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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.

Flickr Flipper

Flickr Flipper allows you to search for Flickr photos and also search for photos from specific Flickr users. It uses Papervision to display the photos one at a time and even allows you to download the photo to your computer. Very nice tool for digging photos in Flickr.

RichFLV – FLV Editor

FLV editing is almost a part of the web design process as it is one of the most popular streaming video formats.

Using RichFLV you can edit FLV & MP3 files and export them to some other formats like SWF.

A great feature of the application is merging multiple files.

Shrink O’Matic

A batch image resizer that can handle JPG, GIF & PNG files.

Images can be resized to a custom size or by a ratio. The output image format, quality & name can also be set.

Em based layouts – Vertical rhythm calculator

A tool for working out the width of an element in em’s.

It calculates the em of any given px input & presents the output as a CSS property. Very handy for liquid designs.

Font Picker

Presents you all the fonts installed in your computer & makes font selection easier.

Simply write any text & it will show the text with every font. You can remove the preview of any font via the “X” button or reset the selections.

COLOURlovers Desktop Color Finder

An Adobe AIR interface for reaching the ~1 million named colours & thousands of colour palettes of the colour resource website COLOURlovers (see WRD post).

Kuler Desktop

Browse the color themes in Adobe Kuler, sign in to your account & manage your themes.

Also, import themes from Kuler Desktop directly into Adobe Creative Suite 3 (Illustrator, InDesign, Photoshop).

Color Browser

An application for generating & saving color palettes.

It is very handy for creating your own color library & then inspiring from them when needed.

The color palettes can be edited, re-arranged & duplicated too.

Color Picker

Using Color Picker, you can find the values of a color, generate new colors & see your recent color generations.

RegExr Desktop

A tool for learning, editing, and testing regular expressions. It is simply a desktop version of the online RegExr application.

It provides a small library for special characters, character classes & more.

Snippely

A very simple yet functional & “must use” tool for developers (see WRD post).

Every developer has some favorite libraries, functions & other ready-to-use codes. Using Snippely, you can group, organize & store your code snippets easily.

SearchCoders Dashboard

An award-winning application that connects Flex developers.

Using SearchCoders Dashboard, searching the most valuable source of Flex-related information: the FlexCoders mailing list archive is possible. Besides that, the application connects to the official Flex developers chat.

It has a special code input feature that allows developers to send code to the room without filling up the output area.

Developers can also use the notes and favorites to keep track of valuable FlexCoders threads and blog posts.

Vertabase Timer

Track time on projects and track time on clients in this free, sleek desktop widget.

Export time reports to XML or CSV for use in other applications (like MS Excel).

MiniTask

Every designer / developer needs a task manager application to get organized better.

If you don’t want a complicated task manager then MiniTask is for you. Just write the tasks, group them with seperators & click the ones you completed. That’s all.

Klok

This application helps managing projects, keeping track of the tasks & getting reports on them.

With a drag’n drop interface, projects, sub-projects (tasks) can be defined and can be attached to a customer (see WRD post for more details).

Doomi

Again, a very simple to-do-list application that reminds you your tasks.

Besides entering, editing & clearing tasks, you can set an alarm for a task and theDoomi can warn you.

Timeloc

This desktop widget keeps track of the time you have spent working on a job or project.

Ok, we are not lawyers but there are freelancers who charge by time. If you don’t, then you can again use it to see howmuch you spend on a job.

Ora Time & Expense

An application for tracking times worked on a project, that works with a timer and generates timesheets & expense reports.

FEAT (Freelancer’s Estimation Assistance Tool)

Most freelancers get lost in the expense-revenue calculations as there is not always a standard price for a project.

This application helps freelancers calculate hourly rates and project pricing estimates.

You can define your expenses like salaries, utilities, tax & mention the profit margin you expect and it gives you the hourly rate you must be charging.

Also, it has a pricing wizard that helps you define a price for a project.

Google Analytics Reporting Suite

The Google Analytics Reporting Suite enables you to use Google Analytics in your desktop.

You can track your visitors, referrals and campaigns, view your AdWords ROI metrics & more.

Note: Installer is in the right-bottom of the application website.

Snippage

A beautiful Adobe AIR application for creating desktop gadgets from any part of a website.

Choose any part of the website, select the refresh period & the gadget is created.

How will a web designer use this? For following an ajaxed stats page, following orders of an e-commerce website, etc..

ConceptShare Desktop Uploader

ConceptShare allows you to setup secure online workspaces for sharing designs, documents and video and invite others to review, comment and give contextual feedback anytime and anywhere without a meeting.

ConceptShare Desktop enables drag and drop uploading of concepts to workspaces. You can also create new workspaces, manage people and get alerted when someone replies or comments in one of your workspaces.

So Dave over at MacNutsAndBolts.com asked me how many FTP clients were out there for the Mac. I thought there were maybe 4 or 5, Dave thought there more. So I headed out on an expedition to find out just how many FTP clients there were. I was amazed at what I found.

To set some standards I decided that a basic FTP client should at a minimum support FTP, SFTP, WebDAV and should have managerial features like FTP bookmarks, and be able to easily edit file permissions on a remote server. These are the basic things any FTP user would use in a normal day.

