Fresh AIR Apps

Snippely is a handy AIR app for storing and organizing any code snippets or text bits and bobs that you keep stored all over you hard drive. I have lots of CSS and ActionScript chunks of code that I can never find when I need them, so here is Snippely with the answer.

Its a very simple tool and not that intuitive when you first load up. What would be more useful is a quick intro page and steps on how you can add your first ‘snippet’, take a leaf out of the 37 Signals book for this one. So after some clicking around the UI I realised that you need to add a group first, then add a snippet to that group using the + button at the bottom left. Now click on the snippet name on the top right for a set of buttons that allows you to ‘add code’ and ‘add note’.

What is good about Snippely is that it uses a syntax highlighter so you can have more meaningful looking snippets. But the big question is how do you set this? Well again after lots of left and right clicking if you right click on the ‘plain text’ about the snippet text you get the option to change. Currently there is support for JavaScript, CSS, PHP and Ruby. Adding ActionScript to this would be very worth while in my opinion.

So will I use it? Err yes of course. What would be useful to take the project forward would be to add an element of sharing. I would like to be able to search other peoples code snippets directly from within the interface then add these to my snippets. Secondly a button to add the content of a snippet to your clipboard would be such a time saver. Oh and could I save all of my snippets out to a native file please?

Design eye

Very Mac inspired UI going on here, fonts can be a little small especially on the buttons and snippet text. You can change the font but not the size. No custom chrome but a nice looking Icon goes someway to alleviate that. Again it goes to show that you cannot immediately tell whether an AIR app is built using Flash, Flex or HTML.

Technical eye

Apparently this tool was developed by the MooTools guys so naturally the app is built using HTML and loads of JavaScript while storing the snippets in AIR’s native SQLite database.