Kuler Essential Training now live at Lynda.com

Many of you are already familiar with Kuler - Adobe's online color community. Over the past few months, Adobe has added more and more functionality to Kuler, including the ability to extract color themes from photographs (your own or even from Flickr). In fact, there's a whole lot going on in Kuler, which prompted me to sit down and record a video title that covers its functionality both within the website as well as other ways you can access it (like from within Adobe applications or even with Widgets and AIR applications).



If you're already a Lynda.com subscriber, you can view the video title here. If you aren't a subscriber, you can get a free 7-day trial by clicking here.

Enjoy!

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Finger on the Pulse: Color Analysis comes to Adobe Kuler

I've always said that one of the most exciting things about Adobe's online color community, Kuler, was that it was built as an RIA -- a Rich Internet Application. Sure, if you look at kuler as simply a way to generate a quick color theme here or there, it works great. But that doesn't tap into the power that the internet brings to the table.

A while back, Adobe update kuler to enable you to extract color themes from photographs. You could either upload your own, or you could extract inspiration from images from Flickr. That stuff was nice, but now, Adobe has started to add the "real stuff" -- a new feature called "Community Pulse" has now been added to kuler, in Beta form. If you log into kuler, you'll find Pulse between the Community and Links buttons along the left side of the screen.



So what is Community Pulse? It's a visual analysis tool that allows you to view color usage. You can almost think of it as Google Analytics for Color. Community Pulse can tell you what colors are popular, where they are popular, and when they are popular. It can also be used to compare color usage across the globe. For example, in the screenshot above, I've asked Community Pulse to display the differences in color usage between the USA and Japan. Specifically, I asked it to show me results of colors tagged with the word "hot", and from the looks of it, it's seems apparent that designers in the US consider blue to be hot.

As Community Pulse is in beta, there aren't as many options available to search on yet, but I'm hoping that eventually, we'll be able to search with our own custom tags and date ranges, etc. I'll be honest, when I first started playing with this cool feature, I was expecting to see a whole lot more green being used, what with the whole global environmental and "green" mindset thing, but that doesn't seem to be the case at all.

I wonder what other people will be able to extract from this incredibly helpful tool -- play around with Community Pulse yourself and let me know what your own data analysis reveals!

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Kuler, meet Flickr. Flickr, meet Kuler.

Check out the latest update to Adobe Kuler -- which now has direct support for Flickr. You can pull color themes right out of Flickr images, and you can even access your own Flickr images from Kuler.

In addition, you'll find it a lot easier to find color themes as searches can now be limited to time. Meaning you can search for themes from the past 30 days, or week, etc.

Designers have also been somewhat peeved at Kuler's automatic way of choosing avatars -- those little icons that appear next to your name. After all, as a designer, you'd like to choose the colors that define you, no? Well, now, you can take any saved color theme in Kuler and assign it as your custom avatar. Cool!

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kuler just got a whole lot cooler

Earlier this week, Adobe has updated their online color-based community called kuler.

The most impressive addition is kuler's ability to now automatically extract a color theme from a photograph -- you can upload any photo you'd like and choose a "mood" (colorful, bright, muted, etc.). There are some other little tweaks and welcome adjustments, such as a new Random search option.

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Have you seen Thermo?

I have seen the future, and its name is THERMO.

I was at Adobe's MAX conference in Chicago last week and had the opportunity to see what I can only describe as probably one of the most exciting pieces of technology I've seen in the past five years. It is something that will change the way I do my own work and will probably do the same for many others as well. It is called Thermo.

Adobe gave a little sneak peek of Thermo -- which is an application that Adobe is working on (they have made no formal announcement as to when it would ship). The name Thermo is also a codename -- no word on what the final application may be called.

Before I can accurately describe what Thermo is, I have to paint the picture of where things are today.

As my loyal readers, you are familiar with kuler -- which is what Adobe refers to as an RIA (or a Rich Internet Application). That's because while it uses the internet, it doesn't necessarily have to live in a browser. You may also be familiar with AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime), which enables RIAs to simply run on your desktop -- no browser needed. Besides kuler, Adobe also recently took the wraps off AMP, or the Adobe Media Player -- which is a player (much like the Real Player or the QuickTime player), but which naturally supports FLV playback amongst many other things. AMP is an RIA that runs on AIR as well.

But how does one build such applications? Well, it usually requires both a designer and a developer to work together. The designer creates comps using applications like Illustrator, Photoshop, and even Flash. These designs may look nice, but they just sit there -- they aren't functional. A developer then has to write the code to make the application function as intended, using tools like Flash and Flex Builder.

Thermo is an application built for designers that allows you to design in Illustrator or Photoshop, and then easily convert design elements into functional code that works. Meaning, you can DRAW a picture of a button or a slider and then simply click on it and tell Thermo you want the picture or design element to be a button. In the background, THERMO WRITES ALL OF THE FLEX CODE FOR YOU. It also means that at the same time, a designer can tweak the LOOK of the app while a developer plugs in code to hook up your app to a back-end server, etc. It's all the same code.

It's unreal, and you really can't fully grasp the potential of this until you actually see it. And what do you know -- you can watch a video of the entire Thermo sneak peek right here... ENJOY.

Would love to hear comments on what others think about this...

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