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Title: Useful, Unusual Tools You've Found Post by: Lorelei on 2007 February 20, 01:15:24 I'm not talking about the usual suspects, be they SimPE or SimCategorizer, but other tools that help you with your Simming.
Google "JDirPrinter.exe" for a free tool that lists, in a text file, the contents of any directory. Good for obsessives who want a record of their downloads. Google "Del.icio.us", a free bookmarks manager. You can access your personal bookmarks anywhere from any computer, and deletions are carried over when you get back home. Useful for me when using a T1 line at school. I bookmark interesting large downloads at home, then find the links at school, download them quickly, delete the link, go back home and the link is already gone, as desired. You can choose to make all, some, or none of the links public or private. You can also find other people's links, and categorize links. Links related to Flash and ActionScript, for school, are thus easily separated from Sims2 stuff. Tool I can't wait for: I believe someone at MTS2 is working on an easy clothing categorizer that will aid in binning and deleting hair (and clothing?) and I am excited about it. Will be able to move violently pink reds to custom and blondes, greys and other normal colours in custom to proper bins. If lucky, my custom bin will only have fugly hats from Maxis and weird XMS-like unnaturally rainbowified recolours that seemed like a good idea at the time but which I rarely use. :) Title: Useful, Unusual Tools You've Found Post by: BlueSoup on 2007 February 20, 01:21:35 The tool you can't wait for is by jfade, not "someone at MTS2."
Title: Useful, Unusual Tools You've Found Post by: Lorelei on 2007 February 20, 01:50:52 Quote from: "BlueSoup" The tool you can't wait for is by jfade, not "someone at MTS2." THANK YOU!! Had a memory lapse. JFADE, JFADE, JFADE. *burning it into my mental harddrive* Title: Useful, Unusual Tools You've Found Post by: redisenchanted on 2007 February 20, 02:26:12 Gadwin print screen helps with picture taking.
Fast Stone photo resizer lets you change files in batches. Both paint.net and gimp are great free photo shop like programs. Title: Useful, Unusual Tools You've Found Post by: missangelica on 2007 February 20, 03:35:05 *clings to her Gadwin print screen* I've had it for years. I recommend it fully. :D
I use Photoshop for batch file changing nowadays but any adequate paint program will have it. Title: Useful, Unusual Tools You've Found Post by: Doursim on 2007 February 20, 04:25:59 If you're a lazy downloader like me, and are not picky about categorizing your downloads folder, I recommend The Sims File Maid. Loved it for Sims 1 and <3 it for TS2. Just download everything to your desktop (or wherever) open up filemaid, highlight zip/rars....drag into the "lawn" and presto! Now you can delete those stupid zips. It also skips over anything thats not a package (so no stupid images, or readmes in your downloads folder).
Title: Useful, Unusual Tools You've Found Post by: Plum on 2007 February 20, 08:00:08 I used to use File Maid until I realized that if I highlight my ZIP/RAR files and right-click I have the option to "Extract files here" and that does the same thing but much faster than File Maid, which tends to freeze if you give her too much to do at once.
Title: Useful, Unusual Tools You've Found Post by: Whatever on 2007 February 20, 16:17:11 Yeah, took me a few years to find that trick :oops:
Title: Useful, Unusual Tools You've Found Post by: Shark*Tooth*Hester on 2007 February 20, 16:29:24 Artweaver if you can't be arsed to track down photoshop for the 5 avitars and recolors you do a year. :lol: It's free, and a nice little program.
Title: Useful, Unusual Tools You've Found Post by: BlackPearl on 2007 February 20, 17:59:32 This is really neat, you can place your sims on counter tops, etc. in poses and add more things to tables, etc.
http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?t=217234 Sims Wiki http://www.sims2wiki.info/Content_List Title: Useful, Unusual Tools You've Found Post by: Doursim on 2007 February 20, 18:02:19 Quote from: "Plum" I used to use File Maid until I realized that if I highlight my ZIP/RAR files and right-click I have the option to "Extract files here" and that does the same thing but much faster than File Maid, which tends to freeze if you give her too much to do at once. Thats nice too, but I don't have my default download location in my downloads folder (er, I download stuff besides sims things, lol) Title: Useful, Unusual Tools You've Found Post by: alia on 2007 February 20, 21:10:40 Quote from: "Plum" I used to use File Maid until I realized that if I highlight my ZIP/RAR files and right-click I have the option to "Extract files here" and that does the same thing but much faster than File Maid, which tends to freeze if you give her too much to do at once. I've done that for years. I extract them all in the same folder. Then I click View -> Details from the explorer bar, sort them by the filetype and move all the .package -files to my DLs folder. It's still faster than filemaid. Title: Re: Useful, Unusual Tools You've Found Post by: icedwhitemocha on 2007 February 20, 22:57:48 Quote from: "Lorelei" Google "JDirPrinter.exe" for a free tool that lists, in a text file, the contents of any directory. Good for obsessives who want a record of their downloads. *mashes nonexistent thanks button* Title: Useful, Unusual Tools You've Found Post by: FreeForMeAlso on 2007 February 21, 16:20:49 I really like Double killer http://www.bigbangenterprises.de/en/doublekiller/download.htm This is great if you have your files in folders and want to make sure you don't have more than one version of the file (sometimes those names are not descriptive ). This program is fast too!
