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Back in the day, you were limited in the number of colors you could display on your computer monitor. In the beginning, there was green on black. Eventually it morphed into different levels of gray, or a limited color palette. Nowadays you can display zillions of colors. Did you ever have to pick a color on screen and match it? Lots of folks' eyes just can't do it. Interestingly enough, though, there's somebody sitting right next to you who knows what those colors are: your computer. In order to light up those pixels on your screen, your system has to know what those colors are, If only you could ask it. Enter Color Cop.

With this tool, it's easy to get the color of any pixel on your screen. Use the eyedropper tool to pick up the color you're interested in; add magnification if that helps. Now you've got the color information you need, and you've got it in formats you can use, including RGB values in hex for your web page, decimal form for apps that like that, or even that odd format that Visual Basic uses to keep track of things.

Color Cop is a free download. It runs under Windows.

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Some people tell their story best in words. They've got word processors to help them out. Other people do a better job of expressing themselves in images. For those folks. image editors are the name of the game.

MyPaint is, as you might believe from the name, a paint program. Rather than springing for a full-price tool like Photoshop, you can do much of your raster image editing with this free tool. It supports layers, which are all-important when it comes to extensive edits—you don't want to break what you've got by adding something new—and layers let you try new stuff out before it becomes "real", to say nothing of having the ability to, ummm, layer elements over one another. It includes a lot of interesting brushes, so you can make a drawing look like it came from a smudge of charcoal or a drizzle of paint, instead of a nice, new, very pointy pencil. And it's easy to move all the palettes and toolbars out of your way so that you can focus on your artistic vision rather than being cramped into the programmer's idea of how a paint program ought to act.

You can grab MyPaint for Linux and Windows.

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Diagrams make the world go round. Try to explain a process of any complexity just verbally, and often you will be met with a vacant stare, or the sound of papers being shuffled. Either way, you can be sure your point has not been made.

Dia is a free drawing tool. Aimed at folks who want to draw diagrams, it takes its inspiration from Visio, the tried-and-true flowchart, orgchart, and UML drawing application. With various floating windows and palettes/toolbars, you can rearrange your workspace to put your most important go-to tools within easy reach. Built-in symbols make it easy to put all the pieces together; add a couple of lines and arrows and you've got a new network design, or you've promoted yourself into a corner office—on paper, at least. It may not have all the spit and polish of Visio, but if your diagramming needs run to the less formal, and your wallet runs to the less full, it may be just what you're looking for.

Dia is a free download, You can grab a Windows installer, or packages for several flavors of Linux. There are reports that it can be compiled under OS X, but you're going to have to be made of strong stuff to go down that road.

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It's nice to have an interesting image for your desktop wallpaper. Whether you're making an artistic- or maybe political statement, or just want something pretty, wallpaper can fill the bill. But it does tend to just sit there. I suppose that makes sense—after all the wallpaper in your dining room just sits there, right?

If you'd like for your wallpaper to earn its keep, maybe it's time to change your wallpaper. Maybe it's time to take a look at Wallpaper Clock. As its name might lead you to believe, these selections of wallpaper also serve as a clock on your computer. Specifically, these wallpapers update the time shown once a minute, so you're always up to date, even if your system clock isn't showing. There are bunches of different designs available to choose from, so you'll probably find one that works for you.

Wallpaper Clock selections are available for free; just find one you like and download it. For full functionality, you need to also grab a clock engine application to run the show. These are available for free as well for Windows, Mac, Linux, and even iPhone. Note that the "recommended" Windows app is only a 30-day trial, but in the "Other programs…" list below it on the download page, there are other free apps to choose from.

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There's nothing like a pile of indecipherable data. Whether it's a log of visitors to your website, or fluctuations in the price of tea in China, just having a bunch of numbers doesn't really help you to analyze and understand the world around you—or at least it doesn't without giving it some serious thought. Sometimes it's a lot more helpful if you can look at things graphically as a flowchart, bargraph, or in some other right-brain-friendly medium. It's easier to spot trends, for example, if you see a line sloping upward (hooray!) or downward (oops!), than just a jumble of digits.

