I hope you had a happy and healthy Thanksgiving, <<First Name>>. In the spirit of giving thanks for useful tools, I have two online apps to share with you. As many of you know, I am a Windows refugee, who has adopted Chromebooks and Chrome OS as my new home. Because of this, I’m always on the lookout for good programs that run entirely in a web browser.

Vector graphics with a weird name

I found Gravit Designer purely by chance, following a link from a blog post that I now can’t find. It fills a huge gap in the world of online graphics apps, with a truly impressive array of features for the professional designer. As if that weren’t enough, the program is also available to run locally on Windows, Linux and Mac platforms. It includes many of the features that were available on the late lamented Adobe Fireworks program, which I always thought was the ideal graphics program for web development. Gravit’s features include:

• Structure. Powerful pages with masters, real layers and symbols to structure your content.
• Vector. Made for vector with non-destructive booleans, knife tool and path graphs.
• Layout. Powerful grids, anchors and auto-layouts made for pixel perfect screen designs.
• Style. Multiple fills/borders, effects and blending modes together with shared styles.
• Text. Powerful text engine with text on path, web fonts, styles and much more.
• Export. Export high quality PDFs, SVGs and Images using slices and multiple assets.

Gravit is free to use, including cloud storage of your designs. They say that they make their money by licensing the graphics engine in other products. The app is only 8 months old but they appear to be developing it at a rapid pace. My main concern is that their business model won’t succeed and the product will go away. I’ll take it while I can get it though. To prevent lock in, designs can be exported as PDFs, which retain all of their vector characteristics and can be imported into other programs.

I’m excited to find a professional level graphics tool that I actually would have paid to use, had it not been free. If you’re a graphics person, give it a whirl and let me know what you think.

Calendaring with no login required

In my other role of Chief Executive Member of WorkPlace Sonora, I had been on the lookout for an online calendar that would allow our members to reserve the conference room. It needed to be easy to use, while also restricting access to other people’s reservations. After a fair amount of searching, I discovered Teamup, which met all of our requirements.

Teamup allows the creation of links that grant specific permissions to each user for each calendar. A link can allow:

• Modify
• Read only
• Read only, no details
• Add
• Add only, no details
• Modify from same link
• Modify from same link, no details

Each of our members has their own “Modify from the same link” to the Conference Room calendar, allowing them to add and change only their own reservations. No login required; everything is handled through the link. Oh, and did I mention that this service is also free?

If you have any favorite online apps that you use, please click reply and let me know. I’d be happy to share them in a future newsletter.

Until next week.