I finally got a chance to catch up with Avi Muchnick, the CEO of Flash software maker Aviary and of the art contest site it spun out of, Worth1000 (a Webware 100 winner).
Aviary is an ambitious project to create a full suite of online applications for creative professionals. The first application, the image editor Phoenix, is now in private beta (read to the end of this post to get an early invitation). The second, pattern maker called Peacock, was recently added.
Coming up after these applications will be Toucan, a color swatch program for designers (like Kuler on steroids), a 3D-sketching program and modeler, a vector-based editor, and a smart image resizer.
Who needs software? This is a layer-based image-editing application running in a browser window. It's pretty snappy, too.
(Credit: Rafe Needleman / CNET)After the graphics applications get some traction, the team plans to ship video and audio editors as well.
There are two goals driving Aviary's development. The first is Muchnick's belief that design tools need to be more collaborative. He's trying to build a Google Docs for designers, it appears. While you can't yet do simultaneous editing in Aviary applications, the fact that all the files are stored online, along with all the raw graphics materials that went into them, can greatly simplify the games of "Photoshop tennis" that designers, artists, and their clients have to deal with during the design-and-review process.
The second is economics. Muchnick is trying to bring Photoshop-quality tools to all designers. He points out that the high price of Photoshop--the Design version of Creative Suite 3 retails for $1,799--is "not fair" for freelance designers, most of whom make less than $35,000 a year. Also, the wikilike versioning and revisioning capabilities built into the Aviary suite will enable all contributors to a media project to get their due credit and, if appropriate, to get their share of revenues from a project.
Everybody who sees the Aviary product calls it ambitious. But the ambition to build a Flash-based competitor to Adobe's tools is only half the story--and half the ambition. Muchnick is trying to enable a new economic system for creative professionals. I think that he's onto something and that he's reflecting the reality of creative work today, rather than trying to ram through his own utopian vision.
Internet economics are changing other creative endeavors: music, photography, and writing. The graphic-design field is also in turmoil, and it needs not just new tools, but also new systems.
Aviary is still in private beta testing, but the first 200 people to sign up here can get priority access to the tools. Note that you must click this link from Webware.
Previous coverage: Flash apps are taking over. Phoenix is proof.
The clip above is a demonstration of the newly announced Aviary, a suite of Web tools for tackling "creation on the fly" (the product's motto and URL). You can think of it as having a similar goal for the creative crowd to what Zoho aims to do for organizational productivity: create a diverse set of light but still functional Web-based applications that enable portability and collaboration.
When the suite is final, it will optimally include more than a dozen applications, each named after a different kind of bird. Each one will handle a different niche of multimedia editing, from typography to audio editing to monetizing the content you create. (Think CafePress.com on steroids). They'll all be compatible so that you can use multiple applications on the same Aviary project, and you'll be able to collaborate with other Aviary users, Google Apps-style.
I know what you're thinking: wow, that's ambitious.
And it is. I saw an in-person demo of the first Aviary application to exit the gates, image editor Phoenix, and I was very impressed by the functionality and speed of the program. But you really can't deny that this is a tough market to enter, as video remix tools and Web-based versions of big-name applications pop up left and right.
The catch is that the folks who make up the team behind Aviary have a pretty unique kind of experience under their belts: they're the same people who run Worth1000, the photoshopping community that stresses artistic expertise over comic value. (No Microsoft Paint here.) That means that while developing Aviary, they've had access to years of direct experience with the Web's creative community. They also now have a loyal pack of early adopters for their new products.
Aviary's success may indeed depend on having those skilled beta testers on board to help shape the new suite into a robust set of applications and spread buzz about it across the rest of the Web.
The beta test of Aviary's first two applications, Phoenix and color swatch tool Toucan, is invite-only, but you can put your name in the hat here. The next Aviary application to be rolled out will be vector editor Raven, with the rest to follow over the next few months.
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