Webware

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Backing up data is important and should be done often. But remembering and knowing how to do it is a different story.

With this in mind, Memeo--an online digital company that offers a variety of online services such as photo sharing --has released a backup solution for business users that will help keep track of backing up data. Memeo Backup Professional 4.5 is tied to an online console, from which an admin user can remotely view the status of backups of other users. This means that once it's installed on network computers, a single admin can oversee the backup status for the whole business.

The admin user can send the remote user, via e-mail, a license to download or software to install. After that the admin can view the status and then contact the user of a particular computer if something is wrong, or to make sure that the user is backing up data regularly.

Unfortunately, for now, there's not much else the admin user can do. It would be much more helpful if he or she could initiate the backup itself or make the software send a pop-up message to remind the local user to start a backup. Memeo's representatives say that this is along the lines with what the company is working on for future releases of the software.

Other than that, Memeo Backup Professional 4.5 is a standard wizard-driven backup software that offers a variety of backup options, including backing up to an FTP server and to Memeo online storage. Backup to an FTP site offers an option for you to make a personal "online" backup. It also allows for differential backups and backups to local/network folders or removable drives.

Memeo Backup Professional 4.5 works with all versions of Windows 32-bit and 64-bit and is available now for $76 per license, which is rather expensive considering the limited functionality of the online console. However as this online console feature is rather unique and if you are an existing customer of Memeo's online backup service, this software will make a good addition.

If you just want good backup software, I would strongly recommend GFI Backup Home Edition, which, apart from the online console and the tie to Memeo online storage, offers the same options and more, including the ability to back up to an FTP site. Best of all, it is yours for free.

Picnik has a new and simple way of distributing photos you've just edited in your browser. Using application programming interfaces from Photobucket's TwitGoo photo-hosting service and Twitter, it lets you compose a tweet that includes a link to the photo right inside of the editor.

To do this you simply link up your Twitter account once, and Picnik saves your credentials for future use. It also lets you take a shot you've edited in Picnik and quickly make it either your Twitter profile picture, or background. In either case it's skipping the step of you having to venture off Picnik to make the changes.

There are several benefits to blasting out photos over Twitter. People on many modern desktop clients can view the image without leaving their app. And TwitGoo provides a simple way for other people to see the original and directly respond or retweet it from their own accounts, which can give you extra distribution power if people like what you've just made.

You can take photos you've just edited in Picnik and send them straight to Twitter with a simple new feature.

(Credit: CNET)

The new image-editing tools on MySpace.

(Credit: MySpace)

MySpace has brought on board some Web-based image-editing tools from FotoFlexer so that members can fool around with the photos they've uploaded to the site.

It's no Photoshop. But FotoFlexer can perform basic editing tasks (cropping, resizing, flipping, red-eye removal), as well as distortion, color effects, and some decoration and "bling" features (always important).

So far, FotoFlexer on MySpace is available only to U.S. users. The tools will roll out internationally soon, however.

This move makes sense for MySpace. Not only does image editing tie in nicely with its longstanding express-yourself, customize-anything vibe, but it's also a way to keep users on the MySpace domain.

The News Corp.-owned social network has been eclipsed by Facebook in worldwide traffic, but relatively recent ComScore statistics have shown that MySpace users stick around for about twice as long on each visit.

WriteOnIt is a simple service that lets you caption and manipulate uploaded photos. Just like BigHugeLabs' Flickr toys project (story), it can take uploaded photos and stick them into magazine covers. It can also slyly insert them onto coffee mugs, billboards, art easels, and fake mirrors within ready-made photos.

CNET's very own Caroline McCarthy gets a (fake) cover.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

You have very little control over the complicated bits, like transparency, placement, and cropping--which are all absent. However, with that simplicity you can very quickly put together something that both looks polished, and that could fool your viewer.

Of all the tools my favorite is the newspaper creator. You have five different periodicals to choose from including Time, Rolling Stone, and Wired. It'll take whatever photo you upload (up to 8MB) and stick it in the background. You can also change the headline and tagline underneath it, but that's the only other thing you can change.

