As you might guess from the name of our blog, we download a LOT of software, and it's a little scary to contemplate how much bandwidth we collectively use every day. So, trying to imagine a time when we felt like a dial-up connection would suit our needs is pretty difficult. But that's exactly how 62% of U.S. dialup users feel, according to a new study from the Pew Internet and American Life project.
The economy isn't doing so hot these days, so you'd think that the additional cost of a high-speed connection would be the deciding factor for these folks, but it turns out that only a third of them cited cost as their reason for sticking with dial-up. 19% gave the mystifying answer that nothing -- not even a huge decrease in the cost -- would make them give up their dial-up. The study posited that they just don't spend enough time online to need it.
That's okay. We're not about to pass judgment on your taste in HTML editors, or your strange penchant for self-inflicted pain. And while we may never use the tweezers in your house, we will gladly point you in the direction of alternative HTML editors.
This week we'll take a look at Screem and Amaya in brief. These two editors are frequently found in distribution repositories (and are also, of course, available as source code). Both of these editors have a very different take on what their users hope to accomplish with them. We hope at least a few have earned your badges of dorkdom, and are presently happily pondering the irony of applications that do the same thing to reach different ends.
Whether you like the idea of handcoding growing the hair on your chest (as opposed to your nostrils), the moral highground of browsing and coding with standards compliance, we've got you covered.
Once upon a time, letting people know what you were up to online was simple. You'd just point your friends toward your blog, LiveJournal page, or MySpace where you posted all of your latest musing on life. But if you're an active netizen, odds are your social activity is spread out across a half dozen or more sites, ranging from YouTube to del.icio.us. Swurl is a new service that helps bring all of your status updates, bookmarks, watched videos and other activity together.
If Swurl sounds a bit like FriendFeed, it kind of is. Both services let you gather all of your social networking activity in one place. But Swurl is a lot prettier and more customizable. You can think of it almost as a meta-blog. If you have a blog on Blogger or WordPress, you can configure Swurl to display all of your latest posts in blog-like format. But it will also show your Twitter and Facebook status updates and other activity in chronological order. Or you can hit the search box to search all of your sites.
Anyone can comment on an item that shows up on your Swurl page just by hovering their mouse near the bottom of an update. And you can use Swurl as something of a start page by hitting the Friends tab to see what your contacts have been up to. There's also a nifty timeline view that shows your updates plotted out on a calendar.
Swurl was developed by Ryan Sit, the same guy who brought us Listpic, an awesome interface for browsing online classified sites.
The premise is simple, you go through a series of days and launch HedgeHogs with a nice launcher gear, much like you would water balloons. Except these aren't balloons, these are dangerous little beasts called HedgeHogs. it's not quite Sonic, but we think it's way more fun.
The name of the game is to only get distance, but to grab money in the air while your HedgeHog flies.
The controls are quite easy, and you can play in fullscreen mode too. Just don't do it at work, because we can't be held responsible for having "HedgeHog Screwoff" on your permanent record. But that would be pretty schweet though.
You can dig in and tweak your thrusts left or right, and as you go through the days, your skills will get better and the stakes will get higher. Collect money, buy better rockets, some stylish goggles, and even a parachute to get better scores.
The music is addictive too.
So launch your hog and share your scores in the comments.
Memeo's new Share application is designed to make the process of sending high-resolution photos a little easier, by sending them directly to another users desktop or putting them in an RSS feed they can look at in iPhoto.
The application, which is currently in beta, isn't meant to be a substitute for any photo sharing application you might currently be using, although photos shared using Memeo Share can also automatically upload photos to your Facebook account. Share is instead designed for sharing high-resolution photos and video with small groups or family and friends without having to send individual emails containing each item due to their size. Those who receive your photos can then decide what photos they want, and print out pictures they like at a quality resolution.
Memeo Share is offering a free lifetime use for the first 1,000 people to sign up for the beta with the public preview limited to 10,000 total sign ups. Get yours here.
Remember, that whole Firefox download day thing that we got so amped up about? Us too.
Remember when their servers screwed the pooch for most of "Download Day"? Us too.
How about that vulnerability that affected all 8 zillion of us who downloaded version 3? Yep, we remember that too.
Now you can put all those rough memories behind and sleep easy. Today, Mozilla "officially" announcedsetting the record, with 8,002,530 downloads on the release day of Firefox 3. It's fair to point out that, nothing was broken here... this was a new record, hence "setting" and not "breaking".
Will you remember Mozilla set the Guinness World Record for the most software downloads in 24 hours on June 18th, 2008? Neither will we.
But congrats on still being #2 Firefox. Let us know when that changes and we'll jump around and party like it's 2035!
Anyone who has gained super powers through radiation exposure, cosmic rays, or scientific experimentation gone wrong knows how painfully difficult it can be to conceal your identity after the fact. Fortunately, there's a web site that will help you make the process much, much simpler.
Fake Name Generator does so much more than what its moniker implies. Not only will it create a (usually) convincing new name, but it'll also give you a corresponding address, phone number, mother's maiden name, phone number - even a social security and visa number. Though we're not entirely sure it's a good idea to go passing those around.
