10 Best Adobe AIR Applications For Professional Designers

This is a guest post by James Adams. If you want to guest post on this blog, just drop me a message using the Contact page.

For interactive media and graphic design professionals, the Adobe AIR environment is one of the most useful and versatile development tools in use today. Creating rich, interactive Flash applications in Adobe AIR is made more efficient and productive through the use of official and third-party plugins and applications that run in conjunction with the AIR platform. Here are ten of the most essential Adobe AIR applications for designers and developers on the market today.

1. WebKut: Webkut is an image capture utility that allows you to sample images, graphics and any other snippet of a page you find online in any format or size you want. It’s a great way to save handy bits of design you run across directly to AIR for later editing and manipulation.

2. Font Picker: For many developers, half of good web design is typography. The problem is that finding the perfect font for all occasions is actually a lot tougher than it looks. Font Picker is free and enables users to view every font installed on their computer in one place and choose the right one for any situation.

3. iPlotz: There are plenty of free wireframing tools available on the market, but none can truly match up to iPlotz in terms of features and capabilities. A single user license for a year costs $99 per year, or $15 per month. That gets you 1 GB of online storage, as well as the ability to export to HTML, PDF, PNG/JPG or almost any format you need. Check out their site for a full list of everything iPlotz can do.

4. ImageSizer: Rescaling and resizing images is a cinch with the ImageSizer. Featuring an easy and intuitive GUI for editing all aspects of any image format including metadata, it’s the ultimate tool for rejiggering your graphics and photos for the perfect fit. Free software for design and development doesn’t get much better.

Also see: Shrink O’Matic

Image credit: Psyked

5. Pixus: When it comes to measuring and planning your designs, Pixus is the go-to solution for sizing up elements. Creating skins and templates is a lot easier when you know exactly how big things are. Featuring multi-screen support and guide lines for layouts, it’s a free and lightweight piece of software to assist in wireframing and general development.

6. Icon Generator: Available directly from the Adobe AIR Marketplace, the Icon Generator allows for the quick and easy creation and editing of sharp, Web 2.0 style CS3 icons and logos in three simple steps. It’s free and allows users to create different image sizes on the fly without any hassle.

Lite version

Pro version

7. XeIMG Image Editor: Every image editor is different, and it’s a good idea to have at least a few on hand for different needs and special situations. The XeIMG Image Editor supports nearly pretty much any image format you can throw at it and as well Alpha Transparency, Embossing, Zoom Photo and a number of other functionalities. Like most of the other tools on this list, it’s 100% free.

8. Splashup Light: Yet another free program, Splashup Light is a powerful image editor for modifying and enhancing images and graphics within the AIR environment. It’s like a specialized, more robust version of Picasa for graphics editing focused on Rich Internet Application development.

9. Website Generation Tool Take II: Developers that need to implement simple, full websites entirely in Flash will definitely want to take a look at this free and handy program. For quick website development, just drag and drop a .swf file into AIR and it will fire off the HTML, CSS and Javascript needed to paste into a simple template. Couldn’t be simpler.

10. e2vector: This little number is a handy SVG editing application to create and modify graphics and SVG images. Importing SVG files with e2vector is also a snap. Its mature and stable code base and highly advanced algorithms allow for quick path splicing, amongst other capabilities. The best part is that it’s completely free.

All of these applications are must-haves for any professional designer or web developer looking for that extra edge to assist creativity and push the envelope of what’s possible with web applications and rich media. Of course, these are just a few of the many other fantastically helpful additions to the Adobe AIR IDE out there at present. But these tools are a great start and there’s no telling what tomorrow will bring in the world of Interactive Media Design.

About the author: James is a technology analyst who works for an online store based in the UK specialising in ink cartridges. Subscribe to the CreativeCloud for more of his writing.

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