January 22, 2006

Cropper Plugins

Recently, I jumped back into developing some plugins for Brian's Cropper screenshot tool. For a while I was using the built in capture tool that comes with OneNote since I am a heavy OneNote user, however, since I upgraded to dual monitors, it's fairly sluggish. It works fine, just a little sluggish for when I want to take quick shots and am not interested in journaling about them in OneNote (it automatically creates a Side Note entry with the capture).

Also, I have noticed some problems with TinyPic. For a free service, it's unbeatable, however, I have noticed some things where I have preferred to use Flickr to host my screenshots instead. These complaints were:

  1. Quality. TinyPic shrinks large images or images with high color depth, so clarity cannot be relied upon.
  2. Speed. Sometimes TinyPic is rather slow to load the images.
  3. Reliability. I have noticed at times it won't pull back an image at all. This is probably just an exacerbated #2 problem.

So my three plugins so far are:

FlickrOutput (1.0)
OneNoteOutput (1.0)
TinyPicOutput (1.2)

All three of these were thrown together really quickly, so please let me know if you find bugs or otherwise room for improvements.

Below is a history of the related posts on the plugin development:

http://paltman.com/2005/11/22/updated-cropper-tinypic-plugin/
http://paltman.com/2005/10/30/update:-cropper-tinypic-plugin/
http://paltman.com/archive/2005/10/01/47.aspx
http://paltman.com/archive/2005/07/11/10.aspx
http://paltman.com/archive/2005/07/11/9.aspx
http://paltman.com/archive/2005/07/09/7.aspx

[UPDATE - 7/22/2006]
FlickrOutput 1.8 is released fixing the non-existent PhotoSet issue (download).

[Update] The links to the uploads are dead and have been removed. The code has been moved over to a project on CodePlex.