Aviary is a beautifully designed and very ambitious online suite of creative applications covering everything from image editing to desktop publishing. It comes from the Worth1000 people (who do those fabulous Photoshop contests) so the pedigree is very cool. I say ambitious because the suite includes apps like video editors, wordprocessing and even a font editor, so it’s likely that this is going to take time to build out.
The first application is Phoenix, the image editor, which although still a lot more basic than Photoshop, has layers and enough tools to do some proper image tweaking. What’s more important is the fact that it’s fast, and very responsive where it counts. If all the applications come out like this, then I can see a very bright future for this suite. I’ve got five invitations to give out if anyone would like to try it out.
By the way, online applications in general are really coming good right now, aren’t they? For another example take a look at Gliffy which is a fabulous diagramming application I use and which has really developed nicely in the two years since we first featured it here on the Ferret. Nice stuff.
All of our tools are based right in your browser or as downloadable AIR applications. Our tools all communicate and relate to each other. To illustrate an example: You can import a swatch from Toucan into Phoenix, while doing complex bitmap processing of a 3D object developed in Hummingbird. Finally, you can take your finished artwork and lay it out in Owl as the DVD artwork for a music CD you and your friends put together in Roc and Myna and offer it for sale in our marketplace, Hawk.
well, may i recieve invitation to find out how promising this concept really is?:)
Online image editor with layers and cross-platform? Yes please!
Done for you both. :-)
ooo this sounds great. I’m tired of waiting for that mystical online PS