Download Squad has written before about the humorous-but-sometimes-useful site Down For Everyone or Just Me. It comes in handy if you need to figure out whether the problem is with a site, or if it's on your end. But if the site really is down, it's out of your control, and that's kind of frustrating. Instead of futilely hitting refresh, try Notify Me When It's Up. True to its name, it will send you an email when the site you specify comes back up.

I love these simple one-purpose sites. There's no clutter, no learning curve, and they just do what they say. You might argue that Notify Me When It's Up should be combined with Down For Everyone, but where will it all end? A comprehensive desktop app with stats displays, accounts and iPhone support? Ok, probably not. But in a complicated world, it's nice to find someone who just wants to notify you when it's up.

Notify me when it's up! originally appeared on Download Squad on Sun, 30 Nov 2008 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Internet, Web services, Search, Web

Soovle is a search engine for people who might not know exactly what they're looking for. As soon as you start typing a search term, Soovle will begin to offer suggestions for related terms that may help you refine your search. And it doesn't just offer suggestions for one service, but for 7: Google, Yahoo!, Wikipedia, Answers.com, Ask.com, YouTube, and Amazon.

If you want to take Soovle up on one of its suggestions, just click on the text and Soovle will change the contents of the search box. If you want to change the default search engine, just click the icon below the search bar and when you click Soovle, you'll get your search results from Google, Yahoo!, Wikipedia, or whichever service you selected.

You can also save Soovle suggestions in a browser cookie or as a text file.

[via TechnoSpot]

Soovle offers search suggestions for 7 search engines originally appeared on Download Squad on Sun, 30 Nov 2008 14:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Developer, Text, Windows, Productivity, Commercial, Freeware

A good snippet manager or autotext tool can save just about anyone a little time and effort. For those who do a lot of typing, it can even help prevent repetitive stress injuries. If you're looking for an application like this, take a look at PhraseExpress.

Apart from point and click insertion of pre-defined text and auto-completion of recognized words and phrases, Phrase Express packs a clipboard monitor, macro support, and system-wide spell check.

Though the settings window presents only two buttons - new folder and new phrase - you're able to do a whole lot more than add commonly used text. PhraseExpress' included macros provide a wide array of powerful functions, including:

• launching external applications
• changing window focus
• opening files, folders, and web pages
• trimming, formatting, and replacing text
• embedding autotext suggestions
• time and date stamping
• inserting Windows environment variables

Since hotkeys are also supported, you PhraseExpress makes a very capable launcher application as well. Unlike some other launcher/hotkey apps, you're able to utilize the Windows key. Despite its numerous features, resource usage is very light - about 10mb of memory on my Vista install.

PhraseExpress can be installed, or you can download the portable version and extract it to your USB flash drive. It's free for personal use and $49.95 to register for commercial use. There's also a network edition that allows groups to access a shared library that runs $44.95 (or less, based on volume) per seat.

If you're already using PhraseExpress, share your experience. If you don't, what apps do you use (if anything) to handle these tasks?

PhraseExpress is so much more than an autotext app originally appeared on Download Squad on Sun, 30 Nov 2008 10:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Browsers

CheckBoxMate is a Firefox add-on that can save you a ton of time if you frequently need to select multiple check boxes when doing things like cleaning your email inbox or responding to surveys. The utility is considered an experimental Firefox plugin, but all that means is that you need to sign up for a free Mozilla account and login before downloading CheckBoxMate from the Firefox add-ons directory. You can also install it without an account by visiting the developer's homepage.

Once CheckBoxMate is installed, all you need to do to select multiple checkboxes is move your mouse over the first box and click to make a checkmark, and before you lift your finger from the mouse button, drag the mouse over all the other boxes you want to check. That's it.

I found that the plugin worked great with Gmail. But when I tried it with Google Docs and Zoho Docs, it was unable to identify the checkboxes. So it may not work on every web site you visit.

[via Firefox Facts]

Select multiple checkboxes with CheckBoxMate for Firefox originally appeared on Download Squad on Sat, 29 Nov 2008 14:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Internet, Utilities, Browsers

If you use some popular ad blocking add-ons for Safari (like the excellent PithHelmet), you may have run into problems when a new version of Safari was released. Updating can break your ad-blocker or cause Safari to crash until a new version of the plugin is released. This isn't a big deal to me, because Safari 3.2-compatible version of PithHelmet has already been released. If you're crazy about stability, though, GlimmerBlocker is offering an alternative.

GlimmerBlocker is downright derisive of other ad blocking options, explaining on their website that "The problem with other ad-blockers for Safari is that they are implemented as awful hacks ...This compromises the stability of Safari ..." Instead of using InputManagers, GlimmerBlocker works by http proxy. This is handy if you're using nightly builds of WebKit that other methods of adblocking can't keep up with. You do unfortunately have to make some small sacrifices for the stability: GlimmerBlocker won't stop pop-unders or filter cookies from 3rd-party sites.

Safari updates messing with your ad blocker? Try GlimmerBlocker. originally appeared on Download Squad on Sat, 29 Nov 2008 11:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Photo, Utilities, Video, Web

ZunaVision is a video technology that movie studios have had for years, brought to the average user by the computer science department at Stanford University. It lets you place images and videos within existing videos. Want to put a poster or an advertisement on a building in the background of your footage? ZunaVision's got you covered. How about changing the painting in a picture frame? It can do that, too.

ZunaVision isn't very hard to use. You can just select a surface, and it does a capable job of making your image look like it could plausibly be hanging there. It's not just pasted haphazardly on top of your video. It's cool enough that I'm already worried it won't stay free for long. The last Stanford web toy I fell in love with, Vector Magic, turned into a pay service after a while. Zunavision looks like it could be worth selling, too, but maybe the creators can just turn a profit by sneaking ads into other videos.

ZunaVision lets you place images and videos inside your videos originally appeared on Download Squad on Sat, 29 Nov 2008 10:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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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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Filed under: Utilities, Windows, Productivity, Freeware

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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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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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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