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Adobe Kuler is a website for browsing and submitting colours schemes and palettes, in a similary way to COLOURLovers (read previous review on COLOURLovers AIR app).

This is the second updated Kuler AIR application from Adobe for the latest AIR runtime. You can browse the pallets submitted by various criteria like most popular, highest rated and your personal favorites.

Once logged in using your Adobe ID and password, you get to see your saved colour palettes under the MyKuler drop down selection. The AIR app remembers what your previous search was on the last drop down option.

For each of the colour palettes shown you can copy the swatch values (as a string comma separated without hashes), go to the Kuler website for that palette or save the theme. Now this is where it gets a little weird. Saving the theme comes with a number of options. You can save directly to your desktop as an ASE (Adobe Swatch Exchange) file. Or your given the option to import the theme into Photoshop, InDesign or Illustrator. Great I though I will save it to Photoshop CS3. Ah, you are then told that you need something called Adobe Switchboard which allows AIR applications to import the themes directly into the CS3 applications.

I couldn’t vote on the theme palettes in the app either. I’m not sure if this was intentionally left out but would be better for a more consistent experience.

One nice but very hidden feature is that you can click and drag a theme pallet from the main window. This creates another window with just that palette being displayed. This new window can now be increased in size to get a proper view of the colours.

Design eye

A well branded AIR application that fits coherently with the online version of Kuler (which is also Flash based). The custom chrome really gives the app a different look, and no crazy drop shadows.

I liked the loading animation but the 3d flip when transitioning to the was very clunky and a bit unnecessary. The icons on the drop down were nice although again what is going on with the scrollbar? It looks so unfinished.

When you dragged out a colour palette and get the separate window, you can’t drag it by the title bar you have to click and drag the actual window content. Again this is altering the users expectation between different parts of the app, making the experience inconsistent.

Technical eye

Built upon the new Kuler API and using Adobe Flash CS3 with ActionScript 3.