Filed under: Utilities, Windows, Productivity, Freeware
As the owner of a netbook, I sometimes have to deal with application windows that I can't move because the title bar isn't visible.
Thankfully, a 10kb download has solved this problem for me.
AltDrag is free, portable program that allows you to drag a window by holding down the alt key on your keyboard and clicking and dragging anywhere. For the 5mb of memory it consumes, it's well worth carrying on your ultraportable.
When launched, it appears as a system tray icon which you can right-click to force it to autostart with Windows or hide the icon.
By holding alt + shift and dragging, AltDrag will snap your window to the edge of your screen. I did notice that it had a little problem with the Vista start orb, and usually snapped below it. Everywhere else on the screen, it worked flawlessly.
[ via
Freeware Genius ]
Linux-style window dragging in Windows with AltDrag originally appeared on Download Squad on Wed, 12 Nov 2008 17:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Filed under: Internet, Web services, Google
Google is experiencing some downtime this afternoon. While some users report that they experienced a hiccup or two when sending an email using Gmail, others (myself included) seem to be experiencing a total Google blackout. No Gmail, no Google Reader, no Google Docs, and no Google Talk. Oh, and the search engine isn't accessible either.
I have no doubt that service will be restored momentarily. But I suddenly find myself temporarily helpless. I rely heavily on Google Reader and Gmail for my workflow as a home office worker. And I'm not alone. A quick
scan of Twitter Search shows that a lot of other people are experiencing the same problems.
While there are many advantages to cloud computing (like being able to access your data from any computer, anywhere in the world), this outage shows one of the most significant downsides. If Google experiences technical difficulties, millions of people around the world who rely on Google services experience those difficulties as well. It's almost enough to make me go back to
Thunderbid and
FeedDemon.
Oh wait, after about 18 minutes of downtime, Google's back online. Nevermind.
Update: Word on the street is that the problem was with Verizon, not Google. Verizon high speed internet customers were also unable to access Facebook, CNN, and a number of other sites during the same period.
Google experiences downtime, so does faith in cloud computing originally appeared on Download Squad on Wed, 12 Nov 2008 16:46:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Filed under: Internet
You know all those ads you see all over the internet telling you that your old friends from high school, or the lonely half-naked girl down the street are waiting for you to call? Yeah, it turns out they're not always telling the truth. But one San Diego man figured that when he signed up for a free Classmates.com account and was
then told that his friends were trying to contact him and he could find out who they were by paying $15 to upgrade his account, it couldn't hurt to shell out a few bucks.
But once he did, Anthony Michaels discovered that nobody he knew or had gone to school with was actually trying to contact him. And the only users who had viewed his profile were people he had never heard of.
Most people would probably just figure they were out $15, because it would take more time and effort to try to recover the money than it was worth. But Michaels decided to try to
put together a class action suit. Presumably, he's hoping to get more than $15 per user out of this, but the bigger point is that he's trying to get a court to show that Classmates.com used deceptive practices to convince him to become a paying member.
Man discovers friends were NOT looking for him, sues Classmates.com originally appeared on Download Squad on Wed, 12 Nov 2008 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Filed under: Windows
Because no space in this world is immune from advertising, you're about to see ads start popping up in software installers.
OpenCandy, the company providing the technology says software developers can use their software in one of two ways. During the installation process, users will either see:
- An option to install a similar application
- An ad
But if you ask me, both options are an ad. Not that there's anything wrong with that. In one case, you may see a paid advertisement, while in another case you may see a recommendation to download an application. Whether the developer of that application paid to get the software title in front of you or not, there's clearly an exchange of value taking place here.
Anyway, the offers to install additional software are always opt-in. So you won't accidentally install unwanted software just by clicking Next over and over. And the way OpenCandy handles additional software installations is actually pretty nifty. Near the end of the install process, you're asked if you want to add an extra application. If you choose yes, the first installer will finish up, and then you'll automatically download the new program and its installer will launch.
OpenCandy - Would you like fries with your software installation? originally appeared on Download Squad on Wed, 12 Nov 2008 15:15:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Filed under: Utilities, Windows, Freeware, Troubleshooting
While it's not something you have to do often, removing files that are locked by Windows can be a pain.
To make things easier on yourself, grab
Boot Deleter, a tiny application that you can integrate into Windows'
right-click context menu.
Locate the problem file on your drive, click it, and choose delete on reboot. When your system restarts, Boot Deleter will remove them automatically before Windows starts up. It's a handy utility to clean up files left over from a malware cleanup.
Boot Deleter is freeware for Windows only, and requires the VB runtimes.
Continue reading Two tools to remove locked Windows files on restart
Two tools to remove locked Windows files on restart originally appeared on Download Squad on Wed, 12 Nov 2008 14:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Filed under: Windows Mobile, Microsoft, Browsers
The Windows Mobile team has publicly released
Internet Explorer Mobile 6. There's just one catch: You can't run it on your Windows Mobile phone yet. Instead, the download lets you run Windows Mobile 6.1.4 on your Windows system in an emulator. So if you want to get a feel for how the new browser, which is based on Internet Explorer 6, will work, you can take it for a spin. If all you're waiting for a mobile version so that you can actually view full web pages on your Windows Mobile phone or PDA, it looks like you'll have to wait a bit longer.
This is the second time in the last few weeks that we've seen a software developer preview a mobile browser by releasing a desktop-only demo. But while Mozilla released a relatively
light weight desktop version of Fennec, Microsoft's Internet Explorer 6 demo includes a full Windows Mobile emulator, which makes the installer file weigh in at 200+ MB.
