Usman Javaid

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ColorUtility: Extract Colors From An Image & Combine Multiple Colors Into One

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If you often find it hard to get required range of color shades, ColorUtility may help you find the right set of color shades. It is a powerful color picker for Windows, which lets you get different color shades from the screen. It shows HEX & DEC color codes in real-time, so you can quickly use the color in graphic applications and web style sheet documents (CSS). Apart from picking colors, you can apply different color filters, such as, Grayscale, Negative, Sepia, RGB Shuffle, Intensify etc, to get different versions of a single color shade. Compared to previously covered Just Color Picker and Instant Color Picker, ColorUtility includes a Color Combiner to mix unlimited number of colors into one; you can add as many colors as you want to create a color shade that you require in graphic design projects. Read More

Gest 3.0 Can Control Photoshop & Browsers Using Mouse Gestures

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Earlier this year, we covered a mouse-gesture application for Windows, called Gest, which includes pre-defined, simple mouse gestures like Up, Down, O, Left and Right, to perform numerous actions in Windows Explorer. Back then, Gest had multi-gesture support and the ability to control only Windows Explorer through mouse gestures. If you’ve been using Gest for a while, you will be glad to know that the program has just been updated to version 3.0. The latest version brings mouse gesture-based controls for PhotoShop and all widely used browsers (including, Firefox, Google Chrome, Internet Explorer, Opera and Safari). Besides these improvements, it includes syntax for opening different folders, option to use several circles per gesture, while allowing you to use blank gestures to perform specified actions for all supported applications. Read More

Tags 2 Folders: Arrange Music Library Into Folders Named By Defined Tags

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If you want to organize music library by tags, such as, artist, album, genre, and track title without having to go through the hassle of creating folders for required ID3 meta tag information, give Tags 2 Folders a shot. It is a miniscule application developed to organize your music library by defined meta tag information, including artist name, album, year of release, track title, and genre. Tag 2 Folders requires nothing except meta tag tokens for organizing music collection by tag named folders. Read More

BluePoison: Unlock Windows 8 Hidden Features And Change Default Theme

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Back in May, we featured BluePoison to unlock some hidden features, utilities and UI related improvements of the leaked version of Windows 8. The application was primarily developed to replace Windows 7 like File Explorer with ribbon based Windows Explorer and to unlock PDF Reader, extended Windows Task Manager and Webcam in early builds of Windows 8. BluePosion now supports Windows 8 Developer Build Preview. The latest version of BluePoision (version 2.1) allows you to disable Windows 8 Immersive Start Menu, unlock the Applications folder, activate full-screen Snap feature on small screens and launch Moorea in MS Office 15 on Windows 8. Apart from these unlocks, it also brings the much needed Windows 8 Start Menu theme gallery to replace the Windows 8 default theme with color scheme of your choice. Read More

Perform Lengthy Tasks With One Click Using Click.to For Mac

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Earlier this year, we featured Click.to app for Windows which significantly saves you tedious mouse clicking to perform lengthy tasks, such as, sharing images and files on social media platforms, searching YouTube videos, sending selected text to default email client’s compose window and more. For those who aren't familiar with Click.to, it’s a user-centric application that provides a list of actions for text, images, documents and items in clipboard to instantly perform them over the focused item. Click.to has recently released the Mac version which supports both Mac Snow Leopard and Lion. Like its Windows counterpart, Click.to for Mac can be used to quickly share Mac OS X clipboard items on Facebook and Twitter, initiate Google and YouTube search for selected text, send text to Mac Mail app compose window and so on. Read More

Hide / Unhide Mac OS X Files & Folders From Menu Bar Using Funter

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Unlike Windows where you can easily toggle Hide Files and Folders option On or Off, Mac OS X doesn’t provide a GUI based facility to hide and unhide files and folders. You may know that files and folders can only be hidden and revealed by running AppleShowAllFiles [Boolean Value] command in Terminal. If you often use Terminal to hide and unhide files, have a look at Funter. It’s a menu-bar app for Mac OS X that allows you to hide and unhide all system and user profile files and User Library folder with a single click. Unlike AppleShowAllFiles which requires running killall Finder command to hide and unhide the files, Funter can automatically relaunch the Finder app to perform the required hide and unhide action. Read More

