Many thanks to Patrick for pointing me to the unofficial Get Fuzzy feed.  I can now get my daily dose delivered right to my desk.

It has been a long time since the PC world migrated away from churning out beige boxes, but major manufacturers have been slow to adopt industrial design standards which can keep up with clean, well-thought-out hardware produced by Apple.  There have been periodic flashes of inspiration from Sony and Shuttle, the results, however, have been inconsistent.

With the advent of the Intel-based Mac, speculation of Windows running on an Apple Macintosh has, of course, abounded.  With Apple's latest announcement of "Boot Camp", an app which allow an Intel-based Mac to dual boot to Windows and Mac OS, we're sure to see increased adoption of the Mac platform.  Users who are willing to pay the premium price of a Mac will no longer have to worry about the issues of incompatibility with the business world.

 
Seriously, which computer do you thing a grownup is going to buy? (Sorry Michael Dell)

Have you ever had to:
a. take a screen shot of just part of your screen
b. try to match your web page color to something on your screen
c. figure out how wide to make a div or table cell

Working as a program manager at Microsoft typically means you take a lot of screen shots.  Screen shots of web pages, screen shots of application prototypes and (yes) screen shots of screen shots.  There are a ton of tools out there that do a number of these functions, some free, some not.  My current favorite tool happens to also have my current favorite price.

Mezer Tools from Bayden Systems is a free little app with a very appropriate icon: a Swiss Army knife.  This great, multi-purpose tool has widgets for measuring linear pixel dimensions and capturing arbitrary rectangles.  The dialog box also has additional tools for converting to and from Hex and for grabbing colors from anywhere on the screen.

 
Screenshots (made with Mezer, of course), click for a closer look.

Here's a list of some of the cool stuff you can do:

• Double-click the edge of a window to grow to the edge of the screen (not maximize)
• Capture a target window or just an arbitrary section of screen
• Capture screen to clipboard or directly to .JPG or .BMP
• Flag screen captures with arrows or scribbles
• Copy arbitrary string lengths to clipboard
• Measure the number of characters in the clipboard
• Grab the hex and RGB values from any location on the screen
• Convert from hex to decimal and back