Christina Warren is an avid gadget-junkie and full fledged computer geek, with an affinity for interactive media and popular culture. A true "switcher," Christina has finally committed to using the Mac as her primary computing platform, after years of trying to tread the Mac/PC divide. It is now her mission to convert fellow PC-diehards to the world's best computing platform. When not academically pursuing film and business marketing, Christina writes about technology and popular culture (her work has appeared in USA Today and other publications) and blogs for TUAW, DownloadSquad and StyleDash. She also co-hosts DownloadSquad's weekly online videocast, The Squadcast.
A few months back, Download Squad's Danny Mendez wrote about Yahoo!'s acquisition of popular Safari InputManager Inquisitor. At the time, Danny was worried that Yahoo's purchase would make the tool unusable with other search engines, but those fears were unfounded, and Inquisitor continues to work well with either Google OR Yahoo.
Inquisitor is cool because it adds Spotlight-like functionality to the default Safari search box (it's kind of like the Awesome Bar for Firefox 3), along with easy access to other search results from places like Flickr or IMDB or Wikipedia. The design is also utterly kick-ass.
In the new release, users who choose to use Yahoo! search engine will see much, much faster results, thanks to integration with Yahoo's new BOSS platform. Like, instantaneously fast. Like, fast enough to make me consider changing my default search engine fast.
Inquisitor now supports eight languages in addition to English: Japanese, Korean, Traditional Chinese, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, and German.
The interface has also become more streamlined and looks really, really great.
Inquisitor is free and available for Mac's running OS X 10.4 and up.
I have to admit, this is probably the most self-indulgent Time Waster ever (and we can be pretty self-indulgent), but as a huge fan of the too-quickly canceled "Arrested Development," I could not resist.
ADchoose is a stand alone Mac application (though it is written in Python so porting it would just be a matter of compiling against a different binary) that does exactly one thing: it recommends what episode of "Arrested Development" you should watch. That's it. I know, I know, it sounds pretty one-note.
Here's why this has potential: A) Genius idea -- as GOB would say, "Come on!" B) The developer already has a poll asking what users would like to see in the next version, and one of those choices is direct Hulu links. THAT makes a one-note application instantly more useful.
If you are a big fan of the Bluth Company, give ADchoose a try...with club sauce!
Micro Olympics is a simple,yet addictive Flash-based game that brings wasting time and shooting things out of a cannon to a whole new level.
There are three varieties of Micro Olympics, the original, Micro Olympics on Mars and Micro Olympics Christmas. All three have the same guiding principal: shoot your plane, flying saucer or Santa's sled further than your competitor.
You control the height of your launch by clicking on the cannon and stopping at your desired angle. The velocity of the launch is then chosen by when you click on the canon as you see the velocity increase and decrease. Match the right angle with high enough velocity and you're golden.
In each round you are given three opportunities to best your competitors average distance. After each launch session, you are awarded points based on distance, bonus points dependent on other features and money that can be used at the end of each round to buy add-ons that will help you obtain higher distances, either through power-ups or bonus points.
The first few rounds are pretty easy, but after that, I got stuck and had to start playing with power-ups to increase my distance. Thirty minutes later, I finally remembered that I better start writing up this post instead of playing Micro Olympics.
The graphics are pretty hilarious, especially when landing (Christmas Olympics is worth a play just to see how Santa lands in the snow -- adorable). The sounds are fun too, but office workers might want to make sure that you disable the effects and background music or mute your workstation before playing.
Yesterday, social bookmarkng site Delicious (nee del.icio.us) launched a brand new design and a much easier to remember URL. The redesign is quite similar to the preview posted last September, Nothing like waiting until your share holders stage a revolt to get your properties updated, eh Yahoo?
The new design is fluid and clean, with a much nicer display system. It's much easier to switch between your own bookmarks and the "popular" and "most recent" listings. Sorting and searching through tags is also much more efficient and intuitive.
In addition to the new design, of which I'm a fan, the site is also significantly faster, both in terms of search and overall navigation. Although the Firefox 3 plugin is fantastic, the old site design and loading time made it a chore if accessed in Safari or any other browser without a specific plugin or tool.
Only a few months after its last major release, the WordPress crew has just unleashed WordPress 2.6 into the wild. While the changes with this update aren't as visually sweeping as those ushered in with 2.5, but they do add some great new options and optimizations. WordPress encourages users to upgrade, as the old 2.5 branch will no-longer be maintained, and they have outlined the upgrade process here or you can use the fantastic automatic-update plugin.
We've been playing around with 2.6 on our local installs since the first beta was released, and we think this is a very, very solid release.
The WordPress team posted video showing off some of the new features:
Windows 7 cannot come fast enough! The New York Times is reporting that Intel has decided against upgrading its 80,000 employees to Windows Vista. An Intel spokesperson told the Times that Vista is being tested and deployed in certain departments, but not company-wide.
Although the enterprise push to upgrade to Vista has fallen short of expectations, this is a particularly brutal blow. Intel is one of Microsoft's oldest and most important partners; both companies became industry leaders in large part because of that partnership.
Although the Times' Intel source made efforts to say that the decision wasn't about "dissing Microsoft," we doubt that will make Steve Ballmer feel any better. Can you imagine what that conversation is going to sound like?
Despite the lack of widespread corporate adoption, the install base for Windows Vista is 140 million worldwide -- hardly peanuts. Still, with large corporations declining to upgrade their systems, Microsoft has had to extend support for Windows XP through 2014.
A few months back, Download Squad's 
I have to admit, this is probably the most self-indulgent 
Only a few months after its 
