Part One of a series

I’ll be providing updated posts as I find more stuff that I think would be valuable to the creative/development community

There’s lots of software out there that’s free or available for a nominal fee that can increase your productivity and streamlining your production process. Here are a few that stand out (note: I am not responsible for broken links):

• Art Directors Toolkit offers a lot of great features, including:

1. View every character in a font;
2. Calculate point sizes;
3. Capture a color on-screen;
4. Translate RGB to Hex colors;
5. Convert Points to Picas or fractions to decimals;
6. Quickly search through industry-standard color libraries to obtain color information; calculate sizes for scaled images and more.

Move your mouse over the menu on the left to learn more about its features.

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• charlieX Screen Rulers

This tool is great for measuring anything displayed on your screen. You can display and drag a ruler in any application (including Finder) to get the dimensions of any document. I find this particularly handy for screenshots and web page dimensions.

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• Bookdog

I don’t know how I lived without it (well, I suppose I could say the same about my Mac…). Organizes your brower’s bookmarks, finds and eliminates duplicates and even checks to see if the site you’ve bookmarked is still at that same URL! A must-have.

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• Bean

A free word processor for Mac OS X. Some features:

• a live word count
• zoom-slider to easily change the view scale
• date-stamped backups
• autosaving
• page layout mode
• option to show invisible characters (tabs, returns, spaces)
• selection of text by text style, paragraph style, color, etc.
• floating windows option
• remembers cursor postion (excluding .txt, .html, .webarchive formats)

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• Todos

With a simple key combination, you can view all your applications without having to open your Applications folder.

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• Veenix Font Tools

Great font tool with lots of features, including:

• Type Book Creator
• Character Set Charts
• Character Inspector
• Font Samples Window
• Font Comparison Window
• Font Activation/Deactivation
• Export Fonts
• Font Search Tool

And speaking of fonts: ever try finding that exact font used in a a layout or design but just didn’t know what it was? Check out What The Font and let them try and find a match.