Aviary, a collection of web based design tools

Thursday, January 17, 2008













Submitted by Ivan on Sat, 2008-01-12 17:08. Review

Once it launches, it will be fun to check out this new project called Aviary, which is a set of many different design tools. It is targeting a semi-professional market, so it's not really us. And, it's unlikely you gonna replace your Adobe CS suite for Aviary anytime soon, but I'm sure we will find a few interesting elements in this new package that can be used together with our traditional applications.

Apparently the flagship application Phoenix is a Photoshop clone with much of the functionality ported. Another exciting title is Peacock, a powerful pattern generator. Check out the sample images. It would be interesting for me to explore the 3D app called Hummingbird and Toucan the color swatches and palettes creator. Check out the whole long product range of Aviary.

Have I mentioned the most interesting part about the project? It's web based. Ironically the whole platform is based on Flex, which is an Adobe product to create rich internet applications. While I can imagine vector editing on a web based interface, but I'm highly skeptical about opening a 500MB image or editing a 10GB video in a browser.

I can't imagine an application made to run in a browser — no matter how well written — can outperform a desktop application in speed. But I can see how these set of tools can bring value into your work process in other ways. I can see your productivity soaring because you can use the power of internet connectivity to share and collaborate with your friends and coworkers to work on projects together. Same way as Google Doc's limited feature set is more useful than using the desktop MS Office or iWork packages in a highly team oriented environment, I can imagine Aviary to be a good tool to create and trade design work by collaborating online within a community.

You can sign up for a beta test here: http://a.viary.com/login/

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