As a Web Designer, I always find websites giving code snippets and tutorials to be the best way to achieve good coded websites. Though sometimes I find that just cutting code from other websites to be quite harsh on the website owner (even if it is a tutorial) and I often find that unless you become a ninja with your bookmarking abilities, it’s often really difficult to find that same website again!
CSS3 is the norm for stylesheets these days, (aside from the spattering of (really awesome) people that use SASS) and it’s becoming ever easier to get things done with nicer looking code, and without the need to even think about using Flash or other horrible tools!
I stumbled across this app for the Mac quite a while ago, but never actually got around to buying it or doing anything past just looking at the website. Up to this point I’ve always relied heavily on Photoshop to create gradients of any kind, just to use the colour picker tool to choose my high and low colours, then I’d probably search the Internet for a CSS gradient tool. Pretty unproductive, right?
So Gradient does away with the need to use Photoshop, it’s small, it’s quick, and best of all its cheap! Opening it up for the first time you’re greeted with two colour swatches, and the ability to choose via magnifying glass (if you have an image that you like the colour of) or by swatches (much like the colour picker app on the Mac). From here you can click a drop down icon and be presented with the RGB, HSI and HEX values for the gradients you’ve created. Though not entirely necessary if you’re going to copy the code straight to CSS, it does leave the option of using the colours later from within Photoshop or a similar package.
Below this you can choose the focal point of the gradient, i.e. where the lightest colour is on the image (centre, left, right, top-left, bottom-left, etc, etc). Pretty nifty if you’re not just doing a bottom to top gradient.
From here you are shown a preview of what your gradient looks like, both with the colours and with the focal point displayed. It’s at this point that you can either output the code to CSS, or use the settings icon at the bottom left and choose more advanced options (like outputting to SASS for example, which I’m a big fan of!)
So, what do I think of it? Well it’s compact, nicely designed (very Mac-like) and it does away with the need to spend oodles of money on Photoshop when creating gradients. Overall I’d say it’s a good purchase, well, it’s earned a spot on my Dock anyway!
