I discovered Skitch a few days ago now and it has suddenly become completely invaluable to me. Skitch is a screen-grab app for OS X that allows you to quickly annotate and sketch on your grab before quickly uploading it to their site (or Flickr, FTP etc) and then link to or embed it into a blog. Note the use of the word ‘quickly’ there. That’s the key to the success of this tool and why it has become a staple in my arsenal of day-to-day tools.

I use this to grab images of UI work I’m doing, annotate it, upload it and then post a link to the image within a Basecamp message for my client to look at. It’s proven really useful.

While I’m waxing lyrical about tools I’m using here’s a quick list of other great tools I’m using and couldn’t live without at the moment with a quicker reason why.

Firebug – Firefox plugin for debugging CSS, HTML and network activity as well as Actionscript logging via Thunderbolt.

PixelPerfect – overlay a comp in your browser so you can match your development to the designers vision. This saves you a lot of time and effort screen grabbing your dev in the browser and overlaying the results in Photoshop with the original design to see if it all matches correctly. It is still a bit fiddly though and I would love to see an ‘onion-skin’ mode in Apple’s Preview app so I can just sit a window over the browser to do the same thing.

Pixus – this little AIR application is the nicest set of screen calipers I’ve used yet. I did find a screen ruler AIR app called ‘rulers’ but it didn’t allow you to change the registration point which rendered it almost useless.

Evernote – I use this all the time now. Any notes, images, ideas, links etc all get clipped to my Evernote account for safe keeping. Will be the first app I buy on my iPhone when I get one too.

DropBox – store files in the cloud but drop them in there via the finder as if it was on your machine. This works just like your iDisk but allows you to quickly grab the public link and paste it into an email.

MAMP – virtual apache server and MySQL server. Just works instantly. I used to spend days trying to get this stuff to work. Now I can build Wordpress themes straight from localhost.

Basecamp – awesome Project management site online. Even if you find yourself flying solo on a project this app will help you stay organised and in control. Use it with Skitch to post grabs of your work and you will never need to clog up in-boxes again.

Versions + Beanstalk = great subversion management. I’ve tried to setup repositories in the past and have had some success but mainly headaches and have lost the files over time. Beanstalk is a site/service that gives you space to store your source code using subversion. Versions is a really nice Mac desktop app that will then allow you to manage the repositories you create. I know keep all my source code in the cloud so I don’t need to worry if my machine fails.

There’s so many more great tools being developed. Please let me know about yours.

I’ve been seeing a lot of very clever spam getting through Askimet’s net lately. At first they completely threw me and I let them go. It’s only been recently that I’ve delved deeper and realised that everything isn’t as it seems. These are comments I’ve received …

is there a FREE program that i can add alpha channels to png imagesIMPORTANT: please include a tutorial on how …

and this equally baffling one …

Interesting. Not that bad as you are saying. Keep trying. Thanks

These comments were not completely out of context to the posts they were commenting on but were contextless enough to seem … well, odd.

Digging deeper (but not too deep) revealed that the authors were an assortment of retailers and services that could only have been spam clientele. You have to hand it to the spammers though, this is very clever spamming. They seem to be able to generate the comments based on other comments on the same subjects or are able to structure generic comments that fit the tone of the post.

Pearl has a similar problem and a great church sign image here.

Thom James has an interesting post on a similar and much less perceptible comment spamming technique here.

Anyway, I’ve installed reCaptcha to try and stop this. ReCapthcha has a novel way of using the data that users input …

reCAPTCHA improves the process of digitizing books by sending words that cannot be read by computers to the Web in the form of CAPTCHAs for humans to decipher. More specifically, each word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is placed on an image and used as a CAPTCHA. This is possible because most OCR programs alert you when a word cannot be read correctly.

But if a computer can’t read such a CAPTCHA, how does the system know the correct answer to the puzzle? Here’s how: Each new word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is given to a user in conjunction with another word for which the answer is already known. The user is then asked to read both words. If they solve the one for which the answer is known, the system assumes their answer is correct for the new one. The system then gives the new image to a number of other people to determine, with higher confidence, whether the original answer was correct.

My new website is finally live. It needs some TLC over the coming weeks but overall I think it’s sufficient for launch … especially considering it’s Flash on the Beach next week and I’ll be handing out a shed load of business cards.

If you’re visiting after receiving a business card then let me say that I’m sure it was very nice meeting you and we had such a laff didn’t we?! That time when you jumped into the sea with your laptop! You were so drunk!! LOL!! Anyway, wishful thinking … there’ll be no repeat of last years drunken shenanigans as I have a lot of catching up to do with old friends and plan on staying sharp. Talking of which I need to go and plan for the next three days.

Hope you like my new website and please get in touch to let me know your thoughts.