Crack Open your Toolbox and Share

Its time to open up your toolbox and share those little programs you can't live without. Trackback or comment with yours, I'm sure we'll all learn something.

My list is mostly web development stuff I suppose:

Nattyware's Pixie
Pixie is a free program that sits in your taskbar and gives you the color your mouse is hovering over in just about any format you could hope for. If you ctrl-alt-c it will copy the hex to your clipboard. I've found it invaluable for me whenever doing anything with color design.

Irfanview
Irfanview is a free image viewer. It views just about any image format known to man. It also lets you do batch cropping, canvas editing etc. It has a small footprint and I find it much better than firing up a clunky editor for certain tasks.

Winamp v2.95
Still the best windows-based lightweight music player. ever. Its too bad the current versions are so bloated. oldversions.com!

Steganos Security suite
This suite is always my first install on a fresh machine. Its not a free product, but its been worth every dime. Encrypted hard drive abilties, anonymous browsing without using scary proxy sites, anti-theft laptop protection, etc etc

Color Blender
Eric Meyer's color blender. Provide it two colors and find a coordinating list of up to 10 in between's. A great compliment to using Kuler.

CSS Sculptor
Eric Meyer's standard compliant CSS tool. This is a great tool that comes pre-packaged with 30 standards-based CSS templates, and allows you to easily customize your design and maintain standards. Its about $150, but does help with lowering development time if you are not a css guru up on the quarterly hacks!

Honorable Mentions
CFEclipse, Browsercam.com (before they became expensive), sIFR


Comments
Dan Wilson's Gravatar Dana,

I posted my list here:

http://www.nodans.com/index.cfm?mode=entry&ent...

Thanks for getting this going. It promises to be an interesting and enlightening thread.

DW
# Posted By Dan Wilson | 10/10/07 4:42 PM
Scott P's Gravatar As usual, I bring nothing to the table.

http://www.scottpinkston.org/blog/index.cfm/2007/1...
# Posted By Scott P | 10/10/07 5:23 PM
Jerry J's Gravatar The list is long, but all make the day easier (or possible)
gtalk, Taskbar Shuffle, tortoise svn, myPHPAdmin, google reader, winrar, grep, tail, fireworks, homesite+
firefox with: pearl crescent page saver, web developer, yslow, live http headers, palette grabber, ie tab, google notebook, firebug, coldfire, list all images, colt, colorzilla, dust-me selectors
wordpress, simile, google maps, yahoo maps, flickr, gmail, picasa, tng, crazy egg
iTunes, musicmatch, audacity, winamp (and shoutcast), vzAccessManager, slingPlayer
# Posted By Jerry J | 10/10/07 6:09 PM
James Moberg's Gravatar Total Commander is usually the first program I install on any computer and has been permanently on my startup list for the past 7 years. You can easily bookmark directories on a network, compare files/directories, FTP, PKZIP, etc. (There's also a U3 version if you have a SanDisk USB thumbdrive.)
http://www.ghisler.com/

I also use AutoHotKey... I use it to launch most of my favorite programs. I also wrote some macros to uppercase, lowercase, titlecase and add quotes to selected text.

FastStone Capture is also something I use a lot when I can't exactly explain something (or need a screen color or need to measure something). The freeware version doesn't have some of the newer features, but can be made to be portable.
http://www.faststone.org/FSCaptureDetail.htm

If I need to show interactivity, I use Wink (opensource) to create an animated/annotated flash video:
http://www.debugmode.com/wink/

I also started using ClipX (Free) to store and re-access recent clipboard text:
http://bluemars.org/clipx/

SyncBack is also a timesaver when updating multiple remote directories or simply backing up your personal data. (I also have this on my U3 thumbdrive.)
http://www.2brightsparks.com/syncback/syncback-hub...

Sometimes I need to access my personal home computer when away from the home office. I use LogMeIn Hamachi (free) to securely access my data.
https://secure.logmein.com/products/hamachi/vpn.as...
# Posted By James Moberg | 10/10/07 7:18 PM
Jeff Fleitz's Gravatar Hi Dana,

I love these too. Always pick up something new and useful.

http://www.jefffleitz.com/index.cfm/2007/10/10/Mor...

Jeff
# Posted By Jeff Fleitz | 10/10/07 9:40 PM
Jamie Jackson's Gravatar WinMerge is so darn (free and) useful, I use it almost daily. I'm on Ubuntu Linux, but I've gone out of my way to use WinMerge in WINE, because it's so good (even in comparison to the free Linux diff/merge tools out there).
# Posted By Jamie Jackson | 10/11/07 1:22 PM
Scott P's Gravatar Forgot to mention jing - http://www.jingproject.com/
# Posted By Scott P | 10/11/07 8:28 PM
Scott's Gravatar VLC - Free every format video player - http://www.videolan.org/

Avira anti-virus - Free AV - http://www.free-av.com/

Exact Audio Copy - Free CD ripper - http://www.exactaudiocopy.de/
# Posted By Scott | 10/17/07 10:51 PM
# Posted By hairstyle | 5/10/08 3:20 PM
# Posted By hairstyle | 5/10/08 7:11 PM
# Posted By sddfs | 6/20/08 10:52 PM
# Posted By sdf | 8/16/08 7:34 PM