Pro Blog Design

Adobe AIR is a great platform to build efficient and cutting edge desktop applications, that work on any operating system.

In the last few years, hundreds of very useful applications have been built on AIR for all sorts of purposes. Here we focus our attention on apps built for web and graphic designers.

This list only contains applications that have proven to be dependable and useful for designers. We’ve split it up into these sections:

• Creating Graphics
• Design-Specific Tools
• Editing Images
• Taking Screenshots
• Productivity Tools
• Image Sharing Tools
• Multimedia Apps

Creating Graphics

1. Splashup Light:

Splashup Light is a casual desktop based image editor. It provides a lot of features to enhance, manipulate and edit your photos with minimum effort.

2. Color Lovers:

Color Lovers offers a desktop color finder for searching the ColorLovers community database. Using this app you can search from over 1 million named colors and 300,000 user created color palettes.

3. Contrast-A:

Contrast-A allows you to check for contrast, experiment with color combination and interact with a 3 dimensional RGB color space.

4. LiveBrush:

LiveBrush is a drawing app that lets you create extra-ordinary graphics by combining simple motion controls with creative brush styles.

5. Icon Generator:

Icon Generator allows you to create stylish icons with minimum drawing abilities. Just select the type of icon you want, customize the text and color and create your icon.

6. e2vector:

e2vector is an illustration tool with powerful features like layers, masks, gradients, intersection and path splicing. It also allows you to import/export SVG files.

7. ColorPicker:

Using ColorPicker you can either pick a color from a color grid or design a color using sliders to adjust the RGB values of a color. An essential tool for somebody trying to play around with colors.

8. ColorBrowser:

ColorBrowser is a simple app to organize your favorite color palettes locally. You can import color palettes that you have created elsewhere in the form of ASE files.

9. Kuler:

Kuler is probably the most popular design app for AIR. Kuler lets you generate color themes for any project and browse through thousands of themes created by the Kuler community. It lets you experiment with color variations without any hassle to design your new project.

10. Random Pattern:

A cool app that creates color patterns based on your given parameters.

Design-Specific Tools

11. Pixus:

What does a designer need more than a tool to measure pixels. Pixus does exactly that and more. Pixus lets you preview your designs and offers a multi-screen support.

12. FontPicker:

FontPicker is a simple tool that lets you see all the fonts installed on your computer and select one. You can also type in text to preview all the fonts before choosing one.

13. PixDif:

In addition to measuring pixels, PixDif also lets you measure difference between two design elements and tweak the alpha/opacity of the image.

14. Em Calculator:

Em is an important concept in typography and design. Finally, there is a calculator to measure em without any hassle.

15. HtmlTextEditor:

HtmlTextEditor caters to the most basic needs of a web designer, writing Html code. Also supoorts CDATA wrapping and changes the Html automatically when you change the rich text.

16. iPixer:

iPxer allows you to create interactive flash content from images. You can use it to create image annotations and interactive presentations.

17. OBO Site GatherAIR:

OBO Site GatherAIR is a website generation tool that lets you create Html templates with ease. You can also use it to drag and drop SWF files into your template.

18. Boks:

Boks is an app for designers to work visually with the Blueprint CSS framework. Lets you drag and drop grid elements, preview in browser and compress your CSS code.

19. PixelWindow:

PixelWindow is another simple app to measure things on your screen using a transparent pixel ruler.

20. iPlotz:

iPlotz is all about letting you create wireframe pages and interactive mockups of your website or software.

21. PixelPerfect:

PixelPerfect is another great application to measure the size of objects on your screen. It also lets you create, resize, move and close windows.

22. DesignView:

DesignView is a great application for the design and development of Flex applications. It is a useful tool to create a quick layout before you start tweaking your MXML code.

23. Merlin:

If you are a designer with hundreds of fonts scattered around your hard drive, Merlin can help you organize them. It helps you by alphabetizing all the fonts and arranging them into folders by first alphabet.

24. Caliper:

Caliper is a measuring scale for your screen that can be dragged and rotated through 360 degrees.

Editing Images

25. ImageSizer:

ImageSizer allows you to resize images in a batch and put them in a compressed zip file. You can also use it to to batch rotate, optimize and rename images.

26. ImageDropr:

ImageDropr is a desktop app to upload images to Flickr. Just drag and drop your images into the application, tag or group tag them and start uploading them to Flickr.

27. XeIMG Image Editor:

XeIMG is an image editor that lets you apply effects and filters to your images. The features include blur, sharpen, negative, embossing, black and white e.t.c.

