We've seen quite a few blogs commenting on the irony of Aviary "competing" with Adobe using their own platform. The truth is, we're not direct competition at all. To date everyone we've met at Adobe has been incredibly supportive of what we're up to, especially on the Macromedia side of the company, as Aviary represents one of the largest testaments to the capabilities of the Flash Player (and Flex) out there.
In effect, we're a third-party evangelist for Adobe. Every time somebody uses our software, they are marveling at what Flash is capable of.
Different Markets
From a business perspective there is also no competition because our target markets are completely different. Adobe targets the niche creative professional market with a suite that is robust and comprehensive (a niche group that can afford to spend hundreds/thousands of dollars on software). Aviary targets the creative hobbyist with a suite that is streamlined and accessible (a larger group with less direct capital to spend, per person).
What about Adobe's initial forays into the web app market? Different market as well - those are completely consumer focused tools. Adobe Premiere Express and Adobe Photoshop Express are both deliberately lightweight offerings that bear no resemblance to the powerful brands of their desktop counterparts. My guess is there is some fear that by offering something more advanced that would appeal to hobbyist users they would cannibalize their high-end software sales... but I think that's unlikely. Web apps, (in their current state), cannot compete with professional desktop software used for professional publishing purposes.
Web-apps fill a different role. They are better suited for enhancing collaborative work flow during the pre-production phase, than desktop software. But it cannot replace desktop software for actual production. It's complementary to the Pro market.
Upselling & Combating Piracy
As for the hobbyist market, there is a direct gain for Pro-providers like Adobe, by other companies offering hobbyist-targeted web apps: Namely lowering instances of piracy.
With viable and affordable Photoshop light alternatives available, there should be a steep decline in piracy amongst hobbyist users - the largest group of software pirates (from my experience in the space). Why would that matter to Adobe? Simple. Once software is stolen, it generally remains so. A hobbyist who stole Photoshop to try it out for fun is not going to go out and purchase a full license once he/she is ready to go pro. (It's a lot easier to rationalize away a crime that's already been committed).
But someone who used legal web-apps and learned advanced concepts that exist in Pro software (i.e. layer-based editing) will eventually want to upgrade to pro software when they are ready for production-level work. If they haven't pirated Photoshop yet, they will be more likely to purchase it once they reach this level of expertise. And Aviary would fill an important role as the broker of that purchase.
Parcopresis, the fear of using a public toilet, is a serious affliction that affects millions of people. And we at Aviary, know there is good reason: Toilets are one of the most favored hiding spots for evil robots from other galaxies. We finally have video proof.
This time around Aviary's resident plumber Meowza has located classified evidence in a secret goverment restroom.
View the sources and full layered file
I, for one, welcome our new porcelain overlords.
This work made heavy use of lighting, painting, transforming and sourcing.
Sources:
Kudos to RudyEvil for the awesome Transformers remix!
Standard disclaimer: For those of you new to this blog, this was not created in Photoshop. It was created in Aviary, a suite of online web applications. You can sign up for the current beta at http://a.viary.com.
We've been getting a ton of press at Worth1000 over our Ultimate Celebrity contest, where the goal is to take the best physical features of multiple celebrities and merge them into one super celebrity. One of the requests we got from a prominent newspaper was to prove that Aviary (a web app) could really be used to create an ultimate celebrity. Piece of cake.
This time around Aviary's resident plastic surgeon Meowza performs illegal skin grafts on Catherine Zeta-Jones, Keira Knightly, Angelina Jolie and Charlize Theron, creating the beautiful Catheinize Zightly-Jeliens. I hope his malpractice insurance is paid up.
View the sources and full layered file
This work made heavy use of painting, blending and layering effects.
Sources:
Kudos to INXS for providing the beautiful accompaniment!
Standard disclaimer: For those of you new to this blog, this was not created in Photoshop. It was created in Aviary, a suite of online web applications. You can sign up for the current beta at http://a.viary.com.
After lots of hard work, we're finally getting ready to release another one of our Flash-based applications, our vector editor Raven. The obvious analogy would be to desktop software like Adobe Illustrator, Corel Draw or Inkscape.
Here's a quick video teaser of some of the functions in action (more to come soon).
From a commercial standpoint, we're really excited to release Raven into the wild because vectors are infinitely scalable and are used in everything from logo design to t-shirts to clip art. In other words, whereas Phoenix is not ideal for native high resolution design, Raven is very well suited for it.
Many of you have asked about how vectors will integrate with other tools: so we'll confirm here that the code base will be ported to all tools in the suite that can make use of it.
- Phoenix: We'll add a Pen-tool for use in the creation of reusable vector paths for making editable shapes and selections.
- Horus and Owl, our font and desktop layout editors, will also make use of this engine to edit vectors directly.
