27 Free Online & Offline Applications for Designers & Developers

27 Free Online & Offline Applications for Designers & Developers

Nowadays, a lot of great and usable applications are sold by their creators. This way, authors, get monetary support for their work, however, not every author decides to sell, some of the creators simply share it with the community for free. In this article we’re presenting 27 great online and also offline applications that have been created for developers and designers. We’ll cover some AIR applications that in the last year have become very popular, and also some color pickers, for better mixing of colors.

27 Free Online & Offline Applications for Designers & Developers

Free Online & Offline Applications

GM Desk
GMDesk is an application that lets you run Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs and Google Maps as a stand-alone application to do all your mail handling, calendar event reading etc with. No need to open it up in a web browser, or have it clutter your workspace.

GM Desk

Boks
Boks is an AIR application (so it works on Windows, Mac and Linux) that provides a User Interface for Blueprint CSS’s framework. It’s been designed for those who think the Grid System is good but never really took the time to give it love. It handles grid configuration, baseline rhythm pimpin’, CSS (with or without compression) and grid.png export, HTML layout and much more goodie-goodie!.

Boks

Doominow
Doomi was designed from the ground up to stay out of your way and out of your browser. It has all the features you use, and none of the ones you don’t. Create, edit, set reminders, and keep archives of your old tasks.

Doominow

Color Picker
colorPicker is a widget-like AIR application that lets you either choose a “web-safe” color from a color grid or design a color using sliders to adjust the red, green, and blue values of the color. Once you have the color you want, you can click on the corresponding “Copy to Clipboard” button to copy the hexidecimal color code for the color and then paste it into your HTML code or your IDE. colorPicker also keeps a list of all of the colors you’ve copied to the clipboard during your session so that you can review them and copy the hex code to the clipboard again.

Color Picker

Light
Taking some cues from Splashup, Splashup Light also has powerful tools for advanced image editing enthusiasts like Levels, Hue – Saturation and Brightness – Contrast. Together with standards tools like rotate, crop, resize and many fun effects, Splashup Light is a well-rounded photo editor perfect for those that don’t need or want heavy desktop image editing suites.

Light

Icon Generator
Icon Generator is a little application built on AIR that lets you generate a CS5 or Web 2.0 style icon.Three versions are prepared according to the usage. You can use Windows XP/VISTA/7, Mac OS X, Linux.

Icon Generator

Color Browser
This application is a simple way to create and organize your favorite color palettes. Sets of colors are easily viewable in a clean interface. Edit them, rearrange them, create new sets, make them your own. Cross-platform using Adobe’s AIR technology.

Color Browser

SWF Shot
SWFShot is a utility to allow you to take large high resolution snapshots of your JPG, PNG and SWF content. SWFShot is pretty simple really. Once you’ve read these instructions, view the “File and Info” tab to get started. From there, you can browse for a file.

SWF Shot

Adobe’s Kuler
Discover Adobe Kuler – the web-hosted application for generating color themes that can inspire any project. No matter what you’re creating, with Kuler you can experiment quickly with color variations and browse thousands of themes from the Kuler community.

Adobe's Kuler

WebKut
WebKut is an AIR application that allows you to capture web pages, or parts of them in a very simple way.

WebKut

zFlick
zFlick is a free Adobe AIR application for viewing and saving photos from the Flickr service. zFlick enables you to search for anything that your mind could desire. If you come across a really cool image save it! Simply drag-n-drop to your desktop. zFlick takes the capabilities of Adobe® AIR™ and produces a rich user friendly animated interface.

zFlick

Capture
Capture lets you do screen capture INSTANTLY. Save it to your clipboard, desktop or even online. Also available as Google Chrome extension.

Capture

Colour Lovers
Colour Lovers lets you Name a Color, Create a Palette, Design a Pattern… they have several tools to help you find and share your color inspiration.

