Fire Alarm Companies

Like any dependable sidekick, Google Chrome has proven to be reliable, fast, and easy to work with; so much so, in fact, that we decided to feature the various apps, games, and utilities Chrome has to offer in a weekly series. But to make things easier for all you Chrome fans, we've decided to compile the last 30 weeks worth of posts and bring them to you here, in one huge comprehensive list of reading apps, games, utilities, and more.

Check em' out below, and by all means, let us know what we missed in the comments. Enjoy!

Gaming

Gun Brothers

No matter how much we love Gun Brother's special brand of shoot 'em up gunplay on Android and iOS devices, we couldn't recommend it for use as a Chrome web app. When it was released to the Chrome Web Store several months ago, it was a glitchy, ad-filled mess where slow downs crashes and errors ran rampant. Fortunately, in the time since our last unfortunate encounter with the game, it appears the game's developers have worked out the kinks, finally making us comfortable selecting Gun Brothers as our Chrome Web App of the Week.

Gun Brothers harkens back to an era in video games where your defeat at the hands of overwhelming odds was almost entirely assured--but players were OK with that. Why? Because they were having too much fun to care. In Gun Brothers, players take on the role of a genetically enhanced field operative with a simple mission: Kill anything that moves. Fortunately, the only thing moving other than you are a bunch of criminals bent on taking over the universe. With the help of some huge guns, armor, and a few exploding barrels, it's your job to take 'em out. To aid you on your mission, you'll have the help of an A.I. companion that does a reasonable job of mowing down the competition without doing anything stupid.

To make the game more awesome, the game's development team have made it possible to swap out the A.I. player in favor of one of your pals via Facebook, making an already fun game even better.

Dead Frontier

With brands like Angry Birds and Plants vs. Zombies available in multiple formats on just about every piece of hardware imaginable, it's never been easier for casual gamers to get their goof on anywhere they go. Sadly, those who prefer a bit of blood with their gaming have far fewer outlets available to them, especially when not in front of their home rig, console or handheld. What's an office drone feeling a bit of bloodlust while trapped in his cubicle on a Monday afternoon to do? Might we recommend embarking on a zombie killing rampage with Dead Frontier? As you may have guessed, it's our Chrome Web App of the Week.

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Dead Frontier is a free-to-play massive multiplayer third-person isometric survivalist shooter designed to run in your Chrome browser. After a brief sign up and tutorial process, gamers are dropped in the middle of the sort of zombie apocalypse that we've all come to know and love.

Equipped with a meagre set of weapons and limited ammunition, you are sent out into the dark to explore, loot and kill the undead in the name all in the name of survival. Should you survive long enough, your character will gain the experience and cash needed to become the zombie slaying machine you always knew he could be. Offering an addictive mix of tension, action and familiar game mechanics, for a browser-based game, Dead Frontier offers Chrome users a surprisingly deep experience that'll keep you coming back for more.

SteamBirds Survival

Angry Birds is out for Chrome, and it is indeed glorious, but doesn't playing it with a mouse feel just a little unnatural? We think so. Fortunately, there are a lot of great ways to whittle your productivity down to a splinter. Might we recommend SteamBirds Survival? It's free, fun and just happens to be our Chrome Web App of the Week.

SteamBirds Survival is a turn-based dogfighting game that puts you in the pilot's seat of a World War II fighter plane fighting against all odds to protect England during the Battle of Britain. Outnumbered one thousand to one, you're not expected to live through the war. Rather, it's your responsibility to stall the Luftwaffe long enough for England's citizens to get to safety before the inevitable bombings begin.

Gloomy? You betcha.

Fun? Absolutely!

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The more planes you down, the more copper you'll receive--money that can be used towards the purchase of new, more powerful aircraft with unique abilities. You'll also find that many of the fighters you eighty-six will provide you with power-ups such as additional health, bombs and homing missiles. With varying levels of difficulty, unique play mechanics and enough ways to kill your foes to keep you entertained for hours, SteamBirds Survival is one game that'll keep you coming back time and time again.

Utilities

With so many ways of spending our hard earned dough, it can be difficult to keep tabs on where our cash goes. For small business owners whose work expenses often overlap the cost of day-to day living, things can get even more complicated. If you're serious about getting your financial life straight and keeping it there, Wave Accounting is the right tool for the job. Free, easy to use and insanely powerful, Wave is our Chrome Web App of the Week.

