[Download Squad] 4 New Entries: Great Summary provides halfway decent summaries of long articles

Great Summary provides halfway decent summaries of long articles

Filed under: Internet, Web services, Web

Sure, you always mean to keep up on the news by reading dozens of interesting articles every day about politics, the economy, and you know, tech news. But who has the time? Great Summary is here to help. Just copy the URL of an article that's so long you get exhausted by looking at it, decide how many lines of text you're actually willing to put up with (from 1 to 100), and push the summarize button. Great Summary will find the most important points of the article, saving you valuable minutes, or even seconds of time.

At least that's the idea. In practice, the web service could use some more work. I tried it on several news articles from a number of different web sites, and more often than not, Great Summary decided that the tags or site navigation menus were worth dedicating a line to.

That said, the service did usually pick out some of the most fact-filled lines in an article, so it looks like the developers are onto something. If you don't care about story structure or narrative flow, Great Summary might be worth checking out. But I wouldn't exactly rely on it as a primary means of skimming the daily news just yet.

You can also use the service to summarize chunks of text that you copy and paste. Want to know how it handles this article? Read the summary after the break.

[via Lifehacker]

Continue reading Great Summary provides halfway decent summaries of long articles

Great Summary provides halfway decent summaries of long articles originally appeared on Download Squad on Fri, 28 Nov 2008 18:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Cubic Explorer is a highly customizable portable file manager

Filed under: Utilities, Windows, Productivity, Freeware

There are plenty of Windows Explorer replacements out there, and most of you probably have a favorite. While I'm normally content to use what Windows gives me, I'm always looking for a good portable replacement to help ease file management tasks on customer computers.

Cubic Explorer has a number of options that have earned it the job. While it's packed with functionality and can be customized any number of ways, the interface remains mostly uncomplicated. It's a given that when you add tabs, breadcrumbs, bookmarks, previewing, folder trees, and everything else normally found in an Explorer replacement that the interface will become cluttered, but Cubic keeps things under control.

I've added all the folders I normally need to access during a repair to the favorites, like c:\windows, control panel, network connections, and my network app shares. After launching Cubic, hitting the bookmarks menu and open all in tabs quickly displays everything. It's much quicker than using start -> run every time I need to open a folder.

Cubic also supports sessions, allowing you to have several customized sets of tabs, bookmarks, and layouts. It's a handy feature for moving between customer systems, our office machines, and my home computers. Several themes are included, and your choice is saved with the session.

Cubic Explorer is freeware for Windows only, and both an installer and portable version are available.

Cubic Explorer is a highly customizable portable file manager originally appeared on Download Squad on Fri, 28 Nov 2008 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Auditorium is a gorgeous musical puzzle - Time Waster

Filed under: Audio, Fun, Games

Oops, there goes my entire day! I just discovered an addictive new musical puzzle game called Auditorium, and I'm trying to play though all of the demo levels. Gameplay in auditorium is centered on a flow of "audiovisual particles" that you can direct by moving and resizing different objects that are available to you. The object is to direct the flow across musical audio containers, using arrows, attract and repel symbols, and any other special tools that pop up.

The audio containers each represent a different piece of the music, and they get louder the more you fill them up with flow. To clear a level, you need to max out all of your containers, which brings the song together. There are multiple ways to solve each level -- right now, there are 3 acts, with 5+ levels each, and 20 total acts are being planned. Once you get into some of the more complex levels, you have to deal with multicolored flow, and even containers that need more than one color to fill up. It's challenging, but the freeform gameplay gives it good replay value.

Auditorium is a gorgeous musical puzzle - Time Waster originally appeared on Download Squad on Fri, 28 Nov 2008 14:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Automate your drive re-organizing with Download Mover

Filed under: Utilities, Windows, Productivity, Freeware

I've been writing about plenty of manual ways to keep your hard drive neat and clean recently. That's a nice start, but what about some automated help along the lines of Auto-Delete?

While Download Mover is no longer actively developed, it's still good at what it does. Download and extract the zip file and launch the executable, and DM will ask you where and what you want to monitor. Specify the interval for checks and set your notification options, and you're done.

You can specify multiple folders to watch and specify different targets for each file type you add. I often forget to change my Firefox download preferences to save things in my d:\downloads folder. Setting Download Mover to scrape .exe and .zip files into the proper directory keeps my desktop nice and tidy with no interference.

If you've got another automated tool for handling chores like this, please share it! I'm always on the lookout for another app that can tackle tedious tasks like directory cleanup.

Automate your drive re-organizing with Download Mover originally appeared on Download Squad on Fri, 28 Nov 2008 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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