you can add some text as a note for that item.

There is nothing revolutionary about it, except for one key difference: it lets you drill into items. By "drilling in," I mean that you can click the bullet next to an item (or press Ctrl+right arrow), and you're then transported "into" the item. You no longer see the whole list - the item you've selected becomes the "master item," and it looks like it's the top of the hierarchy.

This simple difference makes it possible to forget that you have a huge list of other items. It makes it possible to use Workflowy for managing a whole bunch of disparate projects, thoughts, and whatnot. Workflowy was intentionally kept simple -- there are no "tags." You can't send links to specific items. There are no collaboration features. It's a very single-minded tool, and it just works.

I've promised you Matt Cutts in the title, so here's what Mr. Cutts had to say about it, according to WorkFlowy's homepage:

"Workflowy has become one of three tabs that I keep open in my browser, along with Gmail and Google Calendar."

That's a powerful endorsement if I've ever seen one. There's also a short video about Workflowy after the jump.

Continue reading WorkFlowy is a lightweight outliner endorsed by Matt Cutts

WorkFlowy is a lightweight outliner endorsed by Matt Cutts originally appeared on Download Squad on Thu, 11 Nov 2010 14:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Evernote passes 5 million users originally appeared on Download Squad on Wed, 10 Nov 2010 19:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

pleasnotify.me is a fairly straightforward Web app: You fill in a quick form with the recipient's address, a task, a due date, and your address.

The email is sent out, and the recipient is supposed to reply by the time the task is done. On the surface, all is well and fine. I mean, it's not the most original application in the history of the universe, but it's okay.

But when you stop and think about it for a minute, it's an incredible way to spam and harass random people. The application basically provides you with a free, open email gateway, which lets you email anyone, anywhere, without verifying your identity in any way. It doesn't even use a CAPTCHA prompt to make sure you're human. In other words, this thing is just waiting for a spam bot to give it (and hapless email users) some abuse.

Adding CAPTCHA would help, sure. But what would really help would be authenticating users, and doing the whole thing over email in the first place. Do that, and you find yourself with Followup.cc which is how this sort of thing should be done in the first place.

Still, it's a nice try, and hopefully could at least be made a tad more secure.

pleasnotify.me lets you quickly assign tasks over email, spam random people originally appeared on Download Squad on Wed, 10 Nov 2010 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

We all have email. We have too much email, actually. And it stays in the inbox and just piles up, gathering dust, cobwebs and guilt. There are tons of services, systems, and lifehacks to try help us get rid of some of that overload, or at least handle it a tad better.

0Boxer is another such attempt, but it's a particularly graceful one. It comes as a Firefox or Chrome extension that hooks onto Gmail and rewards you every time you do something to handle your email. You get points for replying to messages, for archiving them, and even for composing new messages -- though that last bit seems a tad counter-intuitive. I thought the idea was having less email, not more.

Still, the concept is very cool. You also get "badges" when you perform particularly impressive feats, such as archiving your first message (I'm a big boy now!).

Since this is 2010, everything must be social - and 0Boxer doesn't disappoint. You can use it to find your friends who are also playing the game, and supposedly compete with them. I haven't tried this (you need to have friends for this to work), but it's definitely intriguing. All in all, it does add a bit of interest and fun when replying to scads of messages!

[Via: Switched]

0Boxer makes handling your email into a game, is awesome originally appeared on Download Squad on Wed, 10 Nov 2010 16:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

When you think about it, a calendar is basically a to-do list with dates. Sure, we're used to looking at it in a certain format - all of those little squares, one per day. But coolendar takes the concept of a calendar and strips it from that familiar representation, leaving just a neat, carefully dated to-do list in its wake.

Visually, it's very cool. It's got that iPhone-app aesthetic that seems to be the new Web 2.0 look. All the buttons are rounded, the whole thing is colored in lovely pastels, and when you hover over a button, you get a funky "zoom in" effect.

A part of coolendar's claim to fame is its ability to parse natural language. So you can write "9PM Sunday, do something," and it correctly guesses that you mean next Sunday. However, this is something that Google Calendar already does, and I believe it does it a bit better than coolendar. For instance, coolendar had trouble with a perfectly clear request such as "Sunday in two weeks, do something." It's also lacking any sort of support for recurring events.

In short, the nicest thing about this app is the UI and the visual appeal. In terms of functionality, both Google Calendar and Remember The Milk have it squarely beat, at least for now.

Coolendar is a slick natural language online calendar originally appeared on Download Squad on Wed, 10 Nov 2010 10:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Let's say you've browsed somewhere you shouldn't have, or at a time when it was inappropriate. And maybe you've even forgotten to turn on the private browsing mode. Tsk tsk tsk! But the deed is done; now what?

If you just go ahead and hit Ctrl+Shift+Del in Firefox, you will be able to delete all traces of your browsing from the past several hours, from today, or even the entire history. But that's not very subtle, is it? Anyone auditing your browser history might notice a large, gaping hole in the records and start wondering.

What if you could delete only those traces you didn't want seen, leaving the rest undisturbed? That would be far more difficult to track down. But going over your entire browsing history and hunting those errant URLs one by one is tedious, not to mention error prone.

