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We’re here to help you grow your business and increase your productivity, so the products/services we’ll be recommending in the coming months are also focused on that goal. Not too long ago we spoke about the ConceptShare API and our integration of it for use with providing design briefs or to simplify communication in web application interface development.

So what’s the news this time?! ConceptShare now has a Desktop Companion available for your desktop. I don’t know why they say it’s in beta, this thing is slick! It makes *very* short work out of getting your concepts into ConceptShare to provide your design briefs to us. And on our end it means that now ConceptShare can live in our docks / taskbars.

The Desktop Companion also brings the functionality that you’re used to along with other time saving features home to your desktop. We first tested this out over a 3G connection, so I’d imagine that we’d be even more impressed over a traditional broadband connection. Let’s see what we have, after a quick download and install of Adobe AIR runtime of course (click any thumbnails for a larger view):

There’s an “at-a-glance” view, that wasn’t really available in web application itself: workspace details are available like name, date of last activity are nice, but now you can also see the number of new comps posted, number of new comments as well as view the workspace users in a workspace.

To make sure you’re always looking at things in a way that’s helpful to you, now you can easily sort by: date created, people online now, last visited, new comments, new concepts, latest activity, date created and details can be edited as easily as ever, as well as toggling visibility and workspace deletion. Having used ConceptShare for quite some time here at W3, the thing that makes this companion live up to its name is that the changes you can make to workspace can now all be done in an almost “bulk” fashion, so housekeeping is a breeze and response time crisp.

As you would expect, you can also launch your workspace (in a browser) directly from the companion or even create a new workspace from scratch! Adding users to a workspace is also a breeze, by drilling down into a workspace, clicking on the thumbnail and then clicking the people button below the workspace name.

For those of you like us with many accounts to attend to, you can easily jump into various accounts, which is handy if you’re playing various roles in a number of workspaces.

Last but not least, dragging and dropping media into a workspace is a phenomenal experience (nice touch on the file upload complete sound)! Not only can you have a look at all of the media in a workspace simply by clicking on the thumbnail, you can also have a look at the people in a in a workspace and review the comments as well. The entire experience is also very crisp and (desktop) application like.

As promised, we’ll also be closing the circle on our ConceptShare integration by allowing you to give us access to your own ConceptShare workspaces so that you don’t have to re-upload or re-comment your finalized artwork!

We’re really thankful to Adobe for making it so straightforward for companies like ConceptShare to make the next logical step in user experience; bringing rich internet applications to the desktop. I’m sure there are some easter eggs or features in the Desktop Companion we haven’t covered and even more around the corner. Either way, the Desktop Companion should be a key piece of your daily ConceptShare diet, stay up-to-date with new developments at ConceptShare team. For those of you who are interested, video support is also available in the latest version of ConceptShare!