Excellent AIR Applications Of Adobe For Web – Web Developer Geeks
If you’re unfamiliar with Adobe AIR, it’s a cross-operating system platform that allows developers to use HTML, Ajax, and Flash to build desktop applications. In the past couple of years AIR has gained a lot of popularity, and there’s been a lot of great applications created, including some that are very useful to web designers.
Here are some of these AIR apps for web designers that really stand out i terms of functionality and usefulness.
Adobe Shortcut App for Creative Suite
If you have a hard time remembering shortcuts for all of the Adobe products that you used, then this app will be a life recoverer.
Pixus
Pixus allows you to measure screen objects in pixels using both mouse and keyboard control, and preview your design with skins and presets.
Measure the screen objects in pixels using both mouse and keyboard control.
Preview your design with skins and presets.
Quick guides for checking layout.
Multi-screen support.
Auto update.
Image Sizer
ImageSizer is an application built to optimize, rename and resize a batch of jpg images producing a zip file containing the images. Now ImageSizer is available with Crop tool.
Shrink O’Matic
Shrink O’Matic is an AIR application to easily (batch) resize (shrink) images. It handles JPGs, GIFs and PNGs.
Simply drag and drop images and they’ll be resized as you wish! Options allow you to choose the output sizes, names and formats.
Icon Generator
Icon Generator is a little application built on AIR that lets you generate a CS5 or Web 2. 0 style icon. Three versions are prepared according to the usage.
Online – browser that can be used.
Pro – Installation type. Drag & drop in addition to «Online».
Lite – Installation type. You can make icon in only 3 steps.
WebKut
WebKut is an AIR application that allows you to capture web pages, or parts of them in a very mere way.
It provides you 3 capture options:
the entire page
the current view
only a selection.
Snippely
Snippely is a basic text and code organizational tool. Instead of storing bits of code, quick notes, and memos in text files all over your hard drive, this application will let you save and organize «snippets» in one convenient location. A snippet is a collection of one or more pieces of code and notes. Snippets are stored in groups for organization and quick retrieval.
Boks–A Visual Grid Editor
Boks is an AIR application works on Windows, Mac and Linux, that provides a User Interface for Blueprint CSS’s framework. It’s been designed for the people who think the Grid System is nice. It handles grid configuration, baseline rhythm pimpin’, and grid. png export, HTML layout and much more!
Fractal4D
Fractal4D isn’t your typical AIR app. This app allows you to create very cool looking fractals that can be exported to Illustrator or as a png. There are tons of options that control how the fractals look such as color, blending, easing and blurring.
COLOURlovers Desktop Color Finder
You can use the Desktop Color Finder to search our entire database of nearly 1 million named colors and more than 30, 000 user created color palettes.
Em based layouts – Vertical rhythm calculator
An em is a relative measurement based on the square of the font size at that particular point. As font sizes can vary across differing systems and displays, the result is that the emmeasurement will always be relatively sized and scalable. As we are now developing for a wider range of devices and screen sizes we should look to adopt em instead of pixels in all of our designs.
Contrast – A
Contrast-A allows users to interact with a 3-dimensional RGB color space, experiment with color combinations, check the contrast according to both WCAG 2. 0 and 1. 0 and see the results for different types of color deficiency. Custom color palettes can be created, printed and saved as Pdf to the user’s desktop.
Livebrush
Livebrush is a unique motion-based drawing tool. Use the speed of your brush to toss graphics around the screen or elegantly swing the brush around your cursor.
Over 100 styles and decorations. Export lines you draw as vector files for use in other graphics applications. Easily modify or create your styles while learning each setting using the convenient style preview.
Developers can also use Actionscript to dynamically control or augment brush movements.
