There’s a lot of buzz about Konfabulator, a JavaScript runtime engine for OSX which lets you run beautiful little applications called Widgets. Using the gorgeous display capabilities of OSX’s Quartz rendering engine, these easily scriptable little apps fit seamlessly into the Mac interface and can be made to do just about anything. With a little bit of Javascript and some XML skills, almost anyone could — in theory — create a new widget.
Of course there’s nothing quite like this for the Windows folks, but I’d like to point out two (free) little apps I use all the time. Colourificator is a tiny little app which sits in the system tray and pops up to provide a small color-specifying and -sampling inteface. The sliders will be familiar to anyone using Photoshop, and the display can be set to show the colors in hex, RGB, percentage or C++ notation. Best for me is the eyedropper, which works system-wide, unlike Photoshop’s eyedropper which only works within the application window. And as a bonus — for me, anyway — one of the 3 options for the program allows me to choose whether I want the app to show the word as “color” or “colour”.
The other free app I use all the time is WindowWatch from Dev4Dev, another system tray tool which allows me to resize application windows to any size I choose. Comes in very handy when you’re trying to develop websites for smaller screen sizes and you don’t feel like going through the rigamarole of changing the system’s display size. This little app also includes a set of pop-up rulers which let you measure the size of items on the desktop or in app windows.
These 2 little tools may not be as pretty as Konfabulator, but they are probably as useful.