Enhance your documentation with easy screenshots - check out Cropper

A picture is worth a thousand words. I’m sorry to use a cliché but nothing says it better when it comes to documentation. Instead of a page-long list of instructions detailing every click and mouse move just add a picture, overlay an arrow and most people will get the message. This is where Cropper comes into picture

Impressions

First experience was a bit confusing. I installed Cropper, took a screenshot and nothing happened! I eventually clued in that the screenshot was being saved to disc every time I hit Enter or Double-Clicked the screenshot area but it would have been nice to have some sort of notification that the screenshot has been taken.

 

Once I understood the way it worked it actually made sense. Cropper lets you focus on taking the screenshots as you need them, saves them automatically in he format you need and deal with the screenshots later. This suits the way I work, when I am going through an application I want to just take a screenshot and deal with them later.

 

A nice array of options is supported. For output formats BMP, JPG and PNG are supported as well as going straight to your clipboard.

 

This tool is designed with precision in mind. You can preset your capture size, automatically create thumbnails. This is perfect for documentations where having the same screenshot size for similar items is ideal to make the document look neat. Automatically creating thumbnails is a great timesaver too, the author really uses his tool so he knows what kind of pain we go through to create a proper thumbnail for each capture.

The snappy way to create the screenshots made me wish I could also add a voice recording to the screenshot, something like “Nice screenshot of deleting a file”. This would let me clue in to what I was thinking when I took the screenshot. Just kidding but if anybody wants to implement this feature the source code for Cropper is also available.

 

Price

Free.

Conclusion

This one is a keeper, it will sit forever on my taskbar! 5 stars!

Get Cropper from here: http://blogs.geekdojo.net/brian/articles/Cropper.aspx

 

 

Stylizer - speed up your CSS development

Stylizer focuses on CSS fine-tuning and speedy live web page editing. As a nice change from existing similar tools you can see your changes in Internet Explorer as well as FireFox.

Impressions

Stylizer will let you edit the CSS on your live pages. While it specializes only on CSS editing it does it very well with multiple innovative features:

- Multiple browser support. I was able to easily switch between Internet Explorer and Firefox. A very useful feature to make sure your CSS is behaving as expected with both browsers.

- Instant preview in the browser of your choice. This is a great selling feature for this application, it will let you easily fix CSS bugs or take a peek under the hood for at an existing web site.

- CSS browser filters. Apply some CSS to one browser and some to another, all with just a few clicks.

- Disable CSS on the fly.

- CSS validation, both when a page is opened and also ongoing while editing.

 

You must go through the tutorial, it will show you how to get around the application in just a few minutes.

 

Caveats

 

Limited only to CSS editing, it would be nice to be able to edit HTML and JavaScript as well. Other tools offer similar features while integrating into a more complete experience - FireBug comes to mind again.
The integrated tutorial and purchasing pages are not working if the internet security settings are set to high.

Interface can be hard to figure out at times, don’t skip the tutorial. It would be nice to have the various options available in menus with more descriptive text and in categories to complement the existing toolbar.

Price

The Basic version is free but it comes with limited functionality.

$69.95 CAD for the Ultimate version.

Conclusion

If you need the specific tools it offers then go for it. Basic CSS editing is available for free in other tools like FireBug.

4 stars.

Get Stylizer from here: http://www.skybound.ca/stylizer/

 

 

MBUnit - NUnit evolved

If you love NUnit you’ll go gaga over MBUnit.

Impressions

Just when you thought it cannot get any better somebody comes up with a better way to do test driven development (TDD). MBUnit is building on the solid foundations laid by NUnit so you are greeted with the familiar attributes and test fixtures out of the box. The fun starts when you go beyond the NUnit clone and find that MBUnit will generate the unit tests on the fly and you have functionality such as RowTest. The RowTest attribute extends the Test attribute by letting you specify multiple variations of test data. Take a look at this example:

 

    1 [RowTest]

    2 [Row(10, 10, "Good widget")]

    2 [Row(-1, 10, "Not so good", ExpectedException=typeof(InvalidWidgetDataException))]

    2 [Row(10, -1, "almost good", ExpectedException=typeof(InvalidWidgetDataException))]

    2 [Row(10, 10, null, ExpectedException=typeof(InvalidWidgetDataException))]

    2 [Row(-1, 10, "", ExpectedException=typeof(InvalidWidgetDataException))]

    6 public void SaveWidget (Int32 width, Int32 height, String comment)

    7 {

    8     Widget widget = new Widget();

    9     widget.Height = height;

   10     widget.Width = width;

   11 

   12     widget.Save();

   13 

   14     Widget loadedWidget = Widget.Load(widget.ID);

   15     Assert.IsNotNull(loadedWidget, "Widget not found");

   16     Assert.AreEqual(widget.Height, loadedWidget.Height, "Height not saved correctly");

   16     Assert.AreEqual(widget.Width, loadedWidget.Width, "Weight not saved correctly");

   16     Assert.AreEqual(widget.Comment, loadedWidget.Comment, "Comment not saved correctly");

   18 }

 

One problem I ran into was when using a DateTime type in the Row data.

Price

Free.

Conclusion

If you do the TDD then this is a must have, 5 stars!

Get MBunit from here: http://www.mbunit.com/

 

 

 

 

ReSharper - accelerate your Visual Studio .NET development

ReSharper reinvents intellisense expanding its capabilities as well as improving the built-in features.

Impressions

ReSharper makes development faster with a plethora of features that make developers giggle. It is a developer’s butler anticipating every need and patiently waiting until the master notices. The on-the-fly error detection points out errors and warnings without any compilation. Once it detects that a namespace is not imported it offers a key combination that adds it automatically. Even before I compile I see a comprehensive list of warnings, suggestions and hints that appear right where the problem is so the text is always to the point.

 

And there are the little things like duplicating the selected code. Instead of CTRL+C, CTRL+V I type CTRL+D and it is all done. I simply love these little additions that a few milliseconds every time I use them.

 

Once you are done turn on the automatic code cleanup to remove all the declarations you didn’t use.

 

The feature list is simply overwhelming and posting it all here is not the point; you can find the entire list here:

http://www.jetbrains.com/resharper/documentation/feature_map.html

VB.NET developers will be pleased to find out that they were not forgotten although some key features are only available for C# developers.

Price

$199 for a single developer license.

Conclusion

If you develop in C# then this is a must have, 5 stars!

Get ReSharper from here: http://www.jetbrains.com/resharper/