I've also found list maker to be a helpful program http://www.listmaker.cc/ And totally sims related MultiSims2PackExtract http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?t=37577 (MTS2 is down so I hope that is the right link, if not just search for it there). Title: Useful, Unusual Tools You've Found Post by: Feverish on 2007 February 22, 00:50:48 I use clipmagic for all my print screens.
I don't have to paste and save every time I press print screen. It records them all. Title: Useful, Unusual Tools You've Found Post by: Lorelei on 2007 February 23, 05:05:49 Quote from: "Feverish" I use clipmagic for all my print screens. I don't have to paste and save every time I press print screen. It records them all. If you got SimCamera.exe during Sims 1, it still works as well. Title: Useful, Unusual Tools You've Found Post by: Disorder on 2007 February 23, 08:13:35 Unzip them all is useful when I have a .rar or .zip with 40 other .rars or. zips in it, because it'll do them all at once. That's the only thing I can think of using right now.
Title: Useful, Unusual Tools You've Found Post by: liegenschonheit on 2007 February 23, 08:14:15 YAFSS does the same thing, just saves jpgs every time you hit the print screen button. Saves me ages every time I want to take screenshots or participate in a contest.
Oh and Flashgot is a godsend when you want to download everything in one go. I've used it when sussi's site and a few others went down just to make sure I had everything, and it's way faster. It would be perfect for the booty, come to think of it. It is a plugin for firefox, and I think there is a stand alone version for explorer too. Title: Useful, Unusual Tools You've Found Post by: BlueSoup on 2007 February 23, 08:22:29 When I had to reformat, I used flashgot for redownloading the booty. It was perfect.
Title: Useful, Unusual Tools You've Found Post by: alia on 2007 February 23, 09:51:59 For those of you who do not know what it is
YAFSS can be found here http://www.marian-aldenhoevel.de/YAFSScreen/ Instructions can be found here: http://www.bluegrassairlines.com/screenshotguide.htm Title: Useful, Unusual Tools You've Found Post by: SunsetCiti on 2007 February 24, 17:04:21 Referring to the print screen savers, about how good is the quality of the saved images? I used one recommended to me by a friend but it was horrible graphics-wise. (It wasn't one that's been mentioned here so far, though.)
Title: Useful, Unusual Tools You've Found Post by: Doursim on 2007 February 24, 17:22:59 I've never found a print screen tool (that was free) that has been the same image quality as the good ol' print screen button.
Title: Useful, Unusual Tools You've Found Post by: redisenchanted on 2007 February 24, 17:44:32 Gadwin print screen has the same quality as far as I can tell.
Title: Useful, Unusual Tools You've Found Post by: alia on 2007 February 24, 21:04:37 Thank you! I've tried some of them, but the picture quality was pretty horrid every time. :)
I'll have to try Gadwin. Title: Useful, Unusual Tools You've Found Post by: anoramic on 2007 February 24, 22:55:51 I prefer Fraps. Gadwin causes my game to minimize every time I take a snapshot. Fraps gets the picture with a press of a button and automatically saves it to a folder. It has the same quality as the game; it doesn't modify the image in any way. If you save it as .BMP, that is.
http://fraps.com/ Title: Useful, Unusual Tools You've Found Post by: liegenschonheit on 2007 February 24, 22:57:58 I haven't seen any quality difference in YAFSS, really. No pixel artifacts or weird inclusions in the images or anything like that, it saves a high quality jpg. I've used the resulting screenshots in contests and as preview pics for my own site, and I wouldn't settle for bad quality there.
Here is an example, for anyone who cares to see. This is a completely unedited screenshot taken with YAFSS. Example Photo (http://www.digitalperversion.net/pics/example.jpg) *edit* Also, another reason I prefer YAFSS is because it is extremely lightweight and uses almost no resources. It doesn't cause any lag at all in any game or app I've used it with. The only downside is that if you press printscreen too rapidly in succession, it sometimes misses a shot. If you wait a second or two between captures it doesn't have that problem though. Title: Useful, Unusual Tools You've Found Post by: lazyviolet on 2007 February 24, 23:19:53 unzip them all is great and i use irfanview for screenshots.
Title: Useful, Unusual Tools You've Found Post by: SunsetCiti on 2007 February 24, 23:57:35 Oh wow, finally! A good printscreen program. Thanks for the help!
Title: Useful, Unusual Tools You've Found Post by: RedLove on 2007 February 25, 00:17:50 I use Gadwin too but I'm tempted to try this YAFSS
Also I got flashgot yesterday and now I need a good download manager? I used Flashget but it was pretty slow or did I do something wrong? Can anybody help? Title: Useful, Unusual Tools You've Found Post by: Not Paper on 2007 February 25, 03:19:42 I use IrfanView (http://irfanview.com) to get my screen captures. If it's set to take screenshots and save them as bitmaps or PNGs, then the quality is just as good as the print screen button.
It's not a highly touted feature-- I'm not even sure if it's mentioned on the site in more than the changelog-- but it's there. On the file menu, you go to options > Capture (C), and the rest is mostly self-explanatory. |