One of the frustrating parts of web graphics is color matching.  (It’s worse than me trying to match my blue and purple socks.)  Whether you’re trying to create additional drawings, make web pages or touch up a photo, selecting the right color and color code is important.  With the web’s hex-based color numbering scheme, just figuring out what the number for the color you are working with can be a test of persistence. 

Now, that problem is solved thanks to a small program called ColorPic!

The folks at iconico.com have created a color selection tool that makes web and photo color selection a breeze.  The tool shows the hex color number, a matching color palette, hue, saturation and RGB values, hue selection, has a location for “paint chips” and has a magnifying area that enlarges the screen area around the mouse cursor.  It comes preloaded with 8 different palettes and has the ability to store and recall custom palettes.

The utility resides on top of all other windows and continuously displays the color information  for the  pixel directly beneath the mouse pointer.  Hit ctrl+G with the pointer over the selected spot and ColorPic records the color information and creates a “paint chip” that displays the color in its paint chip palette.

I used to keep four different color palette “cheat sheets” handy for matching colors but ColorPic makes this process so much simpler.   Iconico.com has a number of other tools for measuring distance (caliper), measuring on-screen angles (protractor)  and  for using the mouse as a compass (complete with circle, freehand and contained-area measurements.)

Here’s a tool that I’ve been using for some time. It makes measuring screen objects easy!  It’s quick loading (I’ve got it on my launch bar) and works with Windows XP and Vista (I haven’t checked other Windows versions.) There’s a free and paid version. I’ve never needed anything but the free version.  You can move the ruler around the screen and its always on top of the objects you wish to measure.  It can be oriented horizontal or vertical and it’s opacity can be adjusted.  Overall I think it’s pretty nifty.  You can Google it or download it from cNet here.

After using Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator, moving to FireFox has been a real pleasure. I started using it a couple of years ago and it has made surfing the web more enjoyable and more efficient.

I’m no expert, but FireFox seems more stable and secure than Internet Explorer by a long shot. IE in its various incarnations would typically crash a few times a week. Security updates for it were an ongoing nightmare and I can remember a few times when the updates actually killed the browser to the point I had to uninstall and reinstall it.

Firefox, on the other hand, has just kept chugging along. Each version adds features that eventually show up in Internet Explorer, but really there’s NO comparison. Firefox has so many nifty conveniences, IE will spend years playing catch up.

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Ease of Use Features Built Into FireFox
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Quickly Access a Web Site Via an Un-linked URL:

Let’s say you’re reading a book or movie review with a URL in it that isn’t an active link. The text is there, but it’s NOT clickable. With Internet Explorer, you have to highlight the URL, right-click and select copy or do Control-C, then paste the URL in the address bar. That’s not too difficult, I admit. But, compare that to simply highlighting the text in FireFox and DRAGGING the text to the address bar, or better yet, dragging it to blank spot on the “tabs” bar. When you drag to the “tabs” bar Firefox creates a new tab and goes to the website, all in one motion. This is great for checking citations on scientific and medical papers. They rarely include live links.

Easy Back Paging:

When I’m searching for information I may have to hit the “back” button 40 or 50 times on a web site or wiki. Even with good search engine results, I still have my share of “wild goose chases.” At some point I adopted the habit of right-clicking and selecting the “back” menu option to access the previous page, simply because I moved the mouse less, and it seemed faster. (Yeah, I know about the ALT+left-airrow short-cut, but that means taking my hand off the mouse.)

I found an even faster way to navigate both backward and forward through pages I’ve visited. This only works with a wheel-mouse, and if you don’t have one, get one. (The dark ages and 80 x 40 screen displays have been gone for a long time!)

To back page (access the previous web page) simply hold down the Shift Key and roll the mouse wheel down. Ta da! (I know, it’s the simple things that impress me.)

To go forward and re-visit a web page, press the Shift Key and roll the mouse wheel up.

Keyboard shortcuts:

It takes a little while to
learn these, but once you do, browsing will be super fast. Many of the FireFox menu bar items have their keyboard short-cuts displayed next to them. Listed here are the ones I frequently use.

• Alt-Home (go to home page)
• Ctrl+F (find)
• Alt-N (find next)
• Spacebar (page down)
• Shift-Spacebar (page up)
• Ctrl+D (bookmark page)
• Ctrl+T (new tab)
• Ctrl+K (go to search box)
• Ctrl+L (go to address bar)
• Ctrl+= (increase text size)
• Ctrl+- (decrease text size)
• Ctrl-W (close tab)
• F5 (reload)

Mouse shortcuts:

Sometimes it’s faster and easier to use a mouse
shortcut than to go back to the keyboard.

• Middle click on link (opens in new tab)
• Shift-scroll down (previous page)
• Shift-scroll up (next page)
• Ctrl-scroll up (decrease text size)
• Ctrl-scroll down (increase text size)
• Middle click on a tab (closes tab)

Be careful with the mouse shortcuts. They are fast! It’s easy to close too many tabs by accidentally double clicking when a single wheel-click would do.

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FireFox Speed Ups for Broadband Users
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This information is from http://www.downloadfirefoxbrowser.com/firefox_tricks.html and definitely speeds up FireFox’s handling of web pages.

1. Type “about:config” into the address bar and hit return. Scroll down and look for the following entries:
   network.http.pipelining network.http.proxy.pipelining network.http.pipelining.maxrequests. (Normally the browser will make one request to a web page at a time. When you enable pipelining it will make several at once, which really speeds up page loading.)
2. Alter the entries as follows:
   Set “network.http.pipelining” to “true”
   Set “network.http.proxy.pipelining” to “true”
   Set “network.http.pipelining.maxrequests” to some number like 30.
   This means it will make 30 requests at once.
3. Right-click anywhere and select New-> Integer.
   Name it “nglayout.initialpaint.delay” and set its value to “0″.
   This value is the amount of time the browser waits before it acts on information it recieves.

It definitely speeds up web page display!

If you don’t have FireFox, you can get it here. It’s free, open-source and has a strong user community.

Here’s a cool piece of software from Neil Shearing for building back links to your web site.  It’s great at finding blogs you are interested in that do NOT use the “nofollow” attribute and leaving comments.  At first I thought this was something of a spammer’s tool, but it actually makes blogging more efficient, while helping to market your web site.

Get your own copy of this blog commenting software by clicking here!  The best part is … right now it’s free.