Adobe AIR is one of the most under appreciated application platforms but it has become a popular platform for internet-enabled desktop applications and If you’re a designer, AIR applications will help you with a multitude of tasks that will make your life easier! Today we have selected 30 Extremely useful Adobe air Apps for Designers.
What is Adobe Air? – Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) is a cross-platform runtime environment for building rich Internet applications using Adobe Flash, Adobe Flex, HTML….
Don’t have Adobe AIR installed, you can download it free from www.get.adobe.com/air.
Color – Adobe Air Applications
Store and manage sets of color palettes with colorbrowser. Open or drag and drop ASE files from Kuler or ColourLovers into colorbrowser to add the color palettes to your collection.
kuler desktop brings Adobe’s fantastic color scheme creation and management application Kuler, to the desktopit View RSS feeds of the newest, highest-rated and most popular color themes, as well as random ones.
Random Patter lets you create random patterns based on images and other parameters. The outputted file can be saved as an SVG document.
Contrast-A is a tool for checking the contrast between different colors, according to both WCAG 2.0 and 1.0. It allows you to view RGB colors in a three-dimensional model
COLOURlovers Desktop Color Finder
It’s a basic app but very useful when you’re looking for new and creative color schemes for designs and other ideas.search the COLOURlovers entire database from your desktop to find fantastic new color creations and collections.
Typography and Fonts Adobe Air Applications
.merlin – An AIR Font Organizer
merlin is an Adobe AIR based application which extract the actual font name, and rename the file based off of that. Then put that font into a folder of the first letter. So Arial would go in the “a” folder. Some of the options you can configure for processing is to move, rename, or delete files. It reads OTF, TTF, Type1 (AFM, PFM, PFB, INF) font files.
Font Picker- An AIR Font Organizer
Font Picker shows you all the fonts installed on your computer and helps you choose which one is most suitable for a particular project. It lets select favorites, get rid of fonts you don’t like.
Adobe Air Applications for Image
Caliper Project
The Calilper floats above other applications on screen can be used to measure anything on your monitor. Draggable, Rotates through 360°, Pixel Perfect Measurements, Floats above all other applications.
ImageSizer is a batch image processor tool built to Quickly resize, rotate, optimize and rename a batch of images as a single zip file.Drag and drop the images you want to edit, customize the settings and you’re done.
With JustResizeIt! you can drag and drop images to quickly resize them. Use it to create widgets for specific uses like e-mail, web galleries, web designs, templates and lots more.
Flickr Desktop Search
Flicker One of the best resources available for free images from around the web. Flickr Desktop Search lets you search for Flickr photos, groups and people right from your desktop.
It is a highly useful Adobe AIR application, you can easily save images from the web via a drag-and-drop interface.
Icon Generator
The Icon Generator helps you create CS3 and Web 2.0-style icons in three easy steps.Pick a color, enter your text and save it. It can generate four sizes ranging from 16×16 px to 128×128 px.
XeIMG Image Editor
Xe-IMG Editor is a ultimate image editor. Because of AIR’s cross-platform capabilities – designers who work with multiple operating systems that need a quick and easy image editor will find this tool helpful.
It allows you to change levels, contrast/brightness, hue saturation, text editing, and shapes. Basically it is an image editor for simple image enhancements.
Management Tools
Timeloc tracks the time you spend working on projects. It can handle multiple projects and clients, lets you edit the billing period and change the rate per client and uses audible alerts and reminders.
Google Calendar Invoice Creator
If you use Google Calendar for time management, this app makes it easy to create invoices from your calendar’s RSS feed. It creates text and HTML-formatted invoices.
Ora Time and Expense is a free, easy-to-use application for creating and managing timesheets, expense reports and invoices.
Designing & popular Adobe Air Applications
htmlText Editor is mainly used by Flex developers, it provides a shortcut to having htmlText generated in a WYSIWYG type editor.
With RichFLV you can edit flv files’ metadata, cuepoints, sound and more. Convert them to swf or mp3. It’s a lightweight application for quick, basic editing.
This AIR app is for creating Flex Graphical User Interfaces (GUI) and is great for designers wishing to easily craft interfaces for their Flex-based apps.
Livebrush
Livebrush is a motion-based drawing tool. Toss graphics around the screen or elegantly swing the brush around your cursor. There are over 100 styles and decorations that can all be customized and shared.
Pixus
Pixus is a nice application that enables us to Measure screen objects with both keyboard and mouse control. we can also preview how your design will look in the real environment.
Fractal4D
With the Fractal4D Adobe AIR application, you can draw fractal swirls that can then be exported as a vector file or in PNG format. Use the fractals you create to enhance your graphic designs. 
This is a great app for managing you Twitter account(s). It lets you update, post images, shorten links, and group those you follow. And there’s even an iPhone app you can use that will sync with your Air version.
Analytics Adobe Air Applications
It allows you to filter the data, set up a watch list, see the search keywords that visitors used to reach your website and see the pages that visitors are currently viewing.
SEO Analyzer checks your page rank and analyzes your links and keywords for their search ranking effectiveness.
Framework Tools
Boks provides a User Interface for Blueprint CSS’s framework.
Use Em Calculator to get all the correct values converted from pixels to ems and calculate the correct vertical rhythm for your designs. It’s a simple but effective and useful tool.
Wireframing and Prototyping Tools
iPlotz is an application for wireframing and creating clickable and navigable mockups of websites and app interfaces.It also comes with collaboration and project management tools for designers working in teams.
The desktop Air version is $79, but you can try it for free (although you will not be able to save any of your files without a license key).
Do you know of an Adobe AIR tool not mentioned here? Share your thoughts and experience in the comment section.
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Nice list, quite a few things I havnt come across before, will be checking them out.
Hey!! This article was so extremely useful for me!!! There are 4 tabs waiting for me with amazing applications! Thank you very much!!
nice one…..really a must have apps for every web designer
Nice post and this post helped me alot in my college assignement. Thank you for your information.
really helping adobe air apps, also helping for designers and developers.
Is Mac still the best platform for designers? In my opinion it is clunky and slow to use. With Windows I can navigate and operate with very fast speed and efficiency… ?
Auckland graphic design and website design
thank you,very useful adobe air apps
Sweeeet! These tools are very helpful indeed. Thanks for the post.
First, I would like to thank the author of this post because it is really helpful.
I have learned a lot from it. I have bookmarked it so that I can go back again for future reference.
Those are some really good resources! I wish I had time to test all of them!
I’m learning so much. This is great