Wayne Priestley

Pipette is a handy utility for digital artists and web designers.
It allows you to quickly and easily grab the colour of any pixel on the screen and copy it in hex format, as used in CSS files, or in paint programs, such as Adobe Photoshop.

Pipette is a very easy to use, lightweight application – in keeping with Unix philosophy it does one thing and does it well.

And best of all, Pipette is completely FREE!

I’ve been using this app for a couple of days now and finding it very handy, if your doing any sort of design download, it and give it a try.

After a thread started by Western on the ScreenCastsOnline forum listing the app’s he had installed on his Mac and asking others what they had installed, I thought I’d share the contents of my application folder with you.

Full Size image Here

Out of this list there are a few app’s that I used every day and couldn’t do without:

• 1Password This is the ultimate password manager application.

• Aperture 2 Apples premier Photo management application.

• DropBox Free online storage and sync application.

• iTunes Music player and orginizer.

• iWork 09 Apples office applications, Pages, Numbers, Keynote.

• iLife 09 Apples Photo, Movie, DVD creation and web design tools.

• LaunchBar Indespensible application launcher packed with features.

• Liquid CD CD and DVD burning made easy.

• Mail Apples Mail application.

• Picturesque Add shadows, reflections and more to images.

• Scribblet Menu bar note taking application.

• ShoveBox Another menu bar note taking application.

• Skitch Screen capture application.

• Speed Download Download manager.

• Spotify Online music application.

• TextExpander Use shortcut keys to save typing those repetitive words.

• Things Organize your life.

• Twitterrific Twitter Mac client.

• You Control iTunes Control iTunes from your menu bar.

Most of the other apps I would use weekly and the rest are used only when whatever I’m doing requires them to be open.

Here is the second AppleScript I’ve created.

It’s an image manipulation script that will resize an image to 200 pixels in length, keeping the hight in proportion.

How it works:

This file has been saved as a Application bundle Droplet.
You place this application on your desktop or within easy reach of where you work with your images.

The reason for this is that you must drag the image or images (this script has been written to process multiple images) onto the icon and the script will process the images and resize them for you all at once.

WARNING! This script WILL overwrite the images dropped onto it.

Best practice if you want to keep the original image’s would be to duplicate the them and place those duplicates onto the script droplet.

Please feel free to download the script.

You may change it, if you’re not comfortable doing that then mail me and I can modify it to convert images to a different size for you.

Resize to 200.zip

Trying to have a video conversation with someone on a PC when your on a Mac isn’t as easy as you’d think.

I spent a few hours on this problem to help my daughter talk to her friends on their PC’s from her Mac.

After Googling, and spending a few hours searching through the results and going to links suggested by Twitter users I ended up looking at aMSN, after a recommendation by @SwitchMac.

I was a little confused at first, thinking he was talking about MSN for Mac.
After heading over to their site I downloaded the software and installed it on her Mac.

It’s not the fastest messenger app, nor is it the best looking UI, but it’s not even up to version 1 yet so give it a little time and there should be some nice improvements such as audio conversations.

After a few minutes it was installed and she was up and running.
Starting a video chat was straight forward once she found a friend willing to have a video chat.

I was surprised that aMSN hasn’t been blogged about a little more as it’s a very simple way of Video chatting with Pc users.

It has some plugins available along with some different skins so you can customize the look to the way you like.

So I’m giving Blogo a trial to see if I prefer it to Mars Edit.

I’ll be using both applications for the same purpose obviously so deciding which has the features I need without a lot of extra stuff is the first thing I’ll be looking for.

Second is going to be the price, I don’t think there is much difference here but every penny counts.

One of the main things is going to be how my posts appear once published.

So posting a few images, links and other media will be my first task.

First thoughts are I like the UI of Mars Edit compared to Blogo, where as Blogo is easier to deal with as it has only one window open.

Over the weekend my Logitech VX Revolution mouse arrived.
I’m impressed with the feel of the mouse in my hand, It’s way more comfortable than the ordinary shaped mice I have used in the past.

The scroll wheel feels a little cheap and plastic when scrolling with the ratchet type feel scroll enabled.

Being able to store the dongle into the mouse for safe keeping is a nice little feature, as is the way the mouse switches on when you eject the dongle from within the body of the mouse to start using it.

I haven’t installed the Logitech software I was supplied with the mouse yet as a few people recommended SteerMouse as the best 3rd party application to use.

I’ve installed SteerMouse and have been customizing some of the Logitech buttons to my applications, one of the reasons I installed SteerMouse was to be able to assign specific buttons on the mouse to do different things depending on which application I was using.

So on the whole I am pleased with, and enjoying the combination of VX Revolution and SteerMouse…

APART… from the fact that I only found out after a couple of uninstalls and reinstalls of SteerMouse, that if you have TextExpander installed on your Mac the Application Switching feature does not work.

After raising the issue with SteerMouse Support I received a e-mail confirming that they have been trying to resolve this issue alongside the makers of TextExpander but have yet to come up with a solution.

Hopefully this is a issue that will be sorted in the future, but it’s something I can live with for now.