Wave draws power and simplicity of use from the fact that the application is designed to interface with your existing online banking and credit card accounts, making manual entry of expenses and income a thing of the past. Users can choose from a wide variety of banks and credit card vendors, enter their online banking password information and import all of their income and expenses in under five minutes. Once the import is completed, you'll be asked to categorize your expenses using an extensive, but easy to navigate checklist.

As with other accounting software, the more information you provide to Wave, the deeper and more accurate a picture it can paint for you of your financial situation. Data is presented as a bar graph or pie chart, detailing income and expenditures on a month-by-month basis. Additionally, Wave allows users to keep track of invoices, vendors and customers, so you always know who you owe, who owes you, and what the cash coming into or leaving your wallet is for. After using Wave for a month, you'll wonder how you ever got along without it.

LucidChart

Even the most spontaneous of souls, needs to have the facts of a situation laid out for them now and again. No matter whether you're noodling out your annual road trip with the family or preparing a massive presentation of proposed personnel shuffle at the office, you'll want to have the right tools on hand to get the job done as quickly and easily as possible. Thanks to LucidChart, Chrome users can have access to a powerful set of free diagramming tools anywhere with an internet connection.

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LucidChart offers users an easy to use drag-and-drop diagramming interface, well suited to designing even the most byzantine of organizational charts, mind maps or chapter breakouts. Design elements are easily created moved, resized and connected, mimicking many of the UI touches offered by high priced desktop applications such as Microsoft Visio or The Omni Group's Omnigraffle. Speaking of Visio, LucidChart allows for the import of your desktop-side created diagrams, allowing you to take your organizational show on the road.

Don't like an of the elements offered by the app? No problem--LucidChart provides the ability to work with user uploaded images, making it possible to create the custom look you're going for. For those that can't bear the thought of being along, the program also offers the ability to collaborate on a diagramming project with other users. With such a wealth of on screen functionality, off site saves, printing, download and upload capabilities and even HTML 5 support (with a number of features for the iPad and other tablets coming soon) LucidChart is a must-use web app for anyone that takes their diagramming duties seriously.

PadMapper

Moving, we're certain you'll agree, sucks. Packing, organizing the logistics, paying a security deposit on your new digs, cleaning your old pad from top to bottom after you move out and--worst of all--unpacking, has been rated as one of the most stressful gauntlets of experience that life has to offer. For those of us who have moving to a new apartment in their cards, PadMapper, Our Chrome Web App of the Week, does what it can to make the whole process just a little less painful.

Using Google Maps to illustrate the locations of rental listings from popular services such as Apartments.com, Rent.com and Craigslist, PadMapper makes finding a new place to live almost bearable. In order to get started with the web app, users are invited to click on one of the hundreds of North American cities currently supported by PadMapper. Doing so zooms into a map of your selected location, detailing the rental properties currently available. Through the use of easy-to-apply filters such as minimum/maximum rent cost, number of bedrooms and whether or not the property is pet-friendly, the application makes it possible to quickly whittle your rental options down to a manageable level.

With select cities, PadMapper also provides users with the ability to overlay crime statistics, locate nearby mass transit routes and even factor in their potential work commute time as variables for selecting a new home.

 

 

Utilities (contd.)

Autodesk Homestyler

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Updating the look of a single room or your entire home can be an exciting and stressful affair. Exciting because taking the time and spending the coin to pick out new furniture, paint or otherwise tinker with your home can breathe new life into a stale living space. Stressful because, let's face it, sometimes the vision of how a room should look that we see in our head just doesn't work out the way we planned when we get down to putting it all together in the real world. Fortunately, Autodesk Homestyler is here to help you iron the kinks out of your home styling faux pas.

Autodesk Homestyler allows users to create, decorate and redefine their apartment, house, or any other space with drag and drop simplicity. Room sizes, wall lengths and angles can all be tweaked with nothing more than a few clicks of a mouse. Once the size and shape of your space is up to snuff, Homestyler makes it easy to try out decorating options, furniture arrangements, and various floor and wall palettes. Once you have your space's colors and layout down pat, the web app allows you to kick your design into 3D to give you a bit of perspective of how your creation will look should you ever decide to bring it into meatspace.

If you happen to create a design that you'd like to follow through on, it can be saved for later (saving requires you sign up for a free user account), printed, exported as an image file or sent to a number of social networks.

