Comments on: Inspiration Catalog Tools

By: Herve Billiet

Herve Billiet — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 15:25:37 +0000

To capture my screen on a PC I have a small free tool called FSCapture. I use that a lot ! I think they began selling it now, but you can still find a free version I guess. Really handy tool.
http://www.faststone.org/FSCaptureDetail.htm

Another tool you better don’t forget is to backup your computer. Visa and othes have build in software to do that, others can use http://allwaysync.com/ to get important data on a external hard drive – freeware too I think

By: Carol Logan Newbill

Carol Logan Newbill — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 16:15:24 +0000

Thanks, Brit – will check it out.

By: Brit

Brit — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 16:11:37 +0000

Carol, just for the record, Evernote keeps a local copy of all of your notes in each flavor (Mac, PC, iPhone) of the app. You can “synchronize” from any app to update the cloud so your changes will reflect on the website and other app flavors.

By: Carol Logan Newbill

Carol Logan Newbill — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 16:00:21 +0000

I have Screengrab for Firefox also. Before I used it, though, and before Safari was available on the PC, I often would get a full screen cap by using Browsrcamp. This is a free service that shows you what your site looks like in Safari on a Mac. Another Firefox add-on that's useful for archiving is Scrapbook. It enables you to save complete web pages and organize the saved pages similar to the way bookmarks work. I have folders set up within Scrapbook for various topics and save pages into those. (Caveman discover fire! Beat chest and howl!) The third tool I use, which probably takes the place of Evernotes for Brit, is Jarte (think WordPad on steroids - very fast to load, not many fancy features but not absolutely plain text either). I am very, very skittish about cloud apps like Evernote and Flickr and would prefer to keep everything on my own hard drive or backed up on my server. Jarte supports multiple tabbed documents, so I keep it open with docs marked "just notes," "things to do," "things to do TODAY," "marketing," or whatever the task du jour might be. Then of course, there is the enormous volume of paper file folders in the drawer, but we really won't go there.

By: Jeremy Flint

Jeremy Flint — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 15:11:56 +0000

On my Mac, I use Skitch (http://skitch.com) to capture most of my images. It has support for webposting to Flickr for sharing or a private url at Skitch for selective sharing. You can also annotate images you capture.

For capturing entire site designs, I use a Firefox add-on called Screengrab (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1146), that will capture an entire site (scrolling included) and save the image as a jpg or png. Hopefully Skitch will offer this feature in a future release.

I keep most of my inspirational design stuff in a Flickr set – http://www.flickr.com/photos/jflint/sets/72157603425408204/ – although i need to add a bunch of images to it. I usually do those in a batch after they have collected for a month or so.