There’s not a lot going on with the site today, so I just wanted to take a couple of minutes to pimp out some cool apps and sites that I enjoy:
I got a new widescreen monitor for Christmas. As soon as I had it hooked up, I went looking for new and groovy wallpapers… but there was a problem. Many “wallpaper websites” are infested with pop-ups and malware. Many other sites are a couple of years behind and only offer standard 4:3 resolution wallpapers. Many wallpaper sites also don’t have any quality control, and are thus overrun with crappy Photoshop collages of swimsuit models. I somehow managed to find InterfaceLift… and boy was I happy!
InterfaceLift offers quality wallpapers at 2560×1600, 1920×1200, 1680×1050, 1440×900, 1280×800, 480×272 and 1600×1200, 1280×1024, 1280×960, 1024×768, 320×240. You can easily browse wallpapers in your preferred resolution simply by clicking on that resolution on InterfaceLift’s homepage. And what wallpapers they are, folks! Although user-submitted, the wallpapers come in a huge variety and most are stunning examples of photography. Sure, they’re a bit on the “artsy” side, and sure, the site skews towards cityscapes, pictures of beaches and still lifes of flowers… but I guarantee that you’ll find something you like there… and in the resolution you need!
By the way… do you like the screen capture of InterfaceLift shown above? You can create thumbnail pictures of almost any website using a free service called websnapr. All you’ve gotta do is go to websnapr’s site, enter a URL and then select the thumbnail size you want (the InterfaceLift thumb is “medium”). You’ll probably then see a “this picture is in the queue” graphic… just wait a couple of minutes and reload the page and PRESTO! you have a free thumbnail of the page in question. It’s quick, it’s easy and I like it!
Lastly, do you do screen captures often? I do, and although I like Windows’ built-in PRINT SCREEN and ALT+PRINT SCREEN process, it does have its limitations. First of all, PRINT SCREEN only copies an image of your screen to the clipboard. This is fine if you’re pasting the images directly into a Word document, but if you want to save them as “standalone” images, you’d need to paste the screen captures into an imaging program like Phot shop or MS Paint. And then you have to save the images. Which isn’t hard, but it’s still a pain in the butt. And then there’s the fact that PRINT SCREEN lacks granular control. PRINT SCREEN captures your entire screen, while ALT+PRINT SCREEN captures the entire active window. What if you only want to capture a part of the active window, or a small portion of two windows side-by-side? If these are common complaints for you, you just might want to check out Cropper, a free program written by Brian Scott, a .Net Application Architect and Developer in Phoenix. Cropper puts an icon in the system tray: just click it, and a transparent blue box appears on your screen. Just move the box to where you want to capture the screen and drag the edges of the box to the size you need… anything within that box will be captured when you double-click on the box. Images can be copied to the clipboard or copied as BMP, JPG or PNG images to a folder that you define. You can even have Cropper automatically generate thumbnails of your captures, too! All in all, it’s a nifty little program. It’s free (but requires the .NET Framework 2.0). Check it out today!