Tag: COOL

Jeffrey Morley of the Rainmeter development team has decided to grace us with our very own Download Squad Rainmeter skin! As you can see on the screenshot, the skin shows current DLS headlines right on your desktop. They're clickable, so it's very easy to get to the post that you want to read. You also get a temperature reading and a clock/date display. You can't see it very well on the ...

6. Windows 7 Yeah, sue me -- while I'm by no means a Microsoft cheerleader, I am a huge Windows fan. 2009 saw the release of, dare I say, the best operating system ever made. Sales figures of both the bundled-with-new-PCs and boxed standalone versions have been massive, blowing all other competitors out of the water. Software support is great, the Superbar is awesome... I'm hard-pushed to ...

digg_url = 'http://downloadsquad.switched.com/2009/12/29/sebs-10-greatest-geekiest-and-most-awesome-things-of-2009/'; As you can probably tell, I'm not as savvy when it comes to software -- sure, I know my way around a computer, but it's nothing like the prowess that Lee and Jay display here on Download Squad. You see... I'm a geek. Not a Mac nerd like Jay, or a security-Linux-OMG-netbook dweeb ...

My buddy Dave once shared with me a bit of computing wisdom which I've since found invaluable. "Proper troubleshooting requires a Teddy Bear." As it was told to me -- long ago in a university computer lab not so far away -- there was a sysadmin who became frustrated with the number of questions he was asked by student developers. It wasn't that the questions were invalid, or that the ...

Back in December I mentioned a cool little Flash 8 demo by Grant Skinner that interfaces with your webcam to make it look like you're being snowed on. Okay, it sounds kinda lame when I explain it that way, but it is pretty cool. Even cooler, though, is a new demo by Skinner, which also requires Flash Player 8 and a compatible webcam, that turns you into the human torch. While I don't have a webcam ...

Swarm the dot com advertises itself as "a new way to browse the web and find the most interesting sites." Basically what it is is a Firefox extension that watches what sites you're browsing and sends them back to the Swarm server, which then displays them (along with everyone else's) in a cool Flash visual. From the Flash interface you can see what sites people are visiting in real-time, visit ...

I think it's only a matter of time before Google brings something more like Google Earth to web browsers, but in the meantime check out 3D Maps, a Japanese proof-of-concept that takes map images from Google Maps and uses SVG to transform them into a pseudo-3D tilted view. It only works with Firefox 1.5 and is pretty slow, but is cool nonetheless. If you read Japanese there's some technical ...