History Deleter is a Firefox add-on aimed at automating this entire process. It utilizes a complex rule-based system that allows you to delete URLs (or page titles) containing certain keywords, which have been visited more than once or browsed a certain number of days ago. You can also have it automatically run upon exiting Firefox, or when the history exceeds a certain number of entries.

Clearly, this has uses other than hiding illicit browsing; Firefox's extensive history is used by the Awesome Bar to yield useful browsing suggestions, but the browser can easily become slow when burdened with too many entries. History Deleter can help you make Firefox a bit leaner, while still enjoying the Awesome Bar and other history-related features.

History Deleter for Firefox lets you selectively purge browsing history originally appeared on Download Squad on Tue, 09 Nov 2010 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Evernote

Continue reading Evernote 2.0 for Android is now available, brings many improvements

Evernote 2.0 for Android is now available, brings many improvements originally appeared on Download Squad on Mon, 08 Nov 2010 17:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Evernote for BlackBerry gets an update and becomes available almost everywhere originally appeared on Download Squad on Fri, 05 Nov 2010 17:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

How to Instapaper an entire multi-page article in just two clicks originally appeared on Download Squad on Thu, 04 Nov 2010 16:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

"Remember Mom's birthday," says the bland email from Google Calendar. Sometimes that's enough, really -- but other times, you may want to add a bit of pizzazz to make things more interesting... Especially if you're sending that scheduled reminder to someone other than yourself.

Alertful is a simple, well-designed email alert service. It works kind of like e-cards: there are tailor-made reminders for all sorts of specific occasions, such as a birthday, a meeting reminder, a holiday reminder, a "pet to the vet" reminder, and even a "money reminder." It's British, so there's an "MOT renewal reminder," too (that's Ministry of Transport, I believe). Each reminder has a little tie-wearing dude with a speech bubble, telling you something like "Remember, your MOT is about to expire on...." Here's a sample.

When you set a reminder, you have to fill in a short form with the date, the email you wish to send the reminder to, the frequency (one off, or how often the reminder should be sent), and some other details. I only wish they had custom forms for the different reminders - they all seem to contain the same set of questions. All in all, Alertful is a neat little service.

Alertful lets you schedule cute, lively email reminders originally appeared on Download Squad on Tue, 02 Nov 2010 15:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Blekko, despite how it sounds, is a search engine -- not a euphemism for vomit.

It's a search engine that, in its quest to go up against bigger opponents like Google, Bing, and Yahoo, has tried to set itself apart by lumping operators into "slashtags," calling itself "social," and touting how "open" and "transparent" its search results are. It also tries to put an overwhelmingly positive spin on human bias playing a huge role in search rankings. Blekko hopes to attract not just disillusioned power-users, but everyday users as well -- and from what I've seen, that doesn't seem very likely.

For starters, if you share the aversion to the three-letter acronym SEO that many users of social media tend to have these days, this search engine is not for you. If you like to get your search results very quickly, then this search engine probably isn't for you. If you like your search engine to be intuitive, and furthermore, to get decent results with a minimum amount of finagling, then I have to say that Blekko is not the search engine for you.

I spent a couple of solid hours using Blekko in a vain attempt to find a reason for all the hype. After all, The New York Times went as far as to call Blekko "A New Search Engine, Where Less Is More," and our own AOL compatriot Michael Arrington gave it plenty of positive attention at TechCrunch. I was actually hoping that there might be some worth to the plucky little upstart -- but instead I found a bloated, buggy search engine with largely worthless, extremely inaccurate results, regardless of what slashtag I used to "vertically narrow" my search.

Continue reading Blekko, the "Slashtag" search engine is slow, cumbersome, and just plain broken

Blekko, the "Slashtag" search engine is slow, cumbersome, and just plain broken originally appeared on Download Squad on Mon, 01 Nov 2010 16:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Google's newest official Chrome extension is sure to get a lot of use in the coming months. Assuming you've got extension-syncing enabled in a capable version of the browser, Web Clipboard brings a fully synced clipboard to Chrome, and it's pretty nice for an initial -- though somewhat buggy -- release. It copies both plain text and HTML within any Chrome tab, and secures the data on Google servers. Each item copied remains saved for 30 days, or until you clear the clipboard contents through the extension's drop-down menu.

The extension just released today, but Google warns of two major known issues: Gmail isn't yet supported, and neither are pages which contain frames. I've also run into a spot of trouble in getting items copied with the extension to paste inside Google Docs.

On the bright side, text copied using Docs' built-in clipboard will be instantly available in the extension for pasting elsewhere. Last but not least, the extension is currently only able to paste inside form elements. Despite these early obstacles, this is probably one of the more useful extensions in the gallery for people who use more than one computer. Since this is an official Google extension, I would think the bugs will get worked out fairly quickly.

One thing I'm hoping for in subsequent updates is for the extension to work inside the Omnibar, which could make quickly copying a URL and switching computers a much smoother process than it is today. One thing's for certain, Chrome OS was definitely on the minds of Google's extension team when they cooked this one up.

Google Web Clipboard feeds Chrome freshly synced copypasta originally appeared on Download Squad on Fri, 29 Oct 2010 17:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.