So I found not just 4 or 5, but 11 Mac FTP Clients that would handle any users everyday use. Some better than others, but nevertheless there are 11 Mac FTP Clients out there that met my criteria.

Now just so I don’t go around repeating the same thing over and over again, I’m going to use a legend to denote features present in the app.

• A – Basic FTP, including SFTP and SSH and also includes things like bookmarks and drag-and-drop support
• A+ – Basic FTP as well as Amazon S3 and iDisk support
• E – Edit remote files using local clients such as BBEdit and TextMate
• S – AppleScript support

Transmit

(Supports A+, E, S)
The old bus chugs along, but it chugs along just fine. Nearing the end of its life cycle, Transmit from Panic is still a favourite among many. Why? Because it’s got everything! Amazon S3, iDisk, Syncing favourites across Macs, live edit, and a whole lot more. The user interface is fluid and fast, so your Mac isn’t bogged down by animations.

The only thing that looks dated is the user interface, which has carried over its look from Panther (Transmit 3 was released in ‘05). Transmit 4 is just round the corner, so watch out for this one taking off in a few. If you want a full featured FTP client, Transmit is as good as it gets.

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OS X gives you all the tools you need to make a Web site. However, using Apple’s TextEdit, all you see is the text, no syntax highlighting, organization of anything else. Then, a while ago, Coda was released, and gave us a great interface and IDE (Integrated Development Environment) for the Internet. Now, there is a new kid on the block that directly competes with Coda. It is Espresso by MacRabbit.

Espresso is a one-window app. Everything that can be done is done in its main window. There are three sections to this window: Workspace, Project and Publish. There are also project settings which can be found in the toolbar.

The Workspace section is…well your workspace. This is where you want to put the files you want to work on, or previews of different pages. Instead of having to go through a file structure on the sidebar, you just drag-and-drop important files here, and they’ll stay here. This is also where all previews you generate will go. You can also add a new item to your workspace by going to File>New Tab. If you have a file selected (in the Project section), it will put that file into your workspace. If no file is selected, it will add a blank file to your workspace. To go through items in your workspace, just hit Command-} (Select the next item) and Command-{ (Select the previous tab). To remove an item from this list, just put your moue over it, and then click the (x) that appears. You can also rearrange this list just by dragging. The Workspace is really helpful if you are dealing with many files and many previews, because it provides easy access to the ones you want to access.

The Project section contains all files for your current project. If you click the magnifying glass icon, a text field will appear that allows you to search for files. If you click the wheel icon, you can choose to reveal the current file in finder, delete it, duplicate it, etc. If you use Espresso as it really should be used, you usually won’t need to do much work from the Project section, you will just access files, add files, etc. For small projects, the list of files is very helpful, but for larger ones with complex hierarchies and structures, the Project search makes it extremely easy to find files.

The last section in Espresso is the Publish section. This allows you to easily upload files to an FTP, SFTP, Amazon S3 or FTP with SSL server. To set one up, click the Settings toolbar button and then click Add Server. You can then enter the relevant information for your server. Once you have finishes, just click the Save button, and the server will be saved. Your server will then appear in the Publish section of Espresso. When you click on server, there are a couple things you can do. You can just browse and see what files are on the server (just click the Browse toolbar item). You can also do an Update. An Update just updates the copy of the files on the server. Everything on your computer stays the same. You can also do a Merge. A Merge syncs the files on your computer with the ones on your server so the most-up-to dat version of each file is kept. Before you click Publish (which will sync them), you can see what will happen to each file in the Action column. A Mirror is very similar to an Update, except it creates an exact mirror of the files on your computer on the server. The descriptions at the top of the page can get you really confused about the difference between Mirror and Update if you think too much into it. So, just use the names as guides. Mirror and Update are two different things. Based on what you want to do, choose one. It is nice that Espresso has built-in publishing with many SVN-like (Subversion) commands.

Espresso includes support for things called Sugars. These extend Espresso’s CodeSense (they add extra languages). So, Espresso is not confined to XHTML, CSS and JavaScript, it can include any language that has an available Sugar. But, Sugars aren’t just developed by a few people that have the experience, they can be developed by anyone who knows a little XML. But, of course, this doesn’t mean that you have to make your own. You can find an aggregated list at Coffee House. Sugars are great because they allow Espresso to support an infinite amount of languages (you could make your own pointless one even!), but Coda also has a form of them, so this does not lead it too far ahead of the pack.

Along with Sugars, Espresso includes Themes. These can also be downloaded from Coffee House. Themes allow for different syntax highlighting colors. They are similar to those of TextMate or Xcode. Except for the installing part. You have to click Reveal in Finder in the Colors tab of Espresso>Preferences… and then drag the .css file in there. Then, you have to restart Espresso, go back to the preferences and choose it from the list. This isn’t that bad, but it would be nicer if you could just click Instal Theme. Like Sugars, anyone with a knowledge of CSS can easily make an Espresso theme.

MacRabbit’s Espresso retails for about $80 and you can download a trial from the Web site. It’s Sugars and Themes add a nice configurability option and community part to it. It is $20 less than the other popular IDE on the mac for web development. Of course, you can use a text editor and the Terminal for most features it contains, but it provides a beautiful interface with a very nice and clean environment for developing.