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Some of the more interesting tools out there are mashups of separate applications that just seem to fit together. If you're a fan of the peanut butter cup, then you know what the right kind of synergy can accomplish.

DesktopTweet is an app that lets you easily take screenshots on your system and tweet them. Give it your Twitter login credentials, and you're good to go. With this tool up and running, you take your screenshot—a user-defined region, the whole screen, or even an image file—write a quick tweet, and then upload it all to your favorite Twitter picture service. It currently supports TwitPic, yfrog, and several others. Whether you're giving out elaborate instructions or just passing along a snapshot of that weird thing you saw on your screen, it's easy to let the world see things through your monitor.

DesktopTweet is a Windows application. You can download it for free.

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Some folks are left-brained, meaning that they do well with linguistic and reasoning-related tasks. Others excel at right-brained activities, tending toward the more artistic. And of course, there are those who are equally a home in either world, as well as those for whom it's all a challenge. If you tend to live most of your life in the left brain, things like design and color may be tougher to wrap your brain (sorry!) around. For folks like that, or anybody who could use a hand in dealing with color palettes, there's Color Warlock.

Color Warlock comes with pre-defined color charts, which can be a great help to the artistically uninspired. Color swatches include names and the all-important hex values (#9F8170) that you can use while building web pages. Or if you prefer, you can create your own collections of colors with its built in Chart Builder and use this tool to save them off to share with others.

Color Warlock is a Windows application. It's donationware, meaning you can download it and use if for free, or you can throw a few dollars in the jar to encourage the publisher to keep on coding.

Download Color Warlock

Sometimes bigger is not better. While your digital photos may include all kinds of interesting stuff, they're probably pretty big as well. That may be fine when you're looking a them one at a time, but if you need to build a gallery of them for a website or email a couple of them, that big size—both in bytes and in inches on the screen—is not your best friend. It would be nice to have an easy to use tool to help you build thumbnails of your images.

Easy Thumbnails is just such a tool. With this application, you can make take your images and resize them one at a time, in groups, or even a whole folder's worth all at once. Add text to your new filenames to make it easy to tell the thumbnails from the originals. With several built in filters, you can clean your pictures up at the same time, and its preview window lets you see what you're going to get before you commit.

You can grab a copy of Easy Thumbnails for free. It should run under just about any flavor of Win32 from Win 9x on up.

Download Easy Thumbnails

Back in the day, if you needed to lay out a network or some such, you grabbed a pad of graph paper and started doodling. While that may still be the simplest way to plan out your home office, if you're going to get much more complicated than that, you're probably going to want a somewhat more robust tool to work with.

CADE is a free vector editing diagramming tool that's perfectly suited to laying out network diagrams. It's got a palette full of network equipment you can just drag and drop into your diagram, so that you can look at the big picture, instead of getting bogged down in the details of drawing your servers, desktop machines, and other network nodes. And while you're in the neighborhood, you can also use CADE to create flowcharts, maps, and all manner of other graphical goodies.

CADE is a Windows application.

Download CADE

If you've got just a few pictures—maybe some web images, maybe some digital photos—it's easy to keep track of them all. But once you go beyond a certain point, it all pretty much spins out of control. That means that more likely than not, you've got duplicates of images. And with the size of digital photo files these days, even a few extra copies can take up an awful lot of extra space on your hard drive or memory card. It would be nice if you could go through all that stuff from time to time and get rid of the extras.

VisiPics is a tool that can help you do just that. While it can do a straight file comparisons looking for matching files and checksums, it's smart enough to look at your images in several different ways to see just how similar non-identical images are. That means that two versions of the same photo—maybe one cropped a certain way and the other not—are most likely going to show up as duplicates. Then you can decide whether you want to keep both of them or not. And to make it easy, all suspected duplicates are displayed side-by-side so you can make the final call.

You can run VisiPics on Windows machines under Win2000 and later.

Download VisiPics

You've got a pile of pictures that you're trying to sort through. Back in the day, you could take all the negatives for those pictures–maybe a roll of film, maybe more–and produce a "contact sheet", basically thumbnail-size images of all those pictures. It made it relatively easy to visually scan those little pictures to see which ones you wanted to go further with, to enlarge and print them, or maybe to choose the images to feature in your new book. Now that you use a digital camera, it's not so easy to do that–where do they keep the negatives for all those JPEGs anyway?