Once you're done with any creation made on the site you can save it to your hard drive, or send it to a friend either by e-mail or through MySpace, Facebook, and Windows Live Spaces. There's also an option to publish it so that other WriteOnIt users can see it, which will put it into a bucket of recently uploaded photos and make it eligible for "battle" where users can vote on which result looks better.

(via BuzzFeed)

Tools that let you edit photos in the Web browser have come a long way in the last few years. We wanted to take a moment to do a feature comparison with a grouping of editors--big and small, to see what each one is capable of.

Most of the services on this list take advantage of Adobe's ever-developing Flash platform, which in its latest iteration got a huge boost with support for the large images coming out of today's high-megapixel cameras. On the flip side of that, several of the non-Flash-based editors use AJAX to make the changes happen without reloading the page. The benefit here is that you can run these on machines without the latest versions of Flash installed.

While not an exhaustive list of features, we wanted to focus on some of the ones that really mattered, like how much each service costs to use, how large of a photo you can upload, and what makes each one special. Here are the results:

Two small caveats about size: In most cases, any difference in the maximum photo resolution is a result of which version of Flash the tool--or the user--is running. In Aviary's case, its Phoenix photo editor uses the Flash 9 spec, thus only supporting images up to 2800x2800 in size. Its next release, due later this year, will nearly double that resolution.

Also, the maximum resolution doesn't necessarily mean if your original photo is bigger, it won't take it. Instead, what many of these services will do is simply scale it down to something that's more manageable both for your machine and its servers. Photos with odd aspect ratios are often constrained within the proportion of pixels any given editing app can render within its available workspace.

So which one is the best?

That's a difficult question. It depends on what you're trying to do. If you want to add glitter graphics to a picture to put on your MySpace profile, you should go with Lunapic. If you're trying to edit the RAW photos you just took on your new SLR, you're only going to be able to do it on Snipshot's paid pro service.

When online image-editing site Aviary released Raven on Monday, the Holy Grail of image-editing tools had finally hatched. If you're new to the term, vectors are what allow graphic designers to create an image and scale it to any size without pixelation or degradation of quality. The Wikipedia vector entry does an excellent job of going into more detail about the differences between vectors and rasters, which degrade as you change their scale.

Raven's main editing window.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Beautifully, Raven only requires a Web browser and the latest version of Flash. In the words of Michael Galpert, co-founder of Aviary, "If you can watch a video on YouTube, you can use Raven." Because Raven supports vectorized images and is part of the Aviary toolset, users can share their images and critiques. This also saves the effort of e-mailing cumbersome, large, and layered vector image files to collaborate.

Raven uses a proprietary image format, called EGG, but can import and export files as SVG--the standard vector format. Because it's Flash-based, Raven does have some limitations. Importing images that are larger than the 2800x2800 pixels that Flash supports will cause them to be automatically scaled down, but that shouldn't be a big deal unless you're designing billboards. Many users should find Raven extremely useful for Web design needs.

You can open any Aviary user's images in Raven to create your own version.

(Credit: CNET Networks; art by Harry122)

The actual tools that Raven provides are perfect for basic vector editing. Once you've created your drawing, you can edit path nodes, transform a shape, or drag it to a new location. There are also tools for creating Bezier and lines and drawing freehand and calligraphic lines. Tools for making rectangles and gradient fills are also available. For each tool, a window pops up with helpful hot-key commands. For example, the edit path node tool tells you how to select multiple nodes, as well as editing or deleting a path's vertex.

The tools are laid out in a classic design, with the tool palette on the left and editing palettes on the right. The Layers and Fill and Stroke palettes are hideable to free up more screen real estate, as are the rulers. Surprisingly, there was practically no lag time in loading images, creating new shapes, or filling in gradients.

Raven's tools should be instantly recognizable to anybody familiar with vector editing.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Normally, I'd recommend a freeware vector image editor like Inkscape, but there are some distinct advantages to Raven. The built-in tracking and display of image size, creation date, most recent modification date, comments, sources, derivatives, and versions, as well as the use of tags, makes your vector images immediately Web 2.0-ready.

Also, if you're working on a Netbook, you don't have to worry about blowing out your system resources since Aviary is all Web-based. In my attempts to get Raven to crash, I ran 20 tabs, including Gmail, YouTube, and Aviary in Firefox. Although it ate up a massive amount of RAM, 825MB, that's not a lot if you consider that included working on naturally resource-heavy vector images.

