Make Awesome Website Backgrounds With Gradient for Mac OS X

[Anthony Bouchard]

If anyone around here is a web designer, you might be happy to hear about this cool new program in beta testing. It's called Gradient. It's only available for Mac OS X right now, and it's currently free. The maker of the program is a company named, Jumpzero. Currently the author's intentions are not clear; he may put it on the Mac App Store to sell it later on.

Gradient is a program capable of automatically creating CSS code. All the user needs to do is click on the magnifying glass above the large circles at the top to pick a color. Once the user clicks on one of the magnifying glasses above the circles, a giant magnifying glass will pop up. You can click any color on your screen to pick a color. Then do the same thing for the other circle.

In the picture below, the magnifying glasses were used to pick a light gray and light black color from the Lion desktop wallpaper. The giant circle at the bottom of the application shows what the gradient will look like. The buttons above the giant circle allow the user to control the direction of the gradient. By clicking the little CSS button in the bottom right, as shown below, the CSS code becomes visible. The CSS code can be copied into TextEdit, Adobe Dreamweaver, or whatever you choose to do your web design in. The big 'copy' button under the large gradient circle in the bottom will copy the code for you.



Now of course, this is all that Gradient does. It's not meant for anything over-the-top, basically just for adding gradients to the background of a webpage. Users could always get creative and use it for table backgrounds as well.

Gradient is versatile. It has settings to adapt to all major browsers embedded within its preferences. It also has radial gradient settings for your colors hidden in the pull down menus. Color professionals can even input their own RGB and HEX values.

Gradient can be downloaded for free here.

What do you think of Gradient? Was it interesting to try? Leave comments below saying why, or why not!

Sources: Gradientapp.com, MacStories

[mmaboi21]

Nice platform layout.I wish i had a mac though

[micaiah12]

Okay program Good for newbies to website designing, but still you can do so much more just hand-coding the gradient. Plus if you hand code you get more experience.