28. Shrink-o-Matic:

Shrink-o-Matic is a simple app to shrink/resize batch images. It supports Jpeg, Gif and PNG images.

29. JustResizeIt:

Resize multiple images by dragging and dropping into the application. Once done, drag the resized images into email, office documents or a folder.

30. CleVR Stitcher:

CleVR Stitcher is a simple panoramic photo stitcher. Just drag and drop your images and the app would create a panorama.

31. TiltShift Generator:

If you love re-touching photos, you’ll love this app. It allows you to create the famous Tilt Shift affect in your photos with a single click.

Taking Screenshots

32. WebKut:

WebKut is a simple and free desktop app to capture screenshots from the web. You can capture the whole screen or a part of it.

33. Snippage:

Snippage allows you to create snippets from any website and place them on your desktop.

34. WebSnapshot:

With WebSnapshot you can take thumbnail, browser size or full page snapshots of any website. The snapshots are automatically saved into your specified folder.

35. PhotoTable:

PhotoTable is a unique tool to capture images from the web where you can simply drag an image from any website to the PhotoTable icon and it would be saved.

Productivity Tools

36. AgileAgenda:

AgileAgenda is a GTD tool that plans your schedule for you. Just enter the basic facts of your project and let the app plan out your schedule.

37. Adobe Shortcut App for Creative Suite:

Create and manage all your shortcuts with ease. A must have app for Graphic designers.

38. Live Presentations:

Live Presentations allows you to create and save presentations locally and share them online.

39. Ora Time and Expense:

Ora Time is a simple app for tracking and generating timesheets, invoices and expense reports. You can also use it to generate customizable reports and invoices for your clients.

40. Doomi:

Doomi is one of the simplest to-do apps around. It lets you create tasks, set reminders and archive your tasks.

41. Mindomo:

Mindomo is a mind mapping application that lets you organize your ideas, manage your tasks and goals and do all this visually.

42. FEAT:

Freelancer’s Estimation Assistance Tool lets you calculate hourly rates and project estimates.

43. Klok:

Klok is a personal time tracking application where all you need to do is press a button when you start working and press another when you stop working. Other features include drag and drop, excel export, archive and a collapsed view.

44. Fireworks Auto Backup Utility:

Ever had Fireworks crash on you? if you hate to lose your work with incidents like this, this app will work like a charm for you. It automatically creates backups of all the PNG files being worked on.

45. Ephemeris:

Ephemeris is an app for photographers that calculates accurate times of sunset and sunrise for that perfect shot.

46. BroadChoice Workspace:

BroadChoice workspace is an AIR based team collaboration app. You can send messages to your team mebers, share notes and tasks and create separate spaces for separate projects.

47. ConceptShare Desktop Companion:

ConceptShare lets you upload files, manage workspaces and get updates from your work spaces.

Image Sharing Tools

48. zFlick:

A simple yet great app to view and save images from Flickr to your desktop. Simply drag any image from Flickr and drop it onto your desktop to save it.

49. FlickrFlipper:

Another great app to search for photos from Flickr. It even lets you search for specific users.

50. TinyUploads:

TinyUploads lets you resize and upload images online within seconds. You can directly embed images to your blog or any other web page.

51. Flickr Desktop Search:

Flickr Desktop Search is a simple yet effective desktop search tool for Flickr.

52. Snoto:

Snoto lets you browse your recent photos from Flickr, or images uploaded by any other user. You can also view them as a slideshow.

53. Destroy Flickr:

Complete hassle-free management of your Flickr account.

Multimedia Apps

54. RichFLV:

RichFLV lets you play and edit FLV files with ease. You can also use the app to convert FLV files to SWF and convert the audio to MP3.

55. Fractal4D:

Fractal4D is a great app to draw cool fractal swirls that can either be saved as simple PNG files or exported as vectors to use in Adobe Illustrator.

56. SWF Shot:

SWF Shot allows you to create high-resolution snapshots of your SWF, PNG and JPG content.

57. UVLayer:

UVLayer allows you to organize and play your digital media including photos, videos and games.

58. Adobe Media Player:

A great media player that lets you play your downloaded or streamed media without any hassle. Highly customizable.

59. LightBoxer:

LightBoxer gives you a constantly changing showcase of high-quality images as your screensaver.

60. Webcam To GIF:

Captured something on webcam that you want to convert into GIF? This is the app to do it.

There are a tonne of great apps out there for Air. We’ve compiled our favorites here, but are there any we’ve missed? Which apps do you use?