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\n\tApplications keep looking better and better. Thanks to things like mobile app stores and the Web, people are spending less time considering various applications — and appearance is playing a bigger role in the decision-making process. If your apps look bland, these five products and services will help you spruce them up.
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\n\tNote: You can read the full post in our Five Apps blog.
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\n\tImage copyright \u00a9 iStockphoto.com/seraficus
\n\tAxialis IconWorkshop lets you make attractive icons for your applications. Over the years, icons have become even more important, as they now represent a big part of the “elevator pitch” of applications in mobile marketplaces.
\n\tThe IconWorkshop librarian helps you organize and manage your icon files.
\n\tTwo tools in Microsoft Expression Studio are important for the .NET developers out there, Blend and Design. Blend produces XAML for your WPF, Silverlight, WP7, and Windows 8 applications that goes far beyond the basic controls.
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\n\tDesign is geared toward making great vector graphics, which you can save in a variety of formats, including XAML. The two together are key tools for great-looking .NET applications.
\n\tAdobe Kuler is a tool for creating and sharing color schemes. Working with color schemes may not seem terribly tough, but most programming tools really do not do a good job of letting you easily experiment and see the colors next to each other.
\n\tKuler is free to use and has a large community of folks putting up their own color combinations.
\n\tThe Web has been waiting for Typekit since Day 1, a good way to use nonstandard fonts without resorting to embedding images of text. Thanks to the latest CSS3 specs, Typekit lets you use fonts for your Web apps without violating the licenses of those fonts, in a fashion that is fast and seamless.
\n\tiStockphoto is one of my favorite Web sites, because it has amazingly good search to help me find just the right graphical goodies for my Web apps.
I am an all purpose IT person. If there's a generic job title in IT, I've probably had it, most likely more than once. Programmer, systems administrator, DBA, PC tech/repair, Help Desk, webmaster, web designer, web developer, applications developer, network engineering. Somehow I have managed to get my thumb stuck in each one of those pies!
