Aviary launched

If you want to see the most cutting edge Flash applications made to this day, check out Aviary! It's a suite of image creation tools built using Flash by some of the most talented Flash developers out there. It's really a testament to the Flash Platform when Aviary can build online tools so powerful that they rival Adobe's tools in many ways!

We've been watching Aviary for some time and they keep amazing us. Why build boring RIAs for large corporations when you can make visual creation tools that everyone can play with? To me, building web-apps has never been about displaying data. I want richness and innovation, not charts and datagrids. I want to create fun things and that's exactly what the Aviary team is doing. When finished, the Avaiary suite will contain more than 10 image creation tools, covering both old and new ground.

The first tool in the Aviary suite is Phoeninx, a powerful bitmap image editor. To see some of the possibilities, check out this video where Britney Spears gets a "makeover". Peacock, the second tool is our favorite - a unique pattern generator that you can play with for hours. It's just so much fun and there is no tool like it on the market today. Check out this video on Vimeo to see how you can use Peacock to build something that can take any image as an input and return a LEGO model of it! The third tool is a color selection tool (like Adobe's Kuler) that integrates with the other tools. A vector tool called Raven is currently in Alpha and it's looking good. Future tools that are in the works include a 3D application, a font editor, a seam carving tool and more.

The Aviary tools only exist online and while this may seem as a disadvantage, it's rather the opposite. Aviary is built around sharing. Unless you set your creation to private, anybody can open and learn from how you created it. You can also base your creations on creations from others (images, 3D models, patterns and more). The use of every image is tracked and makes it much easier to solve copyright issues that might occur. This kind of sharing of knowledge also helps build the community around the products and that's part of the plan.

The founders of Aviary also created the popular site Worth1000.com, a community of more than 500,000 digital artists that play make some really cool artwork. You can probably find some of the worlds most advanced Photoshop users on this site. There's a solid business side to the Aviary tools as well. Anybody can play around with them for free. If you use the tools a lot, you'll need to pay a little.

Check Aviary out - this is the frontier of online applications! Just fire up a browser and you have the creation tools you need as well as all your files, how's that for ease and portability? Up until today, Aviary has been in a private beta. From today on, everyone can experience it. At the current pace, these tools will soon compete with Adobe's own tools. In the case of Phoenix vs Photoshop Express, it's already 1 - 0 to Aviary!

 

 

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