Snipping Tool: Windows 7 built in screen capture tool

What do you do when you want to capture a screen shot, part of it or some window on windows machine? Don’t you press “Print Screen” button on a key board then do paste into mspaint and do the required capture, highlight or marking? If you have a windows 7 and you still do it this way only, then let me tell you ‘You live in stone era’.  Don’t you know about Snipping Tool?
 

Snipping tool is a free and simple screen capturing tool which comes built in with windows 7. This is another good built tool in Windows 7.

For opening Snipping tool, 

Click windows button and start typing “snipping tool” > You will see “Snipping tool”  under Programs. > Right click on it and select ‘Pin to Start Menu‘ or ‘Pin toTask Bar’ so that you can find it immediately when you need it.

Snipping Tool

When you want to take a snap of something, open a corresponding window and open this tool. There are three simple menus :

New Options

New : Select what you want to capture
     Free Form Snip: Capture free area of any shape.
    Rectangular Snip: Capture rectangular area.
    Window Snip: Capture an open window.
    Full Screen Snip: Captures full screen.
 

Cancel :  Use this if you want to minimize Snipping tool. Particularly when you want to capture different window than currently opened one.
 

Options : Use this to edit some preferences. 

Snip Editing

Once you have captured the snap, this tool opens your snip and provides you options to Save it, Get a new one, Edit it with colorful pens, Highlight area and an Eraser to undo pen and highlight editing.

 One Extra tip, not related to Snipping tool :

“You can take a snap of some window by opening that window and  “Alt + Print Screen” then paste into mspaint !!”

Free Personal Source and Version Control Solution: Use SVN over Dropbox.

   Want to use some source control and version control tool for your personal use? And don’t want to use public repositories github? And also want to save your all source over a safe, reliable and sharable cloud? Then simplest and free solution is to use SVN, a very good version control tool, and save your SVN repository over your Dropbox account which will save your source over a safer cloud.

   For doing this download and install SVN tortoise client and Dropbox application on your machine. I hope you have an account on Dropbox : a file hosting service operated by Dropbox, Inc. that offers cloud storage, file synchronization, and client software(description copied from Wikipedia). Dropbox takes care of storage, safety, backup and sync for you.

   Once you have installed Dropbox and configured your account, you will be able to see your Dropbox folder on C:\Users\[YourUsername]\Dropbox. By default it syncs all of your Dropbox folders but you can select the folders to be synced from 

Dropbox > Preferences > Advanced > Selective sync.

   Now you are ready to create SVN repository over Dropbox. You just need to follow following simple steps:

1. Go to Dropbox folder, Create a new Folder, it’s your repository so name it accordingly. Right click on this new folder and select
 

Tortoise SVN > Create Repository here
 

Then you will see a dialog saying Repository Created as shown here..

2. Click on ‘Create folder structure’ to create trunk/branches/tags structure inside this new repository.

3. Bang!! Your repository with folder structure is ready now. Click ‘Start Repobrowser’  for opening repo-browser. Remember don’t ever ever ever modify this folder(your repository folder) of your own.  As this folder is SVN repository, it’s structure and data inside it is meant for SVN only.

4. Now you need to add your source code to your own SVN repository.  For that do this :

Right click on your workspace folder > TortoiseSVN >  import > give URL of a folder under trunk (you can copy URL of trunk from repo-browser and add required folder name to it after ‘/’ ) into ‘URL of repository’ > Ok. 

5. You have added your workspace to repository but it’s not versioned yet on your machine. For that right click on workspace folder and SVN Checkout the new imported folder from repository.

6. Once you have mapped your workspace to your local SVN repository, you can use your workspace and commit files as you were committing to standard SVN repository. Those files will just be committed to local repository.

  But don’t be curious about where these files go inside repository folder on your local machine, leave it to the SVN. Also don’t do any modifications to this repository folder. SVN takes care of everything.

7. Now your source code is inside your Dropbox folder that you should mark for sync from your machine if you are using selective sync. If you do manual sync of your Dropbox then keep good practice to sync this repository folder to Dropbox whenever you do any commit or changes that you must do from repo-browser only. Also keep in mind that this folder on Dropbox should also never be modified manually.

     You also can share this Dropbox folder to your teammates through Dropbox share and your teammates can use this folder directly as SVN repository.