Borealis

Free Resources

It’s no secret that Airglo Media is always trying to stay on the bleeding edge of current technology and trends.

Recently, we purchased company iPads. For those of you living under rocks, the iPad is a neat little handheld touchscreen tablet, kind of like a giant iPhone that can’t make calls. They’ve sold over three million of these little gadgets at the time of writing of this post.

We plan on using them for three key reasons: developing mobile apps, as a sales tool, and as a mobile development tool. For example I wrote this entire entry on my iPad at the Edmonton international airport.

There are some great applications for web designers available for the iPad. I’ve got a text editor with built in FTP and localhost web server (Gusto), a sketching app for drawing out quick design ideas and notes (iDraft) and a mockup design tool for wire framing and prototyping (Sketchy). I also use Evernote, Skype, Dropbox, WordPress and Twitterific to name a few. One tool I couldn’t seem to find was a colour picker that output rgb and hex values.

Normally when I’m at home I rely on Photoshop for mixing colours and grabbing their hex codes. I’ve looked around the app store and while there is at least one colour picker app, I found it to be terrible. The controls were awful, it was buggy and you couldn’t copy and paste the colour values.

That’s why I’ve spent the last couple days developing Borealis. Borealis is an HTML 5 web app designed specifically for the iPad. It’s a simple colour picker fully utilizing the touch screen of the iPad with intuitive touch gestures. It outputs both formatted rgb and hex codes which you can easily copy to the clipboard. It is also fully stand alone supporting offline use. That means wherever you go, internet or not, you can use Borealis.

You can grab Borealis by navigating to http://borealis.airglomedia.com on your iPad and adding it to your homescreen.

We hope you enjoy Airglo Media’s very first iPad application!