Raven will be a phenomenal way of driving graphic design services through Aviary's market place. Can you imagine a website where an artist can be hired to design a logo, chat with the client, share revisions (and even edit live in front of the client), manage their work flow and finally provide the final source files right to the client who doesn't need any special software to open it, all from within a single interface?
Another situation where the technology would be useful is for online clothing design communities whose members will no longer need to purchase and/or troubleshoot install expensive desktop software in order to jump in and design clothing!
To be one of the first to get access to Raven, sign up at http://a.viary.com/ for an invitation. If you are already in the system, no need to resign up. Just drop us a note in the forums and we'll add it to your account as soon as we release it.
Exciting news for Aviary users! CNet has nominated Worth1000 for the 2008 Webware 100! We were chosen by CNet from a pool of almost 4,600 websites.
It's a huge honor, especially as we're listed in fantastic company along with the likes of some other web apps and sites we personally love, like Picnik, Scrapblog, Flickr and Twitter (among many, many others).
If you love what we've been doing for artistic communities, first with Worth1000 and now with Aviary, then please show your support and vote!
You can vote here (Worth1000 is located alphabetically, at the bottom):
http://www.webware.com/html/ww/100/2008/vote_publi...
You can cast up to three votes in each category.
Even if you don't vote for Worth1000, please show support for any 3 of the wonderful sites that are listed. To encourage people to participate, we'll make an offer: If you do vote (for anyone) and leave a message here indicating you voted, we'll make sure that you get into our private beta.
As an update to a previous post, where we announced Woodpecker, we were asked by an Aviary user to post a video of our smart image resizer in action and we figured we'd share it with everyone.
While we do have Woodpecker slated to be released as a stand alone application, it will also be available directly within Phoenix, our image editor's interface for easy resizing work on individual layers.
Otherwise known as "Liquid scaling" or "seam carving", this technology allows a picture to be automatically resized without damaging or squishing elements the computer (or artist) deems to be important. For example, we can resize this image:
to this:
To gain access to Aviary, Woodpecker and other tools currently under beta release, please sign up at http://a.viary.com.
Here's one more video of Phoenix, our powerful Flash-based image editor to tide you over for the week:
This time around Aviary's resident mad scientist Meowza experiments with illegal genetic cross breeding. For shame, Meowza. For shame.
View the sources and full layered file
This work made heavy use of painting and layering effects.
Kudos to Alvin and the Chipmunks for providing the soundtrack!
But wait, there's more! Here are some more Meowza experiments on innocent animals: Someone please call PeTA already.
View the sources and full layered file
View the sources and full layered file
Standard disclaimer: For those of you new to this blog, this was not created in Photoshop. It was created in Aviary, a suite of online web applications. You can sign up for the current beta at http://a.viary.com.
If you like this post, please Digg it.
Update The frog image was dugg and the traffic seems to be slowing the site, so we're redirecting traffic over to this blog post which can handle the requests better (and also contains the cyborg frog). You should be able to access the frog image by clicking the sources. Sorry the extra step!
Maybe it's because he's got a sweet tooth, but Meowza simply can't stop turning things into Chocolate. He's like the Prince Midas of Hershey Bars.
View the sources and full layered file
Kudos to Christina Aguilera for providing the retro-funky Candyman sound track. Man, I'm getting hungry.
Here are some more Meowza chocolatized works, for your viewing (and tasting) pleasure.
View the sources and full layered file
View the sources and full layered file
Standard disclaimer: For those of you new to this blog, this was not created in Photoshop. It was created in Aviary, a suite of online web applications. You can sign up for the current beta at http://a.viary.com.
One of the reasons we feel our software suite is so different than anything created to date is because these online flash applications work together. Here is the first video of this concept in action. This shows Peacock, the pattern generator being used to create "microplanets," which are then laid out and blended into a peaceful sky seen in Phoenix, Aviary's flash image editor.
Meowza is responsible for creating this surreal scene:
Just to explain what you're seeing in the first part of the video: It's a special object nicknamed microplanets, being created using Peacock's node-based filter system.
Microplanets is a new pattern filter just added to Peacock, in which a scene can be wrapped around a sphere. For example, this image:
becomes this:
For those of you without access to Aviary yet, you can sign up for the beta invitations to try out both Phoenix and Peacock at http://a.viary.com. If you're already in the beta, just leave a note in the Peacock thread to gain access.
After some of the outcry over our last post showing Hillary Clinton shedding her skin in Aviary's online image editor, we had to prove to everyone that we are non-partisan and love both candidates. In fact, we love them SO much, we figured we'd make them mate and produce a love child super-candidate.
Meowza and Daft Punk team up to show just how much better off the world would be if enemies mated with each other, with hilarious results.
For those of you new to this blog, this was not created in Photoshop. It was created in Aviary, a suite of online web applications. You can sign up for the beta invitation at http://a.viary.com.