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 used to have individual Cookbooks applications for Flex, AIR & Mobile that presented code snippets created by the community.

Now, they have combined all, with new additions, under a single Adobe Cookbooks application.

The website is a great place for finding ready-to-use code samples for Adobe products, specially ActionScript & Flex.

Besides adding new snippets, users can request for the ones that they can not find & other users can create/share them.

The new Adobe Cookbooks also offers a better search/browsing experience with titles like "related recipes" & "contributor lists".

HydraFramework is a prescriptive development framework for quickly building Flex applications at every level.

The framework’s development methodology can be totally adopted or the core classes can be used in any way you see fit in projects.

It consists several projects:

• HydraFramework Core – an implementation of MVC (otherwise known as HydraMVC)
• HydraPlugins – for quickly adding prebuilt functionality into the core
• HydraComponents – a library of components built on the HydraFramework.

The framework is well documented & presents a demo.

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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Hemlock is an open-source Flash framework which offers the richness of Flash & the scalability of XMPP.

It eases the creation of real-time & multi-user applications like games, collaboration and more.

Generally, real-time applications are handled with polling where a database is queried every x seconds to get the latest updates.

With the Hemlock approach, a client registers for a message and is only contacted when a relevant one arrives. This is clearly a better method as it is much real-time & cost-effective (no unnecessary polls).

Axiis is an open source data visualization framework & based on Degrafa, Flex & ActionScript 3.0.

It is a resource for both beginner & expert developers to create elegant charts.

Axiis comes with both ready-to-use visualization components & abstract layout patterns + rendering classes that makes it possible to create custom visualizations.

To view some beautiful examples of this framework, click here.

Kap Lab is presenting 5 impressive & free visualization components for Flex.

All components are AS3 based & some of them offer multiple layout options which makes them very flexible in means of presentation.

The components are:

• Diagrammer (for diagram creation, mind mapping…)
• Visualizer (for displaying hierarchies like organizational schemas..)
• Radar Chart (for data analysis, comparing data items…)
• Treemap (for inventory management, social news mapping…)
• Ring Chart (for displaying statistics)

Examples are provided for each component with the sources & there is a support forum where users share their experiences.

P.S. Download requires a free membership.

OpenZoom is an open source framework for creating zoomable user interfaces.

The framework is similar to Silverlight’s Deep Zoom control (see WRD post), but for Flash.

The power behind OpenZoom is Flex MultiScaleImage component, which is built on top of the OpenZoom framework.

The name is same wih the Silverlight Deep Zoom’s built-in control & the usage is similar too.

The component has built-in support for keyboard / mouse activities & supports Deep Zoom, Zoomify & OpenZoom images.

For now, OpenZoom can sound to specific, but considering its abilities & usage areas, we’ll probably be hearing more about it soon.

P.S. The framework is so fresh & still in development but it can be downloaded (& it is documented).

FlashFlickr PhotoGallery is an open source photo gallery built with Flex 2 / AS3.

The application enables users to browse your Flickr pictures, see your sets, tags and notes within your website from a good looking interface.

The gallery has a location map feature built with Yahoo AS3 libraries that shows the location of the image (if mentioned) using Yahoo maps. This requires a Yahoo API key.

It also has the Flickr authentication for Flickr registered users. This way, registered users can also add comments, tags (if allowed) to the images (Flickr API key needed).

Every designer & developer loves handy tools that simplify frequent tasks.

And, even if you’ve a complicated software that does the same thing, usually it is much more effective to run a tiny, fast-loading application that does the job.

This is a list of 27 functional Adobe AIR applications that can help a web designer to design & develop:

• Better
• Faster
• More organized

Info: If you don’t have Adobe AIR installed, it can be downloaded from here.

Web Snapshot

Very nice application for taking snapshots of any webpage.

It enables you to configure the snapshot sizes & lets you choose whether the snapshot be a thumbnail, browser size or the full page.

WebKut

Using WebKut, you can take snapshots of an entire webpage, parts of them or a selection.

The tool’s interface helps a lot by showing the size of the area selected, letting the user to choose the image format & quality.

Pixus

A pixel ruler that enables you to measure the size of any object..

With browser skins, overlay mode and screen size presets, you can also preview how your design will look in the real environment.

Web & interface designers will love it.

PixelPerfect

PixelPerfect has 1 job to do: measure things on your desktop.

While designing a website or looking for the size of an object in a website, you can run this ruler & that’s it.

Icon Generator

A little application that lets you generate a CS3 or Web 2.0 style icon, in only 3 steps. Pick color, type characters, and save it. Icon is generated in 4 different sizes.

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