That said, Internet Explorer Mobile 6 is a huge improvement over past versions of Pocket Internet Explorer. Like Safari for the iPhone, you can view full web pages the way they would look in a desktop browser and then zoom in tight for a better reading experience. Web pages did take a fairly long time to load, but it's not clear if that's the browser's fault or the fact that it's connecting to the internet through an ActiveSync connection with my laptop.
Internet Explorer Mobile 6 also features Flash Lite 3.1 and the Javascript v5.7 engine from Internet Explorer 8, which means you can watch Flash content from sites like YouTube and render Javascript-heavy pages like Google Docs.
My only real complaint with Internet Explorer Mobile 6 is that there's still no support for tabbed browsing.
[via
Windows Mobile team Blog]
Try Internet Explorer Mobile 6 on your desktop originally appeared on Download Squad on Wed, 12 Nov 2008 13:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Filed under: Business, Utilities, Windows, Macintosh, Office, Productivity, Freeware
Slife - a brilliant activity analysis program - has been available to Mac users for ages. For the past five months, however, their development team has been working almost exclusively on releasing a Windows version of the app.
At last, the waiting is over and PC users can
get their hands on version 2.0.
What makes it worth a download? Install Slife, and it runs in the background, unobtrusively monitoring your application use. Create activity groups to track applications by purpose - for example, blogging, coding, or photo editing. Doing so allows you to keep tabs on time spent performing a single task with multiple programs.
Set goals for yourself, and see how you measure up with Slife's charts. You can view analysis by day, application, or group. It's a fantastic way for teleworkers (or anyone that uses a PC for business purposes) to keep tabs on where time is being spent.
There's also a
team tracking service that enables group usage analysis. Your first 30 days are free (no credit card required), and it's $10 per team member after that.
Slife is a free download for both Mac and Windows.
Slife tracks application usage on Mac, and now Windows originally appeared on Download Squad on Wed, 12 Nov 2008 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Filed under: Fun, Internet, Time-Wasters, Web
Ever have a few drinks and nod off while watching a DVD? I'm pretty sure almost all of us has been there at one time or another. If you've ever longed for that feeling you get when you groggily wake up to the DVD's menu playing over and over again, head on over to
You Fell Asleep Watching a DVD.
You can choose from a selection of DVDs to "fall asleep" in front of, including:
- Pride & Prejudice
- Knocked Up
- Punch Drunk Love
- Bucket List
- Arrested Development
- Terminator 2
- Van Wilder
- Harry Potter 3
- Reservoir Dogs
- The Ben Stiller Show
- Shaun of the Dead
- Bourne Supremacy
This site has a very high WTF factor. There's really nothing more to do than select a movie and watch its menu screen on a tiny screen on a cartoon television in a static cartoon living room. If it was my site, each DVD screen would link to Amazon with an affiliate link so I could make a couple bucks off of it. But then, I'm greedy like that.
You Fell Asleep Watching a DVD - Time Waster originally appeared on Download Squad on Wed, 12 Nov 2008 11:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Filed under: News, Google
Google Trends is a fun way to compare the popularity of search terms, but the technology behind it can also be put to some important uses. Google.org, the nonprofit arm of Google, is using Trends to generate
a flu tracker, showing the prevalence of flu outbreaks across America. Flu-related search terms are tracked to estimate when and where the flu happens, with data going back to 2003.
The data is tracked by state, so you can check and prepare when the flu starts to pick up in your area. According to Google's data, December is historically the worst flu month, so this is an apt time for Google Flu Trends to launch. Google is hoping that the tracker will be quicker and more accurate than the traditional method of waiting for doctors to report the flu, and they estimate that people are likely to Google the flu 1 to 2 weeks before they tell their doctors about it.
How Google knows when you're likely to get the flu originally appeared on Download Squad on Wed, 12 Nov 2008 10:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Filed under: Video, Windows, Macintosh, Web services, web 2.0, Web
Online video portal
Sling.com is set to open to the public on November 24th. It's currently in private beta, but we got an early peek at the service. The online video player is easy to use, and there's plenty of content from a number of major US television networks as well as ton of videos from web sites like
College Humor and
60frames.
While the selection of videos is pretty extensive, that's not really what makes Sling.com special. In fact, the content library looks pretty much like what you can already find at
Hulu. That makes sense, since many of the TV episodes and full length videos are coming straight from Hulu.
What makes Sling.com unlike any other online video site is the way it works with the company's
Slingbox hardware. If you have a Slingbox plugged into your TV set, cable or satellite box, or TiVo, you can use Sling.com to watch live video over the web. Sling Media has offered the ability to stream video over the internet since the company's inception. But Sling.com allows you to access live, pre-recorded, and web video all in one central location.
If you have a Slingbox, there's plenty of reason to choose Sling.com over Hulu. If not, the case isn't quite as compelling at the moment. Eventually Sling Media plans to roll out social tools that let users do things like record clips of TV shows and movies using a Slingbox and share them with other users at Sling.com. But that feature isn't available yet.
You can watch Sling.com's web videos in pretty much any browser. But if you want to watch live TV, you'll need to be running Windows and using Firefox or Internet Explorer. Mac support is coming soon. I also noticed a glitch during my test that caused Firefox to crash every time I switched from watching a live program to watching web video, and then back to live video again. Hopefully that issue will be worked out by the time Sling emerges from private beta later this month.
First look at Sling.com online video portal originally appeared on Download Squad on Wed, 12 Nov 2008 09:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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