Because the images are vectorized, you have to export them before you can send them outside of the Aviary. When you're finished, though, you can Export it as a rastered image, and that will make it socially acceptable. There are a number of online tutorials for Raven, and 62 in total for Aviary, making getting started just about as easy as possible.

In an interview with the Sydney Morning Herald, Encyclopedia Britannica President Jorge Cauz said that the encyclopedia's free, online version, Britannica.com, will soon be allowing user edits and additions to its pages. This system is not yet live, but according to the Herald should be within the next day or so.

Registered users will be able to make corrections, or add entirely new sections to encyclopedia pages--much like Wikipedia. The big difference, however, is that Britannica.com's editing and approval system will be managed by its own editors and contracted staff instead of power users. According to the Herald, Cauz is promising a 20-minute turnover on these edits, but that number could go up dramatically if the company cannot anticipate a large influx of edits at once.

Cauz also told the Herald that the big reason for the change is to improve Britannica's search engine optimization and dethrone Wikipedia from its current dominance on Google.com and other search engines. These edits will also trickle down into the print edition, benefiting those who purchase its 30-plus volume set.

TextFlow, a new way to collaboratively edit documents, is opening up to everyone Monday morning. Instead of going the real-time route like Zoho and Google Docs, the service opts to let a master editor corral multiple versions of the same Microsoft Word document inside of one file.

Each editor sends in a copy of the file (presumably via e-mail), and the master editor drags and drops all of them into a single bucket. The application then divides the edits into sections, letting the master editor pick whichever revisions make the most sense. When finished, he or she can convert it back to a single Word document.

The tool, developed by Nordic River Software, is just the beginning of a much broader plan to change the way all sorts of documents are edited by multiple parties. Creator and CEO of Nordic River Tomer Shalit envisions a much more encompassing, end-to-end solution where users will be able to send their work to a centralized drop box for the master editor to manage.

In the meantime, the current iteration manages to do all of this within an Adobe AIR application just 400 KB in size. Shalit says this system could eventually be ported over to the Web since it's been built entirely in Flash. "It could be online," Shalit says, "but in this first iteration of the product we chose to do AIR for its drag-and-drop capability." AIR also allows local client-side encryption, which Shalit says makes it a more secure editing platform when working with sensitive documents.

The service is completely free, but not without its limitations. It can handle only documents up to 10 pages in length, and from up to seven different editors--something Shalit says is not a technical limit, rather an issue of color blindness and horizontal screen real estate getting in the way of usability. It also cannot currently handle any kind of embedded charts or images, which is something that the team might add in a later version.

Going forward Shalit hopes to expand to accommodate other Office documents and popular file types, including PowerPoint presentations. There are also plans to launch a premium service that adds higher page limits, extended workflow handling, and higher quality encryption for heavy business users.

You can pick up TextFlow here. Also be sure to check out this quick demo of how it works with three different edits:

Online image editing suite Aviary is now open and available to all after serving out a lengthy private beta which lasted about a year and a half.

The suite is comprised of four Web-based image editing tools that aim to compete with traditional software solutions like Adobe's Creative Suite by putting all of the applications right in your browser, making them accessible from anywhere.

The opening comes with the imminent launch of two new premium levels of service, which offer paying members more control over their creations than free users have. While all four Web applications are available to users at each of the three levels of service, the higher tiered plans let them save more items, remove and customize watermarks, and get access to professionally produced tutorial content.

The premium plans, which go live next week (November 3rd to be precise), cost $7.99 per month or $79.90 per year for the "green" plan, and $14.99 per month or $149.90 per year for the top-of-the-line "blue" plan. You can see a full sheet of the differences here, with the key one being both the number of creations you're able to save, and the option of keeping them private.

We've got 100 subscription discounts available, which knock $55 off the yearly subscription price of either premium plan. To claim yours go here before signing up. Embedded below is a quick video to show you what you're capable of doing with Aviary's tools.

Previous Aviary coverage:
Under the Radar: Eye candy that's actually useful
Aviary's creative suite is more than a pretty Flash app
Flash apps are taking over--Phoenix is the latest proof