The clever engine will even piece together an email address and domain name for you AND check to see if they're available. Now that's useful. If you're going for a safe, secondary online identity you may as well have a convincing email to go along with it.
At last we're safe to use our powers for good without fear of being discovered by our nemeses!
If you listen to a ton of music and the word "scrobble" is part of your vocabulary, you'll get a kick out of Lastgraph. It's a service that generates interesting visual representations of your Last.fm listening history. You can view a sweet line graph of your listening to a given artist, or you can generate some snazzy posters of your overall listening.
The posters are pretty huge and take quite a while to render, but you can actually print them out as some stylish, informative wall art. If you don't need something that huge, there's also a smaller version available through the quick timeline feature. You can also export your data as an Excel file, a CSV or JSON.
Sure, Wikipedia may be one of the best places on the internet to find information on just about anything in a hurry, but what about when you're stuck in an elevator during a blackout and you can't remember who wrote The Republic? Relax! Pocket Wikipedia provides quick access to important articles offline - and on just about any kind of device.
The download includes about 24,000 images and over 14 million words covering about 5,000 articles. Each one has been carefully hand-picked from Wikipedia's massive repository of community-assembled knowledge to avoid some of the more important omissions from Wikipedia's own Cd-Rom version Pocket Wikipedia is currently available for Windows, Linux, and PocketPC only.
Want it? Keep in mind the old adage "All good things come to those who wait." None of the mirrors we found were all that fast, but it's too good a download to ignore.
Cocoalicious is a really slick -- but, unfortunately, Mac-only -- dedicated browser for your Del.icio.us bookmarks. If you're a bookmarking junkie, and you have way more sites saved to Del.icio.us than you could ever hope to keep track of, this could be an ideal solution for you. It's laid out a bit like Apple Mail, with your tags running down the left side, your bookmarks on top, and a browser pane at the bottom.
You can put bookmarks directly into Cocoalicious -- it syncs with your Del.icio.us account -- or use the bookmarklet to add stuff to Cocoalicious straight from your browser. This way you can take advantage of autocompletion, tagging by dragging, and other features that make Del.icio.us easier. Cocoalicious also supports Spotlight, so you can search for your bookmarks straight from the Finder!
We'll let you in on a little secret: There are a ton of music videos and live performances on YouTube. What? You knew that? Well, then you also probably know how hard it can be to find every song on an album and play it in order. YouTube is really designed for searching for videos one at a time. But Jogli helps organize the mess.
Jogli is basically a search engine and music video player. Search for an artist and Jogli will bring up a list of possible results. Click an artist name and you'll find a list of albums. Click an album and you'll be presented with a list of songs. In many cases not each song is clickable, but many are.
When you hit the play button, a YouTube video will start playing in the corner. But you can also queue up additional songs and even search for new songs without stopping your recording. Jogli is a lot like MyStrands, another site we covered earlier this year. But the way Jogli organizes songs by artist and album sets it apart from the competition.
Imagine you had a drawing program in which you couldn't draw what you wanted because each tool had a mind of its own. Also imagine you couldn't select the colors to use as it would decide it for you. If this is your idea for a drawing program then you should definitely check out bomomo.
In all fairness, bomomo never claimed to replace any drawing program you may be already be using. Actually, it never claims to be anything really. Maybe its just a web based application that just draws shapes in pastel like colors.
Using bomomo is pretty self explanatory. Select an available brush/tool and start moving your mouse around while holding your button to draw. Shapes are random so don't expect to be able to draw right angles or parallel lines, just think organic.
Bomomo might be used more for the creation of abstract art instead of drafting up plans for a multi story building so that may explain the hours of frustration we had while trying to use the program. Then again we're not really art experts as we think the velvet picture of dogs playing poker is a classic.
RealNetworks has launched a DRM-free MP3 music store. The Rhapsody MP3 store has music from all four major labels, with over 5 million tracks available for download. Most songs are priced at 99 cents, and most albums cost $9.99. That's about the same price that Apple charges for DRM-free AAC audio files, but a bit more than Amazon MP3 charges for many songs and albums.
All songs will be encoded at 256kbps, and will be playable on any device that can handle MP3 audio. RealNetworks isn't killing off its DRM-restricted music service, but rather, plans to have the two services peacefully coexist. You can pay $12.99 a month to stream unlimited music to your computer, or you can pay per download to save songs that you can play forever.
RealNetworks is also rolling out a service that will let Verizon Wireless customers download music for their handsets. For $15 a month, users will be able to download an unlimited number of songs (with DRM) on a Windows PC and sync those songs with their cellphone. Currently seven handsets are supported, with several more coming soon.
The Rhapsody MP3 store is offering a $10 credit to the first 100,000 customers who purchase an album by July 4th. You need to sign up for an account and fork over your credit card information to qualify. But hey, free music, right?
As you might guess from the name of our blog, we download a LOT of software, and it's a little scary to contemplate how much bandwidth we collectively use every day. So, trying to imagine a time when we felt like a dial-up connection would suit our needs is pretty difficult. But that's exactly how 62% of U.S. dialup users feel, according to a new study from the Pew Internet and American Life project. 
Maybe you've 
Launching stuff is cool, and doing so in a flash game online is even cooler. 
Cocoalicious
