For a web application, It is always a good idea to provide access to it from other platforms like mobile or desktop programs.

As web designers/developers, desktop applications are harder to create considering they have a totally different environment.

In order to fill this gap, we can make use of site-specific browsers which enable us to lock a website inside an application-looking browser that can interact with the system tray/dock & display notifications.

Some usage examples for site-specific browsers:

• displaying new orders, support tickets for an e-commerce website
• showing system tray alerts when a new visitor visits your website
• or even locking your whole application inside a site-specific browser and offering it as a desktop application.

To sum up, they simply help us convert a website into a desktop application. Here are free & mature tools for creating site-specific browsers:

Mozilla Prism (Win-Mac)

Prism is a very easy-to-customize tool that supports Windows & Mac.

Applications created can be:

• minimized to system tray/dock & a navigation can be added there
• set to display status messages & popups in the system tray/dock

Prism apps. will be running seperately from the browser & will stay alive even if the browser isn't.

P.S. You can also read a more detailed post about Prism at WRD.

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Adobe AIR applications are great considering the ease-of-use & simplicity they offer.

Almost regulary, WRD is sharing the fresh Adobe AIR applications that web designers & developers will find useful, like:

• 15 New Adobe AIR Applications For Designers & Developers
  
• 16 Fresh Adobe AIR Applications For Designers & Developers
  
• 27 Adobe AIR Applications – Handy For Web Designers
  

Since then, new applications are created & ready to use. And, here they are:

Image Editing, Debugging & Invoicing

zFlick

This is an awesome Flickr search tool that makes browsing between images fun.

Once you find what you're looking for, just drag'n drop that image to your desktop to download it.

PixelWindow

It helps measuring the width/height of any item on the desktop. With a semi-transparent background & custom-presets, it is a great helper when prototyping websites.

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Adobe AIR has clearly became the standard on creating desktop applications for web developers.

Besides the offline applications, it can combine the richness of web with the simplicity of desktop & offer very functional tools.

At WRD, there were 2 other posts that had shared web designer/developer focused Adobe AIR apps.:

• 27 Adobe AIR Applications – Handy For Web Designers
• 16 Fresh Adobe AIR Applications For Designers & Developers

Since then, various new tools are built & here are 15 new Adobe AIR applications for designers & developers:

colrful

colrful is a beautiful application that enables you to make color-based searches in Flickr. Any number of colors can be mentioned, they can be viewed as thumbnails/originals & downloaded.

Another feature is the ability to mention an image URL & get similar images from Flickr.

Polaris

The application is a desktop interface for Google Analytics (free version works with 1 website).

It offers most of the features of Google Analytics including visits, pageviews, reports, Google Maps report & more..

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Glimmer is a desktop application that makes jQuery accesible from a visual tool & generates the jQuery code, XHTML and CSS.

If jQuery is the "write less, do more” JavaScript library, then Glimmer is the “write none, do more” jQuery design tool.

Currently, Glimmer has 8 built-in effects that can be combined with wizards like:

• image sequencing
• customized tooltips
• drop-down menus
• custom animations

It is also extensible. Anyone can write new wizards and effects to improve the application.

Although it looks like a perfect fit to power-users & designers as they generally don’t prefer to code JavaScript, Glimmer is also handy for developers for creating the base-code faster & improving it later on.

To read more on Glimmer, you can visit the announcement article by MIX Online.

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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A web application or a software development process always has bugs which is very normal in a hundreds of lines of code. The important part is tracking & fixing them.

Whether you are a one-person-army or have teammates, it is a big time-saver to use a bug tracking software.

Besides having the bugs listed in a comprehensive way, most bug/issue tracking applications let end-users to submit bug-feature requests that will end up in a better product.

Here are 9 free & open source bug tracking softwares, both desktop & web-based, for a better development process:

WebIssues

WebIssues is an open source issue tracking & team collaboration application that has 2 parts:

• The server: a PHP-MySQL based server where the data is stored, notifications are sent
• The client: a desktop application for users to connect to the server (Windows & Linux supported)

A permission-based user system enables the ability of "multiple users working on different projects".

Issue types are flexible & customizable. Issues can be easily filtered & reports can be created for a snapshot. 

eTraxis

A PHP bug tracking software that works with MySQL, PostgreSQL, MSSQL and Oracle.

Unlimited projects can be created with any number of users working on them. Users working on the project can easily see the bugs assigned to them or see the general status of the project.

eTraxis can notify users with e-mails & has a reminder system. The software has multilanguage support.

