Apathy Sketchpad

I’ve just uploaded a zip file containing five applications I’ve written which you cannot live without. I say this confidently because there are 18 applications in there and I use at least two of them most days at work. Here they are, divided into broad categories. The first category is probably the most useful for non-geeks, the second is indispensable for geeks, and the third is mostly no good to anyone.

The “The Screen Is An Art Package” Applications

These are designed to go in a quicklaunch bar, or in an Aquadock, or something. They all allow you to run simple image manipulation on the entire screen. Some are useful only for people who do a lot of work with images (and don’t want to fire up The GIMP every time they get an email), others are just really, really useful. They are:

• Brightness And Contrast* — make faint images visible without having to copy-paste into an art package.
• Channel Splitter* — toggle display of red, green, blue, hue, saturation, and value of the screen.
• Colour Picker* — find out the RGB code of any pixel. Also shows HTML colour codes which you can copy to the clipboard.
• Copy* — drag a box on the screen and it will copy that area to the clipboard.
• Filters* — apply blur, sharpen, edge detection or any custom filter to the entire screen
• Freeze — prevent an area of screen from updating. You can also use the programme to quickly grab an area of screen, and move it around. It is very useful for comparing graphs, keeping headers in scrolling tables, and making quick notes from a document you’re reading.
• Histogram* — see a histogram of the area of screen you select.
• Morphology* — erode and dilate the screen. Useful really only for imaging types.
• Paintbrush — this allows you to draw on the screen, and then continue to work with the painted lines still visible. This is useful for all kinds of different things, as well as being basically awesome.
• Save* — drag an area of screen, and save it to a file. Nothing you can’t ordinarily do, but it’s so much faster…
• Thresholder** — threshold the screen image.

Regular Expressions Applications

Regular Expressions is a massively useful standard for doing very advanced find-and-replace operations. I’ve built two little programmes around it:

• RegExp — a command line utility that takes standard inputs, applies a regular expressions search to them, then gives the results as standard outputs. It can be used by anyone who understands the Windows console properly to run regexp find-and-replace on any text file or to create a batch file based on a directory structure. To be honest it should have been built into Windows to begin with. Put it in a folder on your PATH environment variable, or else add its folder to PATH (using contol panel > system > advanced > environment variables).
• RegExp File Renamer* — takes a regular expression pattern and a folder of files, and applies the find-and-replace rule to all filenames therein. It’s ridiculously useful. It has a preview feature so you can test the expression before applying it to your precious data, and it can copy, delete, move and rename on demand.

Everything Else

• AnyOverlay — drag a picture onto this window (or load one with the right-click menu) and you can keep it always-on-top, resized, semitransparent, and/or masked to a colour. Useful for aligning things and comparing images. Also pretty handy just for previewing images.
• Coverer And Measurer — tiny application which can be always-on-top (to hide things from people) and displays its dimensions, so you can use it to measure screen distances.
• Folder Viewer* –not the easiest to use application, but it’s designed to help you flick through a lot of folders each with the same images in. I can’t imagine this will be as useful to you as it is to me.
• Text File Combiner — it allows you to combine text files in unusual ways, sticking the new file to the top, bottom, left or right of the old. It’s not great but I’ve used it before and it helped.
• Video Calibration Tool* — calibrate webcams, USB cameras, TV cards, and the like. It shows you the live feed and the histogram, so you can make sure you’re getting the most from it. Probably only of interest to people who need such cameras for something more important than Skype.

You can download it here. All the applications in it require .NET, because they wouldn’t exist otherwise.

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*This was already available from this website but I put it in here anyway because I just don’t care — these mostly belong together, and storing extra data on this server is dirt cheap anyway, and I honestly can’t recall if these programmes have been updated since I last uploaded them. If your RegExp File Renamer is case sensitive then they have; the new one isn’t.**These are available as one combined app, before I split them because it wasn’t practical to add everything else to it.