Colour Lovers

Ink Scape
An Open Source vector graphics editor, with capabilities similar to Illustrator, CorelDraw, or Xara X, using the W3C standard Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file format. Inkscape supports many advanced SVG features (markers, clones, alpha blending, etc.) and great care is taken in designing a streamlined interface. It is very easy to edit nodes, perform complex path operations, trace bitmaps and much more. We also aim to maintain a thriving user and developer community by using open, community-oriented development.

Ink Scape

Splash Up
Splashup, formerly Fauxto, is a powerful editing tool and photo manager. With the features professionals use and novices want, it’s easy to use, works in real-time and allows you to edit many images at once. Splashup runs in all browsers, integrates seamlessly with top photo-sharing sites, and even has its own file format so you can save your work in progress.

Splash Up

Uploadr
The new Flickr Uploadr has been built from scratch to work on Windows and Mac OSX. Before you upload you can add titles, tags and descriptions, add stuff to sets and reorder things directly in the Uploadr. This is an open source project, too, so you can download it and have a look at how it works.

Uploadr

HostM
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a good way to specify the styles of fonts and other page elements on your sites. It makes it easier for you to update styles too, because when done right, you only need to make a single change to update the styles on multiple pages and elements.

HostM

Image Sizer
Image Sizer is a modern and usable air application that lets you edit, crop and edit images as you want.

Image Sizer

Stream Monitor
Demandbase Stream works like a news ticker, streaming information about the business visitors to your website across your desktop. By identifying the businesses visiting your website, the search terms they use to find your site, and which pages they visit.

Stream Monitor

Photo Filtre
PhotoFiltre is a complete image retouching program. It allows you to do simple or advanced adjustments to an image and apply a vast range of filters on it. It is simple and intuitive to use, and has an easy learning curve. The toolbar, giving you access to the standard filters with just a few clicks, gives PhotoFiltre a robust look.

Photo Filtre

Winpen Pack
Blender is a 3D graphics application released as free software under the GNU General Public License. It can be used for modeling, UV unwrapping, texturing, rigging, water simulations, skinning, animating, rendering, particle and other simulations, non-linear editing, compositing, and creating interactive 3D applications, including games.

Winpen Pack

Anxiety App
Anxiety is a super-lightweight To-do list application for Mac OS X Leopard that synchronizes with iCal and Mail. Its aim is to provide a streamlined, easily accessible interface to add and check off your tasks, while remaining poised to melt into the background at a moments notice.

Anxiety App

Colour Mod
ColourMod originally made its debut as a web-based DHTML Dynamic Color Picker. Since the inception of OS X from Apple, ColourMod has been ported to the Dashboard interface and is fully functional in OS X Tiger and Leopard.

Colour Mod

Colorate
Colorate is a utility for creation of harmonized color palettes and color schemes, aimed from hobbyist to professional designers. Colorate fully automatizes the palette generation from a particular color swatch, selected from the standard Color Panel, dragged from other application or obtained from an image through the integrated Image Analyze feature.

Colorate

Sea Horse
Seashore is an open source image editor for Mac OS X’s Cocoa framework. It features gradients, textures and anti-aliasing for both text and brush strokes. It supports multiple layers and alpha channel editing. It is based around the GIMP’s technology and uses the same native file format.

Sea Horse

Paint Brush
Paintbrush is a simple paint program for Mac OS X, reminiscent of Microsoft Paint and Apple’s own now-defunct MacPaint. It provides users with a means to make simple images quickly, something that has been noticeably absent from the Mac for years.

Paint Brush

Thumb Screw
Screw it! Making thumbnails for the Web used to be painstakingly slow if you wanted to apply borders, drop shadows, transformations, alpha channels, and so on. Or if it was fast, you ended up with a boring field of rigid columns and rows. Thumbscrew allows you to quickly and easily chew through a bunch of images, applying scaling, random rotation, border, and drop shadow to each – even resizing the original, and processing the batch as a whole afterwards.

Thumb Screw

Other Resources

Conclusion

After reading this article, we hope you’ll find some great applications that can be proudly placed on your desktop and used on a daily basis.

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