Bring HTML W3C Markup Validator To Mac With Validator S.A.C

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World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) primarily provides two web document validators: HTML Validator and CSS Validator, to check whether the web page conforms with W3C defined standards and technical specifications or not. The HTML validator is responsible for doing in-depth analysis of given web page in order to detect potential issues and HTML related anomalies, whereas the latter is used to check the references to HTML and class usage in style sheet document. In short, these web page validators play a vital role in maintaining the technical quality of website. Validator S.A.C is an application for Mac which lets you validate local HTML documents as well as pages on local websites via drag & drop. You just need drag the HTML file or web link over the application to check the validity of HTML document or HTML source link. Read More

CovArt Ops: View, Copy & Extract Album Art From Music Library

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If you’re fond of album cover arts and want to include them in music album folders of your music collection, CovArt Ops is probably just what you need. CovArt Ops is a unique application that lets you check which album folders in your music library have album arts. This prevents you from the hassle of checking each music album folder for album arts manually. If some folders in music library are deprived of album cover art, CovArt Ops lets you copy or move the cover art to parent folder or currently selected album folder. The application is capable of searching all the album arts from both folders and music tracks in your collection. For instance, if a music album folder contains audio tracks with embedded album art, you can extract the album art from the music file and then add it to album folder as image (cover.jpg or folder.jpg). Read More

How To Create Custom Brushes In MS Paint [Tip]

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You are probably using Windows for a long time like us, and must have played around with MS Paint a lot. But did you know that you can create your very own custom brush? If you create rough prototypes of graphic design projects in Paint and need to use a custom brush, here’s a small tip that lets you do just that. Using the built-in Transparent Selection tool, you can create just about any kind of brush with preferred style and effect. Read More

Sort Image Collection By Resolution Using Dimensions 2 Folders

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Although Windows 7 offers a huge array of filters to sort image files in a folder via sort headers, users have to switch to Details view mode to filter the images and to add and remove the image filters. If you deal with thousands of images everyday and want to quickly sort them by resolution without having to select Dimensions sort header from Details dialog box, Dimensions 2 Folders may help. It lets you quickly sort image folder by defined image resolution. Backed by recursive folder scanning method, Dimension 2 Folders first creates folders with image resolution titles in destination path and then copies or moves the images from source location to their respective folders. This lets you easily find out all the images with 400x320 resolution, 800x600 resolution, 1920x1080 resolution and so on. Read More

Compare Files From Windows Right-Click Context Menu With diff-ext

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Finding out differences between two files through file comparison tools often becomes quite a hectic task, especially when you want to compare multiple file pairs. The file comparison tools require user to first specify the complete file source path and then enter the parameters for comparing or joining the files. diff-ext is a small Windows shell extension which lets you effortlessly perform file comparison tasks via right-click context menu. It allows you to associate your favorite file comparison utility with its right-click menu options: Compare with and Compare later. With diff-ext installed, you no longer need to launch a file comparison utility and enter file paths followed by parameters to view both files side by side for comparison purposes. Just right-click the files you want to compare from Windows right-click context menu to open them in associated file comparison tool for finding the differences between them. Read More

HyperTrace Is GUI Alternative Of Windows tracert Command

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Windows tracert is a CLI based network diagnostic tool which helps system admins trace route for a given network location. It also shows the time it takes to traverse each machine with its IP address to calculate the total access time for defined host. If you find it tedious to open CMD (Command Line Interpreter) every time just to trace the route for a certain network locations, HyperTrace is a solid pick. It’s a GUI alternative to tracert command which lets you quickly trace route. Unlike tracert, HyperTrace quickly provides the trace route information along with data packet loss details to help users resolve the connectivity issues. It displays network hops, machine names with their location, response time, and route TTL. Read More

Private Eye: Monitor Incoming & Outgoing Network Traffic Of Mac Apps

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Like Windows Task Manager, Mac OS X Activity Monitor doesn’t provide detailed information on applications’ threads which send and receive data packets from connected network. Activity Monitor only shows the total packet in and packet out information, total packet throughput, and data sent and received details for current session. This leaves many proficient Mac users with no other option than to use an advance network utility to find those applications which surreptitiously use network resources. Private Eye is small yet handy network monitoring application for Mac OS X to view all the connections that applications make in real-time. Read More

