This month’s Cool Tool spot belongs to FileZilla, one of the best open-source FTP, SFTP, and FTP over SSL/TLS (FTPS) clients available on the market for free (under the GNU General Public License). FileZilla is cross-platform, supporting Windows, Linux, Mac OS X and more. As of this writing the latest stable version of the FileZilla Client is 3.5.2 and for the FileZilla Server it is 0.9.40. Documentation of both the Client and the Server is made available online at the FileZilla Project Wiki.

I’ve been using this Cool Tool since it was release a few years back and like many of the products that come out of Adobe, it just gets better with age. Adobe Kuler is a free web-based application for creating and sharing color themes. It is incredibly powerful tool for Web designers but quite frankly it is pretty useful tool for anyone who works with color themes for anything (such as packaging or interior design).

Adobe applies the same color-theory algorithms found in its Creative Suite so you can easily generate color themes from scratch (using the color wheel), from an uploaded photo (or pulled in from Flickr), or started with one of 500 million themes donated by the Kuler community. Once created, your color theme can be imported into Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Fireworks, or Flash. I could go on but this video from Adobe TV does a fine job summing up the features.

Recently, Adobe rolled out Kuler for Android v3.1 or higher (no iOS version as of yet but Adobe is working on it and you can be notified here when it is released).

I was actually going to post Onswipe as a Cool Tool back in June but found the start-up was still experiencing some growing pains. Nevertheless, I was optimistic that the good folks at Onswipe (namely co-founders Jason Baptiste Andres Barreto) would grow up fast. And they did, culling $6 million in VC funding for trailblazing.

Onswipe bills itself as a magazine-style publishing and advertising platform for tablet devices. They have some big name publishers like Ziff Davis, Slate, and Marie Claire. Nice. But the idea I really like is Onswipe makes it “insanely easy” to convert ordinary WordPress blogs into a slick touch-screen friendly e-zines. They do this with open-souce PHP and NodeJS with a MongoDB database on the back-end and HTML5/CSS3 (and their own JavaScript framework called SwipeCore) on the front-end.

It is pretty simple to get started: create an account, select a layout, and pick a custom URL like touch.virtual-arts.com. You can have Onswipe auto-detect the user’s device and redirect to this URL but you will have to update the primary domain DNS settings with a CNAME record (call your domain registrar to help you with this step). The application also lets you specify a Google Analytics ID for tracking site usage.

Overall a nice first step in the right direction if you don’t mind relinquishing some design. Clearly the greater advantage is to ad-driven sites with lots of content. I’ve yet to delve that deep into the publication end and suspect there are some limitations but the convenience of delivering content to touch-screen devices without the hassle of redesigning your site is compelling (at least for the short-term). Something to keep an eye on.

This month’s Cool Tool is actually a set of SSL Certificate Tools from SSL Shopper that help webmasters and average Joes troubleshoot problems they may have installing SSL certificates (not like that ever happens). The SSL Checker, CSR Decoder, and Certificate Key Matcher all came in handy recently when trying to sync up the SSL Certificate issuer on a separate Web Server Host where the private key and CSR were generated. It was a big help and thought others would appreciate the convenience. The only limitation I’m aware of is that there is no validation of intermediate certificates. For this you might try Why No Padlock.

• SSL Checker
• CSR Decoder
• Certificate Decoder
• Certificate Key Matcher
• SSL Converter

This one is for the typographer inside every Web designer. Since the inception of the Web, designers have toiled with the lack of font options for their online creations. Typically, if you wanted to make sure your non-graphical text rendered smoothly and consistently across all browsers across all platforms, you stuck to the handful of system fonts made available on both the Mac and PC (e.g. Arial, Verdana, New Times Roman).

Sometime in 2005, Mike Davidson and Mark Wubben invented sIFR (Scalable Inman Flash Replacement), a clever little “applet” that used JavaScript and Adobe Flash to dynamically replace text elements on HTML pages with Flash equivalents (based on text-to-flash replacement technique by Shaun Inman, hence, the name).  sIFR was not suitable for body text and required a call to the Flash player for each rendering which could slow page-load times. Other non-Flash variations emerged such as FLIR (Facelift Image Replacement) which replaces text with dynamically generated images (using server-side scripting language PHP) and Cufón which uses JavaScript and vector graphics to write fonts from an XML font file (e.g. TTF, OTF, PFB). But these too had their shortcomings.

Then in 2010, the Google Font Directory emerged from Google Labs, leveraging the “power of the cloud” to provide high-quality Web fonts anywhere regardless of the browser or device (you can read the announcement on the official Google Code blog). Google has made adding these fonts to your Web pages incredibly easy for even the non-technical, using CSS3 and the Google Font API. Just select a font and follow the steps for copying and pasting the code into your Web pages. All the fonts are open-source so there are no copyright worries.