Spread your wings… and fly! (Artistically, of course)

July 16, 2009

A former UR student called me the other day to touch base and “talk tech”. At one point in our conversation, he asked me if I had heard of this awesome Adobe competitor called “Aviary“. I told him, inquisitively, “No”, but as we continued to talk, I accessed the site and became instantly intrigued. Mind you, the Center for Teaching, Learning, and Technology has recommended many web 2.0 image/media applications like Picnik, Photoshop Express and SplashUp to faculty, staff and students who need to do basic image manipulation procedures. These apps surely serve their purpose, however after using the Aviary suite… I think I’m hooked (although I haven’t gotten a hang of the file/save/open-old-file workflow, yet)

As you peruse the gallery of Tweety’s cousins, you’ll notice that Photoshop is to Pheonix as Illustrator is to Raven. There’s no need to go to different web sites if you want switch from a bitmap editor to a vector editor - its all in one place!

If you’re looking for a basic, FREE set of web-based image applications (did I say FREE?), then Aviary just might fancy your tail-feather! It has great relevance for art classes, journalism projects and students of new media. Give it a try, and do it soon… I’d hate for the Aviary to wind up with an unexpected case of Birdflu 2.0 (ie. being purchased by a larger company or barraging it’s users with random advertisements to sustain itself). And yes, the puns were intended.