snipes

A spin-off of the original Contract Killer hit, Contract Killer: Zombies ups the ante by dropping you smack dab in the middle of an undead apocalypse. Fans of the original hit should recognize both the format of the game and the interface.

For those unfamiliar with the original, its controls are simple. Contract Killer is a first-person shooter. You swipe around the screen to look for zombies and set your sights, and tap the fire button to trigger your firearm. There's also a quick-switch button that allows you to swap between your primary and secondary weapons.

The structure of … Read more

Contract Killer puts you in the shoes of a master sniper for hire. Work your contacts, look for missions, and complete hits in order to gain new weapons, experience points, and money. Become a good enough killer, and you might be able to climb your way to the top of the underworld ladder.

Sniping is simple. Just tap and drag around the scene to find your target. Once you find him, tap the scope button to zoom in, drag around to adjust your crosshairs, and fire away. Aim for the head for an instant kill. But watch out, because crime … Read more

Grizzled eBay veterans know all too well that the action on any auction doesn't heat up until the last few minutes. Bidding wars can be won and lost by who had the fastest click--or the highest auto-bid. To aid in this nail-biting process is Snipe Swipe, a "sniping" tool with a new Firefox add-on that does the bidding for you at the very last possible second.

Once installed you'll get a new button on any auction page that lets you set it to be sniped. After you've done this, it gets flagged in Snipe Swipe'… Read more

Monday's New York Times highlights one of my growing pet peeves: increasingly invasive on-screen ads and information that are invading all manner of TV programs. The article ("As the Fall Season Arrives, TV Screens Get More Cluttered") explores some of the supposed reasons behind the trend, which runs the gamut from "bugs" (channel logos) and on-screen data dumps (news and financial market tickers, scoreboards), to--in my opinion, the top annoyance--"snipes" (animated ads, for either upcoming programs or sponsored products).

On news, financial, and sports programming, I'm a lot more forgiving of … Read more

SportSnipe is a new single-page aggregator the likes of Original Signal, PopUrls, and others, although it's focused specifically on sports feeds from all over the world. Users can browse through headlines and video thumbnails for various leagues, genres, and teams. Like Original Signal, SportSnipe has the option to hover over any headline to read the first few lines of the story, along with a comment button that lets registered users add their own commentary to the story--separate of the parent site.

The service claims to pull its headlines from over 1,300 different sports feeds. It also doubles as a regular old build-it-yourself feed aggregator similar to Netvibes and PageFlakes, albeit a little less flashy. Users can add RSS feeds as either text or video feeds. The video feed catcher is especially cool and gives you a little thumbnail for each clip. If you do this with a text feed, you won't get anything but a black box.

SportSnipe has a few ways to sort and share content. You can bookmark pages you'd like to share with others through a variety of social bookmarking sites. You can also turn off comments and hover over previews. With a quick toggle you can rearrange the feed boxes and extend the feeds to see more than just a few headlines. There are also embed codes for putting your feeds on a blog, Web site, or social networking profile (which I've done to the right.)

In many ways, SportSnipe isn't very original as a single-page aggregator. Pageflakes and Netvibes do a much better job with their presentation, and the resemblance to Popurls and Original Signal is unquestionable. However, SportSnipe has a really great directory of sports feeds that aggregate quickly and are far more comprehensive than what Original Signal offers. The video feed implementation is a nice touch as well.

More screens after the jump. … Read more