AutoCAD

There's a good number of drawing and design programs available through the Chrome Web Store. Most of them will let you knock out awkward looking stick-figure sketches or primitive landscape images using features similar to those we've enjoyed/loathed in MS Paint over the years. Some offer more complex features, such as layering and various virtual paint brushes. which most of us end up using to knock out awkward stick-figure sketches or primitive landscape images. If you want to draw something useful--the blueprints for your next house, for example--there's only one Web App that'll do: AutoCAD WS. It's a Web App with so many awesome features and such rich functionality that we had to make it our Chrome Web App of the week.

Designed with designers, architects and engineers in mind, AutoCAD WS brings a startling number of features previously found only in AutoCAD's legendary desktop design software to a free, relatively easy to use web-based application. Thanks to AutoCAD WS, designers can ply their trade on any computer rocking Chrome.

The App offers deep design functionality, automatic versioned back-ups, the ability to upload files from a desktop CAD program and tools for real-time multi-user collaboration. While it doesn't have the guts to replace a dedicated piece of CAD software, AutoCAD WS is a compelling online offering that no serious CAD user with a need to work on the go should overlook.

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Offline Google Mail

While eating pizza on the moon may still be a ways off and there's still no cure for cancer, these are nonetheless magical times, my friends. We are living in an era where WiFi is available on airplanes, phone calls can be made from the summit of a mountain and revolutions are stoked with 140 characters or less. Most amazing of all, Google's finally got their act together and given us the ability to work with our Gmail accounts without being connected to the internet, thanks to Offline Google Mail, our Chrome Web App of the Week.

Drawing it's two-paned good looks from Gmail's tablet interface, Offline Google Mail not only makes it possible to tinker with your Gmail with or without a connection to the interwebz, it does it with style. Intuitive and easy to navigate, this is Gmail as it should be, and after using it for a little under a week, we seriously hope that Google considers implementing the app's GUI for use with its online cousin as well. That said, all those good looks don't count for anything unless the web application's functionality is up to snuff. Fortunately, it is.

Offline Google Mail allows users to access their Gmail accounts, read their mail, search their account's archives, respond to and even forward messages all without an internet connection. Once your computer's back in touch with the Web? Boom. All of the changes you made offline will be uploaded and reflected in your online Google account.

Quick Note

Cloud-based services such as Dropbox, SugarSync and Box simplify our lives by making even our most complex files obtainable with push button simplicity anywhere there's an internet connection. Google Docs boils this convenience down even further by combining a robust document creation application and file syncing into one free-to-use solution. But to get down to the nitty-gritty essence of cloud-based note taking, we'd like to suggest you give Quick Note a try--it's our Chrome Web App of the Week.

Quick Note's interface will feel like an old friend to anyone that's every used the iPad's Notepad interface to jot down and retain data. Designed for use within Chrome, Diigo has provided users with an easy to navigate two-paned interface: One pane to take notes in, another pane to create, search for and select notes from. Nothing could be simpler. After installing the application, users are invited to create a Diigo account or use their Google credentials to log into the company's servers. Doing so allows users to sync their Quick Note files to any machine rocking Google's Chrome browser such as Android phones or even an iPad.

In addition to text input, Quick Note also allows for the drag-and-drop addition of images to any note file, making it a great option for individuals that want to take their note taking to the clouds without the complexity or deep feature set of a service such as Evernote. What's more, Diigo has mentioned that they have plans to integrate Quick Note with a number of online services, giving this already great web app a very bright future indeed.

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Utilities (contd.)

Pixlr-o-matic

Since it first popped up in the iTunes App Store, Instagram has taken the smartphone photographic world by storm. Currently being rocked by more than 10 million users, the free photo editing app allows users to give their iPhone photos a warm vintage look via the use of a number of filters, making mundane image captures a little bit more extraordinary. Wait there's more! Once you've processed your photos, you can share them on a wide variety of services, such as Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr! Sounds good right? If you're an Android phone user, take heart: Instagram will be coming to your handset... eventually. Until then, we can be content to use pixlr-o-matic, our Chrome Web App of the Week.

Free and easy to use, pixlr-o-matic provides PC users with much of the same functionality that's made Instagram all the rage with Apple fanboys. Users of the web app are invited to take a photo with their webcam or to upload an image for editing from their desktop. Once they've selected an image to work with, users face the daunting task of choosing which photo filter to use. Once you've created your masterpiece, you'll have be presented with the option to either upload your freshly edited image to pixlr's servers or download it to your desk top.

Oh, and should opening up Chrome to tinker with your pictures prove too much for you, the application's developers have also cooked up downloadable and Facebook-bound iterations of the app.

