17 Awesome Adobe air apps for designers

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One fine day I was trying to fill in an important official form online on my Mozilla Firefox’s browser. After spending about half an hour I reached the last few questions of the form. One question there asked me to click a checkbox to answer but I could see no checkbox on the screen. After wasting a lot of time reading the instructions and every possible detail over and over again I asked for advice from my friends. One person told me that I should try to refill the form on Internet Explorer. I tried it and now the checkbox appeared and I successfully completed and submitted the form online.

The problem just described occurred because the form was designed to work especially for Internet Explorer. You see, designing an application for all systems is tedious as one has to tweak the runtime code again and again to make it compatible to work with different systems. Here is where Adobe AIR jumps in. If an internet application is designed using Adobe AIR then it will automatically work for all systems and browsers.

Technically speaking:

“Adobe AIR is a cross-operating system runtime that lets developers combine HTML, JavaScript, Adobe Flash and Flex technologies, and Action Script to deploy rich Internet applications (RIAs) on a broad range of devices including desktop computers, netbooks, tablets, smartphones, and TVs. AIR allows developers to use familiar tools such as Adobe Dreamweaver®, Flash Builder®, Flash Catalyst®, Flash Professional, or any text editor to build their applications and easily deliver a single application installer that works across operating systems.” – Adobe’s website.

Adobe AIR has a wide array of apps that can help designers design better applications. Below I have selected 17 of them.

1. Shrink O’Matic

Shrink O’Matic is an AIR application to easily (batch) resize (shrink) images. It handles JPGs, GIFs and PNGs.

2. WebKut

WebKut is an AIR application that allows you to capture web pages, or parts of them in a very simple way. It provides you 3 capture options: the entire page, the current view, or only a selection.

3. Splashup

4. Icon Generator

5. Boks

Boks is an AIR application (so it works on Windows, Mac and Linux) that provides a User Interface for Blueprint CSS’s framework. It’s been designed for those who think the Grid System is good but never really took the time to give it love.

6. Monster Debugger

Monster Debugger is an open source debugger for Adobe Flash, Flex and AIR, It is made in Flex and AIR and offered for free by De Monsters.

7. 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.

8. Snippage

Wouldn’t it be great if you could take pieces of your favorite web sites and put them on your desktop? Things like that auction you’ve got your eye on, your web mail’s inbox, or even that search box you’re always using. Well, Snippage lets you do just that.

9. Font Picker

Font picker is a simple tool that lets you browse through the fonts installed on your computer and narrow down your selection to choose the one that’s right for your project. There are two versions of Font picker.

10. Kuler

11. Doomi

12. Live Brush

Live brush is a drawing application. It employs an easy-to-use brush tool that reacts to your gesture. By combining simple motion controls with brush styles, Live brush offers a fun and unique way to create graphics.

13. Image Sizer

ImageSizer is now up to version 0.4.6. If you’re paying attention to the number of updates I’ve been putting up here, that’s a noticeable jump from the last update.

14. Any Flicker

15. Color Picker

16. Web Snap Shot

Enter the Url and Press Snap. Or Drag&Drop it from your browser. Click on the Thumnails to Save. With Auto Save Checked, the thumbnails are immediately saved to your ‘save’ folder.

17. Z Flicker

ZFlick enables you to search for anything that your mind could desire. If you come across a really cool image save it! Simply drag-n-drop to your desktop. zFlick takes the capabilities of Adobe AIR and produces a rich user friendly animated interface.