Rhythmic games are “the shit” these days. After Singstar, games like Guitar Hero and Rock Band are now dominating the charts. It’s the retro days all over again.

Of course, for those of us who don’t feel like making the music but like experiencing it, we can trace our steps to the game that started it all: Dance Dance Revolution.

As there are many PC clones of Guitar Hero, like Frets on Fire and JamLegend, it’s not a surprise to find PC adaptations of DDR as well. However, so far we only reviewed rhythmic online flash games and missed some of the bigger fish in these waters.

Today, we’ll show you one of, if not the most popular rhythmic dance games on the block. You better tie those shoelaces, because we’re getting ready for a dance battle.

DISCLAIMER - Playing these games will most probably not make you a great dancer. Even more so, if you are Michael Jackson’s offspring, you’d do better hitting the club. Burning some calories, you know.
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Steve Jobs once said that Microsoft’s products lack “taste”. At the moment, it started a war between Windows and Mac fanboys. But to many people, that statement was justified – OS X was considerably ahead of Windows from a design and usability standpoint.

Today, you can see that Microsoft has decided to give a lot more attention to the design of its products. Windows 7 is a testament to that endeavor. It does sadden me that the majority of the UI improvements are derivations or adaptations instead of innovations.

Safari 4 hasn’t suffered radical changes since the beta version – except maybe for the tabs issue which generated a considerable amount of uproar – but it did a fantastic job of polishing rough edges. Safari 4 is fast, usable and has taste.

Let’s dig in a little deeper, shall we?
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Check out some of the latest MakeUseOf discoveries. All listed websites are FREE (or come with a decent free account option). No trials or buy-to-use craplets. For more cool websites and web app reviews subscribe to MakeUseOf Directory.

(1) Colnect - Social network for collectors and the place for managing personal collections (stamps, coins, phonecards etc.) online. The site has variety of collectible catalogs submitted and updated by collectors community. It is based on a wiki model, which means anyone can edit and update collectible catalogs, and as compared to printed catalogs, Colnect contains more up to date information on collectibles. Read more: Colnect: Site For Sharing & Managing Collections Online
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A lot of us here at MakeUseOf use Skype to get in touch with each other. Skype, for those who may not know, is a Voice-over-Internet Protocol (VoIP) service which allows unlimited free calls between users using the desktop, mobile or iPhone application.

If you pay for Skype credit, you can call out from Skype on your computer to normal phones (wireless or landline) at a discounted rate. Also, for an additional cost, you may get a “Skype-In” phone number, which is essentially a Skype number disguised as a local land line, so that all calls to that number will be forwarded to your Skype account, allowing you to take the call anywhere and on any computer with Skype installed. This benefits the caller — if Skype is not available, he/she can always contact you simply by dialing a local number.

It’s a cool thing to have, but outside of this site’s staff I don’t have much use for the service (many of my friends are still using AIM for goodness’ sake). That changed today when I signed up for phone numbers to forward calls to my Skype account, and unlike the Skype-In service, they didn’t cost me a thing.

So, how to get a Skype phone number?

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As a writer, I often stuck on a topic. Getting ideas is one thing, turning the ideas into a “readable and understandable” piece of work is another. I found that one of the best ways to expand and organize ideas is by mindmapping.

For those who are unfamiliar with the concept, here’s the quick description of ‘mindmap‘ quoted from Wikipedia:

A mind map is a diagram used to represent words, ideas, tasks, or other items linked to and arranged around a central key word or idea. Mind maps are used to generate, visualize, structure, and classify ideas, and as an aid in study, organization, problem solving, decision making, and writing.

Basically, here’s what happen in the process of mindmapping: you start with a main topic or idea as the center of focus, then expand the ideas with related points through branches - or children as some people prefer to call them. Each of these children could also be expanded to grand children, great grand children, and so on. If the main idea is too general, you can pick one of the children to focus on.

Personally, I think nothing beats a large piece of paper and several color pencils for mindmapping, but there’s also nothing wrong about doing the process on your Mac. Especially if you have large monitor, and unreadable handwriting

Here are three free, simple idea mapping software for Mac.