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Appcelerator Titanium is an open source platform that enables you to create rich desktop applications with web technologies like HTML, CSS, Javascript as well as Flash and Silverlight.

Appcelerator SDK is used to create applications or any third-party Ajax library / framework can be used too.

Tip: To make it clear, it is very similar to Adobe AIR but open source.

Titanium also comes with a simple command-line interface (CLI) for creating projects and packaging them into an executable.

The platform has a built-in database, direct file system access, desktop notifications & more.

Titanium apps. currently work in Microsoft Windows and Mac OSX.  Linux support is in the roadmap.

SproutCore is a framework for building applications in JavaScript with remarkably little amounts of code.

It can help you build full “thick” client applications in the web browser that can create and modify data, often completely independent of your web server, communicating with your server via Ajax only when they need to save or load data.

Like other JavaScript frameworks, SproutCore has ready to use visual widgets like list views, button views, and forms. But it also has other functions such as an in-memory database (that can integrate with client-side offline storage), bindings, property observing, and controllers.

SproutCore uses Ruby to generate static HTML and JavaScript files, you are not tied to Ruby or Rails in production. SproutCore runs in the browser, your production system can use whatever backend you want

Remote desktop sharing applications are the ones which sometimes save the day of a developer (specially the freelancers) or anyone who works with computers.

• Working as a distributed team and need desktop collaboration?
• Supporting a remote web application that you had built?
• Need to manage the work computer from home?

There are great free remote desktop applications which helps to build this remote connection.

Do you think these applications may save your day, don’t forget to bookmark this post (del.icio.us link).

I have collected the best ones I know & experienced. Here they are:

LogMeIn

Free version works like a charm, you can manage multiple remote computers. This is a web-based application and you only have to install clients to the PCs to be managed. Downside of the free version is you can not transfer files.

TeamViewer

TeamViewer is a software and both PCs need to install applications. You can control remote PCs (unlimited) with the free version. You can transfer files, chat, establish a VPN connection & more.

Yuuguu

This is a very different one. Besides controlling remote computers, Yuuguu enables a team of up to 30 people to share their desktops and chat.

DimDim

Dimdim is a free web conferencing service where you can share your desktop, show slides, collaborate, chat, talk and broadcast via webcam with absolutely no download required for attendees. It also has an opensource version.

Mikogo

With Mikogo, users can host smooth-running screen sharing sessions and invite up to 10 participants simultaneously to any one Mikogo meeting. It is genuine freeware with no costs and there are no installations on the participants’ side (thanks Andrew for the suggestion).

TightVNC

TightVNC is a very famous open source remote desktop management application. It is lightweight and has versions for both Windows and Unix.

Conclusion

All the applications are very easy to use and has lots of users. Except TightVNC, all of them are firewall friendly, which will probably not cause any problems while connecting. But only TightVNC is a standalone product that does not require any registration or depend on any web-based service (and DimDim opensource).

If there are any other free remote desktop sharing solutions that you know, please share them to make the list better.

Mindquarry is a brilliant open source application to organize teams in means of documents, ideas and tasks. Shortly, their collaboration.

This team collaboration application can be reached both from the browsers and from a desktop application.

Document Management

The strongest part of the application is document management.  It uses Subversion for document versioning and backup, supports file syncronization, collaborative editing and has notification system for the updates made within the documents.

Wiki

You can create wikis, assigns them to teams or tasks to manage the ideas and information. Updates made to the wiki content can be viewed within the activity timeline, pdf output can be generated and more.

Team Management

Teams are holding the user groups together. They can be assigned to tasks, have their own wikis and permission groups on documents, tasks..

Task Management

Mindquarry has a handy task management module where tasks can be created, assigned to users, priority levels and their status can be set.

To mention, this is not a project management module and does not have milestones, resources, costs or chart features. It simply allows users to assign and control tasks (for a chance to win a great project management software license check the OneProject Project 8 giveaway).

Conclusion

If you are working in teams, need to share and work on documents together I believe Mindquarry can be a perfect fit as you will be able to:

• Work on the same docs, have them versionned and backed up.
• Create your own information or idea libraries with the wiki feature.
• Assign tasks to each other.

Application requires Apache, Java and Subversion to be installed. Desktop application has Windows, Mac and Linux versions which makes everything much better.

Tip: Mindquarry has a XAMPP download in the downloads section that automatically installs Apache, Subversion and Perl to prepare the application environment.