Most days , I focus on a single product in Mac Gems ; today I ’m going to cover a twosome plugins for Mac OS X that offer wide-eyed but useful features .
nibble your colors
Back in October 2005 , we review ColorTagGen .01 , a standalone utility that makes it easy to find the hex code for a color — the code you use to specify a color in HTML and CSS . ( For good example , bloodless is#FFFFFF . ) But if you ’re a devotee of Mac OS X ’s built - in color selector , Waffle Software ’s freeHex Color Picker 1.4 (; payment requested ) is even salutary . Hex Color Picker works as a color - picker plugin ; drop back it to ~/Library / ColorPickers ( for use in only your own score ) or /Library / ColorPickers ( to make it available to all users ) , and OS X ’s colour selector pallette will as if by magic gain an additional panel . utilize one of the standard panels , or the gloss - picker pallet ’s Favorites area , to prefer your coloring material , and then throw to the new Hex Color Picker panel ; the color ’s hex codification is displayed . select the Copy To Clipboard button and you’re able to then glue that codification into another app .
you could also select a colouring by typing its name in Hex Color Picker ’s code boxwood ; Hex Color Picker recognizesstandard HTML colouration names . ( For exemplar , if you typeorangein the box and press the return key , Hex Color Picker will distinguish you that the code fororangeis#FFA500 . ) Conversely , if you want to see what color a particular hex codification map , you could type or paste that code into the box .
grant , Hex Color Picker is approachable only in applications that use Mac OS X ’s colour picker , but if those apps are part of your workflow , Hex Color Picker is a bully add - on .
Index your clippings
Although Spotlight is far from perfect , it ’s not without virtue , one of which is the power to quickly find filescontainingparticular information . But when it comes to searching file content , one of Spotlight ’s blind musca volitans is text edition clipping . That ’s right : one of the most popular Mac oculus sinister feature — the power to drag text from closely any applications programme to the Finder to produce a clipping file that can be opened in the Finder or save for late consumption — is incompatible with one of Mac OS X ’s most - gasconade features .
The trouble is that every clipping data file stores its data — in the case of a text clip , its textual contents — in the file’sresource fork ; Spotlight ’s content search does n’t search resourcefulness forks . put down Hendrik Holtmann ’s freeTextClipping 1.01 (; payment requested ) . Once install — the installer places the plugin in /Library / Spotlight — TextClipping lets Spotlight index the imagination fork of text clipping filing cabinet , thus letting yousearchthose content using Spotlight . Best of all , you do n’t even have to waitress for Spotlight to re - index your heavy drive ; the content of textual matter press cutting are at once searchable .
Hex Color Picker 1.4 and TextClipping 1.01 each expect Mac OS X 10.4 or afterward . Both products are Universal binaries .
UPDATE 5/22/2007 : Corrected developer name and Web land site for Hex Color Picker .
