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Filed under: Software, Cool tools, Developer

Developer Color Picker: For your pickiest developer

by Robert Palmer (RSS feed) on Jul 17th, 2009

Wade Cosgrove, code ninja over at Panic, has released a freeware Developer Color Picker that helps developers of all stripes pick and paste color declarations for a variety of languages.

Any color picker will let you choose a color from anywhere on your screen, but Developer Color Picker turns that into usable code for your Xcode and web development projects. Developer Color Picker generates code suitable for NSColor, UIColor, CGColorRef, CSS and HTML declarations.

Depending on what you want, you can copy just the value for the color itself, or an entire declaration including the color. Imagine the time you save not having to type UIColor *aColor = [UIColor colorWithRed:0.282 green:0.569 blue:0.894 alpha:1.000]; again!

Developer Color Picker is available on Panic's website.

Tags: cgcolorref, code, color, color picker, ColorPicker, css, design, developer, html, nscolor, time saver, TimeSaver, uicolor

Filed under: Software, Cool tools, Productivity

SmileOnMyMac Releases TextExpander 1.3, the Customizable Typing Timesaver Tool

by David Chartier (RSS feed) on May 23rd, 2006


Earlier in May, SmileOnMyMac acquired Textpander, a really handy (and free) text insertion utility. Today, they released their first official version update in which they changed the name to TextExpander, added a few snippet-creation features and are now charging a lump-in-throat inducing price of $29.95. The new features include the ability to create snippets from selected text, snippet nesting and the ability to limit usage to an application list.

A 30-day demo is available, but I have to say: I'm really happy I backed up the disk image of the latest version of Textpander. I haven't installed this new retail version of TextExpander yet, but slapping $29.95 (without any warning) on a utility that was previously free donationware stings quite a bit (Fraser Speirs, I would argue, handled this transition a lot better with the FlickrExport 2.0 beta introduction). If any enthusiastic users of Textpander make the leap, feel free to share your impressions with the new features and whether you think it's worth $30.

[UPDATE: Peter Maurer makes a really good point: Textpander wasn't free, it was donationware. Unfortunately, the donation system clearly wasn't working, as Hawk Wings points out that many donationware-centric developers lament that only 1-2% of downloaders actually donate anything for the app. Let TextExpander serve as a good lesson for what happens when you don't show some donation love to hard working developers.]

Tags: abbreviations, customizable, customize, expand, insert, snippets, text, TextExpander, Textpander, timesaver, type, typing

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