Daniel Martinoli’s Website

I wasn’t really happy with the way PixelGrab turned out. Sure, it worked, but it was kind of messy and didn’t look great. So I decided to completely rewrite it. I also decided that I would write it using WPF (since I’m trying to learn how do use this technology) instead of Windows Forms (which is outdated and limited on modern versions of Windows).

After a few days, here’s the end result: PixelGrab 2.0 – with a completely new WPF interface. It looks much nicer, in my opinion. More after the break.

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Don’t you just hate it when you lose a lot of data? I do. My webhost decided to kick the bucket and shut down. I was able to get my money back, but none of my data. So yeah, I was in a bit of trouble. That is, until I remembered that I had every single one of my blog posts backed up thanks to Windows Live Writer (which I use to write these blog entries).

Live Writer automatically saves everything you publish so restoring my blog posts was simply a matter of re-installing WordPress (the program that runs this blog on the web server) and then republishing all my blog entries! Simple!

Now I’m back up and running and you wouldn’t even be able to tell that the site has been down.

So, people, back up your files. When something bad happens to them, you know you’ll always have an extra copy.

PixelGrab is a small application I wrote aimed at web developers and graphic designers/artists. It helps to save a lot of time by retrieving the colour of any pixel on your desktop when you mouse over it.

The user has a great deal of control over the program. They can choose whether or not they want it to run automatically when Windows starts and can choose exactly what gets copied to the clipboard when a pixel is selected.

If you ever need to know the exact value of a colour (you know who you are if you do), then give PixelGrab a try. It’s free and it’s pretty good (if I say so myself).

Here’s some screenshots:

I found this tool awhile ago and I still can’t get over how useful it is! It’s a free application from Microsoft which makes blogging really, really easy. Instead of having to open up a web browser to write blog posts AND spending time getting them to display properly, I can do it all from Windows Live Writer.

The application will connect to your blog, prompt for a username and password, download your blog template (so everything looks good) and you’re good to go! In fact, before I wrote this post, I set up Writer in about two minutes.

More some more information, check out the Windows Live Website.