Cas is a tool that can give you a hand here. Just drag a folder of images onto the app, and it will generate a single image that incorporates all those other pictures. Now you can easily scan your eyes over it and see just what you've got in there, and decide which photos or other images to use, or to go back to the drawing board and take some more pictures.

Cas is a free download, and runs under Windows.

Download Cas

Can you ever have enough icons? These little pictures are everywhere. If you're building websites or desktop apps, and happen to be an artist, then you're good to go. If, however, you're more focused on the coding or the business behind it all, then drawing those cute little pictures may be something outside of your comfort zone. That's where a tool like SimplyIcon comes in handy.

With SimplyIcon, you take an existing picture—an image created by someone else who has the time and talent to do these things—and turn it into an icon. Or several icons actually. Just drag your image and drop it on the application window, and it will convert it into an icon, in several popular sizes. It's going to work best for you if you start with a square picture, since that's where it's going to end up, but you've got to admit it's a lot easier to grab a square selection out of an image than to create the whole thing yourself.

SimplyIcon is a free download. It's a Windows application.

Download SimplyIcon

It can be handy to capture what you see on your screen. You might want to document something interesting you found on a web site, or some funny message you see on a desktop app. Most operating systems let you grab a piece of your display's real estate, but it's not always the easiest—or most intuitive—thing that you'll do today. It can involve a couple of arcane commands and a few not-so-often used apps. Or you can check out Owely.

With Owely, you can grab a piece of your screen, which is convenient enough, but then you can add to it. Crop your image to keep only the important stuff; annotate your screenshot to show people what it is you're trying to point out to them with text, shapes, or even hand-drawn lines, arrows, and such. And when you're all done, it's easy to upload your masterpiece, so that everybody else can see what you've done.

Owely is available for Linux, Mac (10.5, Intel only), and Windows (2000 and later).

Download Owely

I wonder how much time people spend tweaking images. While we're overrun with various pictures—downloads from websites, output from digital cameras, and all that—what are the chances that you're going to be able to use this picture or that one without having to get in there and mess with it some way or another. Maybe the colors aren't right, maybe the dog's got that demon-possessed look in his eye from a goofy flash setup, or maybe your image just isn't the right size. There are lots of tools out there to do what needs to be done, but if you're looking only at resizing your images, Photoshop, GIMP, or many of the others may be a lot more horsepower than what you're looking for.

Image Resizer for Windows is a tool with a single purpose in life: take a picture and make it a different size. It comes with some handy preset sizes you might want to use for small, medium, or large screen sizes, as well as a selection for mobile devices and a custom option, that lets you choose the size of your resulting resized image. By default, it will take your image and modify it to make the result be either larger or smaller than the source, but you can set it to only shrink larger images if you prefer. Also, while out of the box it creates copies of your pictures with your desired new dimensions, you can tell it to resize your originals instead. With this option, you'll save space, but you'll probably want to make sure you've got an archival copy of your original somewhere in case you ever need to get back to the unprocessed version.

As you might expect, Image Resizer for Windows is a Windows app. You should be able to use it with Windows 2000 and later.

Download Image Resizer for Windows

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) give you great control over how your web pages are going to look. Back in the day, if you had some real preferences over what went where on a page, you had to enter the world of tables nested inside of tables, and that wasn't pretty for anybody. With the advent of CSS, there was a real break between content and presentation, and everybody's code was dramatically cleaner. Nice. But frankly it can still be rather complicated to make sure that the right bits hit the page in the right place.

The Square Grid is a framework that greatly simplifies the process of creating CSS-driven websites. It consists of a set of templates and worksheets to use in laying out your pages. Sketch sheets let you design on paper with pencil. Template files for Illustrator, Photoshop, and InDesign, let you set up your pages with your favorite graphics tool, and a style file has all the parameters you need to implement your design on your actual pages.

You can grab your copy of The Square Grid for free.

Download The Square Grid