Wednesday, January 16, 2008

Kuler integration with Flash, Fireworks and now Dreamweaver!

After one of my CS3 Web Premium sessions at Macworld, I had a customer ask me about Adobe's plans to integrate Kuler into the other CS applications (it's already integrated with Illustrator CS3 through a Flash-based panel).. For those of you who may not be familiar with Kuler, it's essentially a hosted web application from Adobe that allows the creative community to create and share color themes. You can read more about Kuler here.

Anyway, I didn't have a definitive answer for the customer in terms of what Adobe's plans were, but I know of a number of third-party extensions that enable some integration between Kuler and our web apps.

Pixelfumes released a couple of (free!) extensions for Fireworks and Flash last year - check the links below:
And more recently, WebAssist launched a Kuler extension for Dreamweaver that allows you to pull Kuler colour schemes directly into DW. This is definitely an improvement over taking a screen capture of a colour scheme and manually entering the hex colour values into a site's CSS.. and best of all, it's free!

While you're at it, check out the Kuler Desktop application built using Adobe AIR. The download link is near the bottom of the page.

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