If you're tying to gain mastery of your data, a tool like yEd might be your ticket home. It supports oodles of different layouts and and symbols, so there's bound to be a way you can make your data talk to you. It's easy to work with, as you can rearrange all the tools and palettes to make sense for your work style. And you can export your results into a bunch of different bitmap and vector formats, suitable for including in reports or posting on the web.

yEd is a Java application. If you've got the right JRE on your machine, it'll run anywhere, including Windows, Mac, Linux, and more. For some of these, it'll work even if you don't have the right runtime, since it's included with the download. Sweet!

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Some people just love souvenirs. You may recognize them as the ones who can't go to the Grand Canyon without grabbing an official Grand Canyon ashtray or water bottle. On the other hand, it is nice to collect a little something and bring it home with you to help prompt all those happy memories of journeys past. That all works okay if you're traveling around in the real world, but where are the souvenir shops for the trips you take around the web? For those, you're going to need to create your own little bring-along goodies.

Web Page Thumbnails is a tool that can give you a hand. With its easy to use interface, you'll be grabbing web pages and turning them into thumbnail images in no time. It's got a built in web browser, so there's no messy cut-and-paste of URLs between IE or Firefox and this tool. Use your new thumbnails to catalog interesting pages you run across as you wander around the web, or maybe something more useful, like creating a graphical sitemap of your website, complete with pictures. It creates a gallery of images you've already grabbed, so you'll always know where you've been (keeping an eye on where you're going is up to you).

Web Page Thumbnails is a free download. It's a Windows application and will run under WinXP and later.

Download Web Page Thumbnails

When you work with images and other graphical elements, every pixel counts. If your alignment is off just a tad, it doesn't look right; if your measurements are off just a bit, ti's not going to work.

PMeter is a little tool that can help you with these problems and more. This portable app has a bunch of features that make it helpful. First, it's a ruler, so you can measure goodies on the screen. While by default it sits horizontally on your desktop, a quick double-click rotates it to a vertical orientation. Drag it around your screen to measure this and that. It also includes a magnifier and a color picker, so you can zoom in and grab colors from images. And it displays mouse pointer coordinates, so you'll always know where you (or your mouse) are.

PMeter is a free download and runs on your Widows machine.

Download PMeter

Has this ever happened to you? You've got a digital photo that you really love, except for that thing you need to take out of it. It could be anything from the bars on the cage at the zoo that get in the way of that cute Panda cub, to that great picture of you that just happens to have your Ex in it. If only you could get rid of that extra stuff.

This may be a job for PhotoWipe. Just drag your image into the app and paint the stuff you want to get rid of with black. Black? Yep, and then click the Preview button, and the sections you over-painted will automagically go away and be replaced with a reasonable facsimile of what the picture might look like without them. Through some behind-the-scenes sleight-of-hand, the app looks at the area of the picture around where you applied the paint and makes a guess as to what it might have looked like originally. Your results may vary, of course, and apparently you'll have better luck with long, narrow regions–like those zoo cage bars–than with bigger areas (Mr. or Ms. Wrong), but either way, you've improved the overall appearance of your image.

PhotoWipe is a free Windows application.

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Not everything you do on your computer has to be serious. Sure, you've got spreadsheets and reports to work on and all that, but sometimes it's nice to just kick back and have a little fun. So how long has it been since you had a new cursor?

Cursor Editor lets you create a whole pile of new cursors. You can make them plain or fancy, static or animated, and more. Import images or draw them yourself, whichever you prefer. Build a whole set so that you've covered not only "normal", but also all the various resize, move, and busy cursors as well. And once you get one you really like, you can share it with the world as part of the publisher's free online library.

A free download, Cursor Editor is a Windows application. You should be able to use with on systems running Win2k and later.

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Windows Metafiles (WMF) are an image format that lets you easily incorporate pictures into Word, Excel, and other apps that support that format. There aren't lots of tools out there, however, that let you view those files without embedding them into a document or spreadsheet first. That's not too handy.

WMF Viewer is the exception to this. With this tool you can open WMF files and see what's inside of them before you start sticking them in your documents. It's compatible with standard 16-bit files, and also the newer 32-bit Enhanced Metafiles (EMF). You can open multiple files at once, and once you're in there, it's easy to zoom, scale, align, and more. You can even print them out if you want to.

WMF Viewer is a free download. It's a Windows app and runs under any Win32 system, so you should be able to use it with anybody from Win95 up through Windows 7.

Download WMF Viewer