Simple tools to make your life easier
These simple free software tools need to be part of your toolkit when you are working on your online business. Quickly find out the color code of everything on your screen, structured overview of all your passwords, a photo editor and a mind map tool. The best part is that all of them are free!
Colorcop
Ever wanted to know what HEX colorcode a particular color on the web is? Color Cop brings you the correct HEX colorcode of everything. Super handy when you’re designing stuff! From the Colorcop website:
“Color Cop is a multi-purpose color picker for web designers and programmers. It identifies and represents colors in various hex color code formats. Simply drag the eyedropper control to any location on the screen and release. The hex color code for the selected color will be automatically copied to the clipboard.”
Keepass
Writing down your passwords or using the same password for all your accounts are things considered to be bad practice for obvious reasons. Using a password manager makes managing all your passwords a lot easier and more secure. From the Keepass website:
“Today, you have to remember many passwords. You need a password for a lot of websites, your e-mail account, your webserver, network logins, etc. The list is endless. Also, you should use a different password for each account, because if you would use only one password everywhere and someone gets this password, you would have a problem: the thief would have access to all of your accounts.“
“KeePass is a free open source password manager, which helps you to manage your passwords in a secure way. You can store all your passwords in one database, which is locked with a master key. So you only have to remember one single master key to unlock the whole database. Database files are encrypted using the best and most secure encryption algorithms currently known (AES-256, ChaCha20 and Twofish). For more information, see the features page.”
Paint.NET
Paint.NET is a simple yet very effective and above all free editor for images. Layers can be added, colors replaced and the compression ratio when saving JPEG images is quite good. This program comes in handy for quick resizing of images as well. From the Paint.NET website:
“Paint.NET is image and photo editing software for PCs that run Windows. It features an intuitive and innovative user interface with support for layers, unlimited undo, special effets, and a wide variety of useful and powerful tools. An active and growing online community provides friendly help, tutorials, and plugins.“
Xmind
Sometimes it is a good idea to visualize what you are currently working or what’s on your mind. Xmind is free software and offers you the ability to create awesome mindmaps. Use a variety of different templates to create the wildest mindmaps with dependencies, groups and relationships between each element. From the Xmind website:
“You can tailor the style of themes to your preference, customize shapes, lines, colors, etc. which allows you to use it directly every time instead of repeat editing.”
“We offer the fishbone chart, matrix, timeline, brace map, the org chart to enrich your mind maps. Various branch shape like the hexagon, capsule, circle etc. to emphasize your thoughts.”