For any designer with significant amount of Photoshop brushes installed, it is always a pain to navigate through the brushes & find the one you need.

ABRView is a free software that makes this process much easier. It allows you to define the folder(s) where brushes are installed & preview them.

Also, once you download a brush, although you have an opinion on how it looks, you can not be sure until installing it, running Photoshop & checking the look from the brush palette. As ABRView can display brushes from any folder, you simply save time on seeing how they look.

It has an .exe version for Windows & .jar version for Mac & Linux.

With the ease of development & multi-platform support, Adobe AIR is a getting-popular choice for creating desktop applications.

There are many beautiful applications built with it including the ones that are functional for the designer & developer community.

Months ago, a post published at WRD was sharing 27 Adobe AIR Applications - Handy For Web Designers. Since then, there are various great applications created.

And here they are, 16 Fresh Adobe AIR Applications For Designers & Developers:

ImageSizer

ImageSizer is a batch image processor tool which can resize, optimize and rename multiple JPG files.

Once the images are processes, they can be exported as a single .zip file.

JustResizeIt!

A batch image resizer that works with drag’n drops. It enables users to define different presets in advance & creates resized images instantly.

The application is great for anyone sending photos with e-mails, requires batch resizing & more.

Xe-IMG Editor

It supports multiple image types, image-from-URLs & SWF files as images to be edited.

With various effects like: zoom, image mask, sharpening, enhancing, embossing & more Xe-IMG Editor is a handy free desktop image editor.

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Mastering frequently used applications increases the productivity significantly.

Controlling these applications via keyboard is a part of this "mastering process" which helps you use an application with 2 hands = much faster.

Also, knowing the tricks of tools inside these products definitely opens new doors for creating.

Specifically for designers, here is a list of cheat sheets for the most popular applications like Photoshop, Illustrator, Gimp, Fireworks & more..

Photoshop CS4 Keyboard Shortcuts

Keyboard shortcuts are very well organized, both by menu & alphabetically.

Also, shortcut presets that add lots of extra shortcuts are provided too.

Keyboard shortcuts for previous Photoshop versions:

• Adobe Photoshop CS3
• Adobe Photoshop CS2
• Adobe Photoshop CS
• Adobe Photoshop 7
• Adobe Photoshop 6
• Adobe Photoshop 5

Photoshop Black And White Cheat Sheet

There are many different way & settings for converting images to black and white with Photoshop.

This is a Photoshop file presenting different filters/presets. Just update 1 file & see the various outputs.

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JPEGSnoop is a free application (Windows) that gives you details of JPEG and MotionJPEG AVI files.

It is for anyone who is curious in finding out the source of an image to test its authenticity.

The application can open various file types that contains an embedded JPEG image like: .JPG, .AVI, .MOV, .PDF & more.

Besides the authenticity, JPEGSnoop provides other detailed information about the images like:

• JPEG quality & resolution
• EXIF metadata
• Makernotes
• RGB histograms & more..

There are various web-based image editors that help a lot specially when you do not have the right image editing software with you.

AIE, an open source Ajax image editor, is one of them but with a difference: it can be installed under your websites.

So, besides using it as a standard image editor, it can be integrated with other applications you use (like image galleries, blogging apps., etc) by simply setting the "images folder" of these applications.

AIE has great features like:

• resizing images
• cropping images
• rotate/flip images
• apply filters
• add text with a text tool
• apply watermarks & more..

It is built with Ext JS & uses PHP+ImageMagick on the server-side. For a demo, click here.

Shape Collage is a free software for creating photo collages automatically.

The collages can be in any shape, including the ready to use templates or the ones that you can create from scratch.

Images used can be selected from the computer or web. And, they are totally customizable:

• Size & number of the photos, collage size, spacing between photos can be defined
• Background image/color & borders can be selected

The collage created can be in GIF, JPEG & PSD format (so you can edit the collage more).

The software has Windows, Mac, Linux & Java versions.

LightScreen is a free screenshot tool that makes taking screenshots easier.

It can run at the background, can be called via hotkeys and enables you to take a screenshot of:

• the screen
• the window
• a selected area

The image format, quality, how it will be named & where it will be saved can be pre-defined.

And, once the screenshot is saved, it can notify you with a "tray icon popup" or a sound.

P.S. It only works in Windows OSs.

PHP template engines are used widely to seperate the code & the layout.

This makes a website easier to maintain/update & creates a better development environment by enabling developers & designers to work together easier.

It sure has some drawbacks which is generally the performance (most libraries offer great solutions there) & need to learn a new syntax (not always).

To mention, using a template engine may not be suitable for every project. A website with few pages will probably won’t need it. But it can improve the development process of a portal, an e-commerce site or another web application easily.

Here are 19 PHP template engines with very nice features & have a continious development:

Smarty

The most popular PHP templating engine which prefers to call itself a "template/presentation framework" as it equips both the designer & programmers with powerful tools at the presentation layer.

It has a robust caching mechanism as well as a strong plug-in & add-on support.

With the template functions, debugging capabilities, security it provides & continious development, Smarty is a great engine.

Dwoo

Dwoo aims to be a serious alternative to Smarty with a cleaner codebase.

It has almost a totally compatible template & plugin system with Smarty.

Some main features are:

• Template Inheritance, a fresh look at complex template structures, now built without includes.
• Flexible plugin creation.
• Scope aware engine, allowing for  shorter templates.
• Unicode / UTF-8 support for string manipulation functions & more..

Savant

A lightweight templating engine for PHP.

it uses PHP itself as its template language & no need to learn a new markup system.

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AdesClrPicker is a free color picker application which runs at the background of your PC & offers you a great usage.

It can be reached via 3 ways:

• A hotkey
• Optional floating menu (good for frequent users)
• System tray menu

Once the color picker is run, it floats over every application. So, you can easily get colors from webpages, desktop or anywhere on your PC.

Just left-click your mouse & the color choosen is on your clipboard, simply paste it (possibly to your fav. image editor). And, you can reach the last 10 colors picked from the system tray.

There is also a color library within the application where you can manage your favorite colors.

All these features come with a lightweight application. Just great!

P.S. Thanks to Abdylas for the suggestion.

Blender is an open source 3D content creation suite.

It is an all-in-one package for 3D modeling, animation, rendering, post-production, and gaming.

User interface of Blender is formed of boxes, where all of them can be moved for the max. flexibility for not being blocked by the UI.

Advanced animations & the integrated game engine can be controlled with Python scripting which also makes developers a part of the game rather than only the designers.

A very detailed feature list can be found here.

The software has a large community & is very well-documented which makes it easier to improve your skills.

An open source game built with Blender:

Yo Frankie! is an open source game built with Blender & its integrated game engine.

The game is also like a source of information (as you can download the source files) for anyone planning to develop games with the application.

P.S. Anyone into 3D design is probably aware of Blender but this post is published considering it may be helpful to fresh 3D designers.