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Skitch review: powerful screen capture and sharing software

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skitchI’ve been amazed at the usefulness of Skitch, a screen capture and sharing app that I’ve been using for quite some time. It just can’t be beat.

Skich is innovative, fun to use and absolutely fantastic. It’s from the same guys (plasq) who developed Comic Life, a truly amazing app that has far more functionality than meets the eye.

There is certainly no lack of screen capture apps; why the MacOS even has a basic screen capture utility built right in which is accessed by command-shift-3 or command-shift-4. But if you want more flexibility in what you want to capture with the additional capability to share it easily, you must use one of the other alternatives.

Many of you have probably heard of Jing, a free screen and video capture program from the same folks who produce Camtasia, the awesome full-featured screen capture program. I’ve been happily using Jing for about a year but it is a bit cumbersome to use for quick screen capture and I dislike the constant plugs for TechSmith products that you are forced to see when using the product. Oh, the price we pay for using freeware.

Skitch on the other hand is way more useful as a screen capture utility because it has so many additional features. You can easily grab a portion of a website for instance, then use tools to draw a circle around something, add text to point something out then in a flash, upload it to Skitch.com on your personal space, or send it away in an IM or email. Truly powerful, flexible and feature rich. It’s been in “beta” for a long time and I’m not really sure why. All I know for sure is that once you spend a few mintes with Skitch, you’ll end up wondering how you managed so long without it.

I’d love to hear your opinions of Skitch. Do you have a favorite screen capture app that you use? Let me know.

Wibiya toolbar width CSS hack

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CSS_hack

If you’ve used Wibiya, you will have undoubtedly discovered that the toolbar extends the full-width of the browser window. Although it will dynamically resize if you re-size the browser window, it cannot by itself be set to a fixed width. This means that if the content area of your website is 800px wide, the Wibiya toolbar will be wider than your content area and will actually be as wide as your browser window.

Clearly this presents a design dilemma because your beautiful website now has an ungainly toolbar at the bottom of the page that doesn’t fit in with the design of your site.

Although the developers will certainly address this in an upcoming revision, right now the only way to adjust the width is by using a simple CSS hack.

You just need to determine the width that you’d like your Wibiya toolbar to be and insert that width into this little chunk of CSS which you will place in your styles.css file for your website.

#wibiyaToolbar_tbl{
width: 800px !important;
margin-left:auto !important;
margin-right:auto !important;
}

As you can see, in my code, the width has been set to 800px. If you need the toolbar width to be any other value, just replace the 800px with the value you need.

Here is an example of how a site looked with the default Wibiya toolbar and then after applying the CSS hack.

Default toolbar width
Default toolbar width
Toolbar width with CSS hack applied
Toolbar width with CSS hack applied

Wibiya review, an interesting toolbar plugin for WordPress

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wibiya-toolbarI’ve been beta-testing a new plugin for WordPress, Wibiya. It adds numerous interactive features to your blog or website. At first glance you might be inclined to think that Wibiya doesn’t do anything new or replicates functions that may already be present via other plugins you may have installed. But looking a little deeper it becomes obvious that Wibiya is definitely more than a re-hash and collection of already available tools. It is being agressively developed and new features are already in the pipeline. And to realize that all the functions provided by Wibiya are discretely present in a concise toolbar anchored to the very bottom of your browser window makes it constantly available yet not in the way.

Among some of the features are…

  • Search function
  • Translate page to another language
  • Recent Posts
  • Random Post
  • Subscribe to RSS feed
  • Share this post
  • facebook Community
  • Twitter Dashboard
  • Notification panel

wibiya-toolbar

It’s in beta mode right now but it only took several hours for me to be “accepted” into the beta cycle so I’m not sure how difficult it is to get into the program. From my experience it was not very difficult at all.

Check it out and let me know what you think.