HostsEditor: Quickly Toggle Mapped Domains On/Off In Windows Hosts

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Windows Hosts file is used to map domain names with their IP addresses to instantly access the most frequently visited websites, network locations and also to block potentially harmful remote locations. Hosts file works just like your ISP provided DNS server. The only difference is that Hosts file lets you create list of domain names and make amendments to mapped locations. The hosts file can be easily edited using any text editor but Windows doesn’t provide any tool to manage the mapped domain names. For instance, it requires you to manually enter the domains, modify the IPs, etc. Moreover, users often find it hard to quickly toggle mapped locations On or Off. HostsEditor is an application to add new nodes to hosts file without having to manually edit them. Read More

Schedule Backup Of Outlook PST File With Backup my mail

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Since Outlook saves all data, including emails, appointments, calendars, tasks, journals and other items in PST and OST files, it’s recommended to backup PST and OST on regular basis since it helps restore all Outlook user data back when it suddenly crashes or stops responding. Backup my mail is an Outlook backup tool which uses hobocopy at backend to create Outlook PST backups at scheduled intervals. The hobocopy is Console based tool which makes use of Windows VSS (Volume Shadow Service) to silently perform file backup operations. Unlike previously covered Safe PST Backup (ad-supported), Backup my mail can start backup operation at any day and then follow the user-defined routine for creating Outlook data backups after specified time intervals. You can also choose to follow linear backup approach to create backups after every x number of hours. Read More

Pick Colors To Form A Gradient And Get CSS 3 Code With Gradient [Mac]

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Defining CSS 3 class for color gradient is a wearisome task, as one needs to find the required color shades and then mix them together to form a gradient. When the gradient is created, transforming it to CSS3 code (to call it in HTML5) isn’t easy at all; web designers often struggle finding the exact HEX values of different color shades to finally create a CSS class for color gradient. Gradient is a small, elegant application for Mac which lets you pick colors to form a gradient, change gradient shapes, and generate CSS3 code for final version of gradient which you want to use in your website stylesheet document. The application comes with RGB and HEX color code editors to manually adjust the color shades of gradient. Two small color pickers have also been integrated into the application to pick colors off the screen for each gradient color shade. Read More

Quickly Access Mac OS X Apps From Dock And Menu Bar Using App Bar

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Remember previously covered aLaunch for Mac which allows accessing installed applications from user-defined groups in system menu bar? Although aLaunch greatly reduces the time involved in finding the applications from an ever-growing Application folder and Launchpad, the configuration process is a bit tedious; it first requires you to create application groups and then choose applications for each group to access applications from menu bar. If you want a simple application which simply puts all the applications and sub-folders in menu bar, try out App Bar. Unlike aLaunch, it operates from both system dock and menu bar.  You can access application list from menu bar, as well as, system dock. Read More

Fix XML File Formatting & Identify Syntax Errors With XML Viewer Plus

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eXtensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup document that contains data values enclosed in user-defined tags. While creating an XML document, one needs to make sure that defined tags are properly closed with / character, so associated applications, RDBMS, and other like programs can modify and read the data values without any issues. Since a broken XML documents can have numerous issues, it’s quite a hectic task to manually dry run the code to check the XML declaration, schema introduction, tag attributes and their values, and start and end tags to ensure that XML document can be easily read by associated applications and databases. XML Viewer Plus is a small tool for Windows which lets you validate XML document formatting and identify the syntax errors in long XML documents. Read More

Test Mac Hard Disk Read & Write Speeds With Blackmagic Disk Speed Test

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Blackmagic Disk Speed Test is a hard disk benchmark test tool for Mac which deploys a classic method of determining hard drive read and write speeds; it fills free space with sample data to measure the total write speed, once data is written to the disk, it starts reading the data to evaluate disk read speed. It was developed to check if a user's hard drive write and read speeds are suitable for working with high quality video editing and like tasks, including ultra high quality video playback, live encoding of HD videos, etc. Unlike other hard disk benchmark tools, it consistently performs write and read operations, so you can check both performance and reliability of your hard drive in real time. Read More

Analyze Mac Time Machine Error Logs With TM Error Logger

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Time Machine is to Mac OS X, what System Restore is to Windows. Time Machine is an built-in feature of Mac OS X which lets users create regular backups of their Mac including, system files, pictures, music, documents and all other important user folders. Using Time Machine, you can bring the previous Mac OS X state back without having to manually find and revert the changes made to the system. If you use Time Machine to create backups daily, you may know that it often fails to recover all the data back. In such a case, it become quite tedious to identify the root cause of the problem which Time Machine faced during the restore process. TM Error Logger is small Mac app that solves this very problem. It is designed to show current and previous Time Machine error logs, so you can analyze the issues Time Machine encountered during the process. Read More