Rating

Version tested: 4.1

ColorPic is a free app that allows you to pick any color from the screen and displays its code in HEX and decmial. It features a versatile color mixer and the ability to create and save color palettes. It also offers a number of others functions such as a customizable magnification area and the ability to snap to the nearest websafe color.

Most people working with websites and/or with design will invariably need a “color picker” program that can identify the color code of any pixel on screen. There are many such free programs, but of all that I have tried ColorPic is by far the best. Here’s what I like about it:

• Allows you to store captured colors inside pallets which you can come back to later (to the tune of 16 colors per pallet). You can create as many of these as you like.
• Snap to nearest websafe color: once you grab your color a little “websnap” button will appear close to its code on the ColorPic interface. Clicking on this will snap to the nearest websafe color. Very cool.
• Magnifier: this is available as part of the ColorPic interface. You can increase/decrease magnification or overlay a grid.
• Color mixer: click a tab in order to switch between the 4 nifty color mixer tools that are available.
• I like that you do not select your desired color using the mouse button; this means you can run ColorPic then go in and out of windows/pages until you find the color you want. Once found you can use the mouse or you can use hotkeys to capture it (use alt-tab to get back into ColorPic, F1-F12 to pick one of the available color slots, and CTRL-G to grab it).

There are many freeware color-picker programs around; I’ve tried a number of these from tiny, minimal programs to feature laden and top-heavy ones. What I like about ColorPic is that it manages to pack a very nice set of features into a very small app that uses just over 1 meg of memory.

Compatibility: Windows 95, 98, NT, 2000, Me, XP, Vista (make sure to download the correct version for your OS).

Go to the program page to get the latest version (approx 579K).

Version tested: 1.05

HTML GUI Tidy is a graphical user interface for HTML Tidy, a program that automatically optimizes HTML/PHP source code and fixes a number of common problems. It also arranges code so as to give it a reasonable indent-style layout.

I am not a programmer nor a developer, but ever since starting Freewaregenius I have learned a bit of HTML and occasionally found myself having to change, modify, and/or add countless parts of code. At times I would need to do something that was over my head or would have a problems with my site that would lead me to seek the help of our hotshot programmers at work. Typically, the first things these guys would go is dump my code into their favorite text editor then proceed to fix the visual layout; separating chunks of code, inserting and maintaining a hierarchy of indents and margins that just made the code look good and comprehensible. They then will go down the code removing unneeded code and checking for beginning and end tags to make sure all of these are present and correctly placed. In most cases, this exercise alone would either solve the problem or at least make it apparent what it was.

What GUI Tidy/HTML Tidy promises to do is essentially the exercise above. It will allow you to dump your code into the ’originial code’ tab, process it, then generate a new code inside the ’optimized html’ tab with the implemented corrections and optimizations. This tab also contains a third window that contains errors and information on where in the code they were found.

Here’s what you need to know about this program:

• Fixes a number of problems including missing/mismatched tags, adding missing items, fixing tags within lists, and replacing missing quotes.
• Proprietary attributes/elements/HTML extensions are recognized and reported.
• Layout changes are done according to user-selected pre-defined styles.
• GUI Tidy includes the HTML Tidy executable version from 11/23/2005.
• Note that there is another GUI for Tidy called TidyGUI, which is a different program.

As an HTML novice I do not feel like I can comment on this program with a lot of authority. What I can say, however, is that I’ve found it a handy tool for (a) getting quick code fixes done automatically, and (b) making the code and code layout look good and tidy. If you have a bunch of messy code I recommend you try running it through this; you will likely find it useful.

Compatibility: WinAll.

Go to the GUI TIDY page to get the latest version (approx 606K).
For more info go to the original HTML Tidy page and the HTML Tidy page on Sourceforge.

Version tested: 1.0.1 (6) beta

Windows Live Writer is a true WYSIWYG blog authoring tool that can be used to write and edit blog postings (including pictures) locally and then post these online. It supports a wide range of blogging platforms including Windows Live Spaces, Wordpress, and Blogger. 

Let me start by saying flat out that I am in love with this program, mainly because it allows me to work on a blog posting locally and publish it when I’m ready. Here’s what you need to know about it.

Notable features : 

• WYSIWIG (what you see is what you get). It will download your site’s CSS and is able to preview exactly what your post will look like when published. The editing interface looks really good and is very well designed.
• Built in spelling checker.
• Instantly switch from normal view to the HTML code and to ‘web preview’.
• Tags Tags Tags! Enter tags straight from the Windows Live Writer interface. For Wordpress check out this plugin that will work with the Windows Live Writer tags for both tag and metakeyword support.   
• Nice handling of images, including a slew of unexpected options such as the ability to rotate an image, adjusting brightness, setting height/width of an image and the margin around it (if any), as well as a handful of border styles. It seems that you can import more effects capabilities through downloadable plugins. Paradoxically, for all of this I was unable to tell the program to use a thumbnail instead of the actual resized image, a glaring omission in my book.
• Tags Tags Tags! Enter tags straight from the Windows Live Writer interface. For Wordpress check out this plugin that will work with the Windows Live Writer tags for both tag and metakeyword support. 
• Relatively small and non-bloated (yes this is Microsoft we’re talking about folks).  
• Supports a wide range of blogging platforms including Windows Live spaces, Wordpress.com, Typepad, Livejournal, Movable Type, Wordpress custom installation, Radio Userland, Community server, Dasblog, Metaweblog API, Movable type API, and Blogger (Atom).
• Allows you to either publish a posting or post-to-draft.
• You can insert MS Live local maps straight from the interface. An interesting feature for some I’m sure (not so much for me).
• Plugin support; Microsoft offers a write SDK, which means everyone can make their own plugins. Some of these are listed here.

My Windows Live Writer wishlist: this software is still in beta, and I suspect many of the following will be addressed, but here they are all the same.

• Hard as I tried, I was not ablt to get Windows Live Writer to update a post to reflect changes that I did online AFTER publishing a post using Windows Live Writer.
• The ability to specify posting thumbnail vs. original image, the way Wordpress does it. I want a 9k thumbnail that can be clicked to show the 100k image, not a resized 100k image within every post.
• Currently, Windows Live Writer is unable to download previous posts past the <!–more–> tag, which is very strange and effectively makes it useless for editing already published posts. This has to be fixed urgently.
• For such a foray into WYSIWYG blogging, I am stumped as to why there is no support for creating tables on the fly. I mean if I AM using a local client it might as well be powerful.
• For posted images, Windows Live Writer creates its own folder structure within the Wordpress ‘Uploads’ folder. Which is okay, but I do wish that it stuck with the Wordpress folder structure instead.
• I wish the program has more warning dialogs such as “you are about to delete this post; both local and published versions will be affected, are you sure you want to do this”. Or something like that. This would have prevented my deletion of a published post

The verdict: One thing that I want to convey before I’m done is this program’s sheer coolness factor. Not sure what it is, but I really want Microsoft to fix the bugs/issues above so I can use this as my default blogging software. As is it probably deserves a 4 star rating but I am crossing my finders and giving it the benefit of the doubt and the max rating anyway.  

Compatibility: Window 98 or higher.

Go to the program home page to download the latest version. For info on how to set up Live Writer, go here or here (for Wordpress).