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One of the most nerve-wrecking times in a guy’s life is the day he finds someone that he realizes he actually wants to marry, and he needs to get up the nerve to ask her. If you’ve racked your brain for creative ways to ask someone to marry you, I’m here today to offer you a few suggestions that may help.

It goes without saying that these will all be Internet-based, so they’re perfect for the girlfriend who’s obsessed with the Internet - the one who can’t stop checking her Facebook account or surfing YouTube videos. These are also the sort of techniques that you can use to ask a girl to marry you when you’re in a long distance relationship, or maybe if you’re in the military and serving in a foreign country. Don’t let distance stop you. The following geeky tips will get her attention and they may even make her cry, but most importantly, they will also make her say “yes.”

How to Ask Someone to Marry You on the Internet (And Get Them to Say Yes!)

Let’s face it, it’s a web 2.0 world. The days of kneeling on one knee beside a restaurant table are long gone. Today, you’ve got text messages, instant messaging and email. Guys today need to be fresh and creative with their proposal ideas to capture the hearts of that special girl. If you’re one of those guys who have been thinking about “popping the question” for quite some time - stop thinking about it and start living! Ask her to marry you using the many web technologies that are now at your disposal.
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Have you ever wanted to make your FireFox smarter?

I am talking about adding functionality to our favorite browser that well, should have been there from the get go. Well now, here is an awesome download called SmarterFox. It adds a bunch of new options to your already pretty awesome browser. First off, it allows you to search different search engines with text that you highlight via a pop-up bubble.

It adds functionality to Wikipedia by adding a related-articles box, among other things. One of my favorite features is its ability to change a plain text link into a working URL. The plug-in was created by Yongq.

To start, you would visit https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/9825 and install the add-on to your FireFox browser.
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Sharing files on a network generally requires some amount of configuration, know-how and time. Things get even geekier when you have different machines running different operating systems. Damien showed you how to use Giver back in March. There is however, a simpler solution if you don’t want to go through all the steps of setting up a share. Enter Meiga.

Meiga is one of the best file sharing programs to share files across your network or over the Internet. Meiga is available for Linux (you can access files from other operating systems as well). Download the deb packages for Meiga from here. If you use other non-debian based distributions, you would have to compile from source.

Once installed, fire up the GUI. (Applications > Internet > Meiga in Ubuntu). You would be greeted by a minimalist window like this.

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Check out some of the latest MakeUseOf discoveries. All listed websites are FREE (or come with a decent free account option). No trials or buy-to-use craplets. For more cool websites and web app reviews subscribe to MakeUseOf Directory.

(1) YouFlow - Online service that lets search and browse YouTube with a stylish image flow interface and most importantly, play multiple videos in one browser. You can open and play as many videos as you like and easily scale them to your desired size . Read more: YouFlow: Browse YouTube & Watch Multiple Videos At Once
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Good evening, Ladies and Gents,

Allow me to re-introduce myself, my name is Mike, also (hopefully) known in the online community as Commodore 64 or C64 for short. I have spent the last 12 years, since Photoshop 5.5, exploring the many realms of this staple of the graphic designer’s diet. Aside from the usual plethora of features, Photoshop offers tools for anyone ranging from budding photographer to astrononomer.

Throughout the years, I’ve known Photoshop to be ultra powerful in the pathing arena. The pathing tool, or pen tool, might very well be the most powerful tool in the Adobe arsenal mainly because of its origins.

I’ll keep this history lesson brief: The idea behind the pen tool, or less commonly known as the Bezier tool (pictured above) is that geometric constants can be used to create flowing, curvacious lines and designs. It was because of this tool, developed by Pierre Bézier in 1962 and then put to work in the auto manufacturing industry, came about the advent of curvy, smooth cars rather than the Caprice Classics of the day. Fast forward to 2009 - Adobe has put Beziers mathematic principles to good use in many of it’s previous versions of Photoshop and Illustrator up until today.

I use the pen tool primarily to make quick, smooth, profesh cutouts of anything ranging from a bikini model with hair blowing in the wind to a tree with a multitude of branches (in combination with some color specific selections).

Today, we’ll concentrate on pathing out a simple object from its background, let’s say a freshly cut orange with shadows on a white surface:
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