I wanted to point out a couple resources that two of my excellent readers recommended in the hopes that they will be useful to you.
Chris from AB Web Design says the best tool he has found for color sampling is Pixie. It’s a tiny little program that tells you what the hex, RGB, HTML, CMYK and HSV values are for a particular color. You simply hold your mouse over the color you want.
I do this a lot of times when I see a color in a photo or on a website that I love. Now, instead of opening up Fireworks (which takes an eternity on my piece of crap machine) to find out what the hex value is, I can open up Pixie instantly and find out. Very handy.
Jack from ZedProMarketing.com uses Treepad. I haven’t used it too much yet but I can see it’s like Notepad (for keeping text files) but with a lot more features. Plus it is a much smaller program than OpenOffice or MS Office so it’s much easier to load and keep running while you’re working on other things.
For bloggers and/or web designers who have computers that are lacking in speed and memory (like mine!), these two programs are great options. Thanks for the recommendations guys!
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I use a program called FastStone Capture which allows you to screen capture anything on your computer and also has a built in function to determine colors of any pixel.
Another useful way to use it is when you want to know how big something can be. So for example, if I wanted to know how wide I could make a picture and not have it run off and out of the content area of my blog, I can take a quick snapshot of my content area and look at the dimensions of the screenshot.
I probably use that more than the screen capture function.
Twitter Comment
[link to post] RT @cassiegermsheid: “Two light-weight programs for bloggers and web designers”
– Posted using Chat Catcher
@John – Yeah, lightweight screen capture tools are great. Personally, I prefer ScreenHunter (by Wisdom Software).
It’s free for personal and business use, though they do offer paid versions (Plus and Pro) that provide additional features. However, the free version is good enough as far as I’m concerned.
link: http://wisdom-soft.com/products/screenhunter_free.htm
@Cassie – I think you will find this interesting (grats!): http://www.websitegrader.com/wsgid/3450929/default.aspx
I am using EditPad as a text editor. It is truly a great Windows text editor with lots of features, incl. Unlimited Tabs, and a nice History-Reopen feature. It is free or you can buy upgraded Pro version too
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That’s very cool John. I’ve been looking for something like that for a long time now. Thanks!
@Chris – Awesome, thanks!
I guess I’ve got some more work to do
@Dagmar – That’s a great resource, thanks for sharing!
Another good text editor for people like us (people who toy with their blogs) is EditPlus. It highlights code and everything. It’s free to try for 30 days and costs $35.
Not too expensive for something you’ll use all the time.
@John – Thanks
I’ve got a pretty good list going now of text editors. Now to decide which one is best!
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