3 Useful, Productive and Free Adobe Air Applications

The Adobe Air runtime allows developers to create rich Internet applications that run from the desktop on Windows, Mac OS X, as well as Linux.

From the Adobe Air Wikipedia entry:

AIR is intended to be a versatile runtime environment, as it allows existing Flash, Actionscript or HTML and JavaScript code to be used to construct a more traditional desktop-like program. Adobe positions it as a browser-less runtime for rich Internet applications that can be deployed onto the desktop, rather than a fully-fledged application framework.

Adobe provides a marketplace to find applications that have been developed using this framework.  Here are a few of the applications that I found looking through the productivity and creativity sections of the Adobe Air Marketplace.  All of these applications are free.

1. BetaDesigns Caliper

This application provides a caliper on screen that can be used to measure anything that you have displayed on your monitor.  This is a really convenient little application for measuring the width of your webpage elements or parts of a user interface that you may be working on.

The caliper is draggable to anywhere on the screen you would like and it also rotates through 360°.

2. Vertabase Timer

Vertabase Timer is perfect for anyone that has to track their time spent on specific projects.  To use this application you simply enter the projects name in the Track Time On entry box (or select a previously entered project) and press the Start button.   When you press the Stop button an optional note can be added to the recorded time.

Clicking the Show Time button allows you to view a breakdown of your time spent on each project.  The time can then be exported to XML and CSV.

3. Color Browser

Color Browser is useful to anyone that develops webpages as well as other creative types that need to keep track of color palettes that they currently use or get inspired by.  This application allows you to create a color palette as well as import palettes from outside sources.

The first palette shown in the screen shot below is the palette that I based my website design on for Smart To-Do List.  I found this palette on ColourLovers.com.  Colour Lovers allows you to export the palettes in a variety of formats, one of which is the ASE format which this application uses.

If you know of any other useful Adobe Air applications, I’d love to hear about them.