Color Your World

For all you web designers, there's a new free color picker, named--you guessed it--ColorPicker. I've been playing around with it and can recommend several of its features, particularly the "magnifying glass" that lets you accurately "grab" a color from a web page or open application. Once you grab a color, the program saves it as a color chip and gives you the hex and rgb values for the color. I have a feeling this one's going to be one of my favored apps for creating web-safe customized color palettes.

File Copy/Move Blues Turn Green

I'm lazy where it comes to computer file management; if a file gets saved to the wrong location, "I'll take care of it later" is my favorite mantra. But now, with the help of our How to Geek friends, these file actions can be accomplished easily. This small package will install a "Copy To" and "Move To" capability to the standard right-click menu. This tweak works fine on both Windows Vista and Windows XP.

Work Together 2.0

This great article at Mashable.com lists 60 web sites, organized by type, devoted to working collaboratively. If these don't wag your tail, check out the "See Also" lists below the article for even more tips and sites that make working online a breeze.

It's Still A Free World

As we all know, keeping up with all the latest and greatest programs can be lethal to your pocketbook. For the vast majority of programs, however, there are open-source alternatives available, often better and faster than the commercial versions. Check out the list at 100 Open Source Downloads: very comprehensive, and all listings, very free.

Pimp My Toolbar...

Conduit offers a simple interface for creating a customized browser toolbar that is helpful and good for branding. I may have mentioned this previously, but I finally got around to using it. You can download the Bailey Library toolbar here and avail yourself of a Google search (my only criticism, you are locked into Google and nothing else but Google -- surely they are not that insecure, how much of the world do you need to dominate?) a quick link to our catalog, WorldCat, amazon, etc., journal searches, interlibrary loan -- in fact, almost the entire library home page in a single toolbar. I am liking it for those times I am reading something and think, "I wonder if our library has that?"

I could also see how I might want to customize a personal toolbar for home use. Fun, free, and another one of those things that makes you look skillful but requires little effort -- my favorites! I forgot to mention it has a sort of forum component -- we can push messages out to everyone who downloads the toolbar and they can reply. Very cool.

Who Says "You Can't Take It With You"?

I know I've blogged about Portable Apps before, but they keep getting better and better. In addition to Firefox and Thunderbird Mail, you can now load up fantastic Open Office, the free, open source alternative to Microsoft's Office on your flash stick to bring with you wherever you go. Just take a trip to OpenOffice.org Portable and download your portable office suite. How suite it is, indeed!