Murdoch Block

There's a lot to hate about Rupert Murdoch's media empire these days. The allegations leveled against what was once one of the mogul's flagship publications run the gauntlet from unethical to disgusting, dragging journalism through the mud all along the way. Illegally tapping telephones in the name of an outrageous headline? Bribing law enforcement officials? Dead whistleblowers? It's all so seedy and sordid. If you're of a mind to protest all of this dire hullaballoo, boycotting Murdoch-owned publications and television stations is a good start, but to do it right, you'll want to take the fight online as well. To make your online NewsCorp as easy a go as possible, the smart money's on Murdoch Block, our Browser Extension of the Week.

While it's sadly only available at this time to Chrome users, Murdoch Block is just what the doctor ordered. Once installed, the extension effectively blocks access to NewsCorp's most popular news-centric websites. Additional Murdoch sites, such as Hulu and AllThingsD can easily be added to your block list as well, thanks to Murdoch Blocker's user-friendly options page available via Chrome's Extensions menu.

For anyone that takes their online boycotting or protesting seriously, this is one extension that you'll want to at your disposal.

Chrome Tasks

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As anyone who's used a computer will tell you, a service or application's usability is directly influenced by its accessibility. In other words, if you can't get to it, you're not going to use it. Google in particular has learned this lesson well. Their popular Google Calendar and Gmail services, which were once an online-only affair, were recently given a load of offline functionality by the Mountain View based company, making countless users around the interwebz very happy puppies indeed. Unfortunately, since Google hasn't gotten around to giving us the same offline awesomeness with Google Tasks, a third-party developer has taken it upon himself to make using Google's already very useful product just a little bit easier.

Tasks is a Chrome browser extension that allows users to peruse, add, and check off items from their Google Task list from their browser's navigation bar. So long as you've got a browser window open, you'll have access to your tasks through a minimal or full sized Google Tasks interface designed to suit your needs no matter how much or how little you've got to keep track of.

For those of you out there who prefer their task management be left to other online services such as Remember the Milk or Toodledo, Tasks has you covered. Tasks offers full support for Remember the Milk users, and experimental support for other online task management services as well. Just right click on the extension, select options, and input your credentials. Nothing could be easier.

Remember the Milk

Having your Google Calendar and Gmail available for use everywhere you go is a productivity godsend (or a curse, depending on how you look at it), making it possible to stay in touch and plot out your life no matter where you roam. That said, both of Google's web applications lack anything even close to a useable task management system baked into their interfaces. Fortunately, Remember The Milk's got a solution to this problem, and we feel it's slick enough to be our Browser Extension of the Week.

Remember The Milk for Gmail allows users of Remember The Milk's incredibly versatile online task management service to access their task list through their Gmail interface in Chrome or Firefox. In order to use the extension, you'll need to have a Remember The Milk Account. The good news is that getting one doesn't cost a thing. After signing up for an account and adding the extension to your browser, navigate to your Gmail interface and boom--you'll find email and task management has been rolled into one big awesome mashup. Remember The Milk for Gmail automatically syncs with your RTM account, allowing you to review, edit and add new tasks from inside of your Gmail interface.

It's even possible to link tasks to specific pieces of mail, Google Calendar events, and Google Contacts. If at any time you decide that you can't bear the thought of how many tasks are awaiting your attention, just click the left side of the Remember The Milk for Gmail interface to tuck it away, out of sight out of mind.

 

 

Utilities (contd.)

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Google +1

With so many ways to socialize online, there's no excuse for being a digital hermit these days. Facebook now offers the ability to follow feeds, Twitter's still cranking out the tweets and instant messaging just keeps on keeping on. Now that Google+ has made the move from invite-only exclusivity to being a social media network that anyone can join, the time seems right to declare Google +1 Button our extension of the week.

In a sea of third-party Google+ extension options, Google +1 Button for Chrome is unique in the fact that it was cooked up by the web-minded folks from Mountain View. Once downloaded and installed to your browser, Google +1 Button is good to go, as chances are, you'll have signed into the Chrome Web Store with the same account as you rock Google+ with. In the off chance that your primary account isn't linked to Google+ (individuals with a Google Apps account, for example), the extension will demand that you sign into a Google+ account before it can be used for the first time. Once you're good to go, giving a +1 to any page you frequent is as simple as clicking a button in your browser's navigation bar.

In addition to allowing you to voice your approval for a page, the extension also shows how many other users have given a thumbs up to the site you're viewing. Best of all, should any site you've given a +1 to fall out of your good graces, rescinding approval is as easy as pushing the same button you used to hand it out in the first place.

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