griffin aviary

I have been working with the Aviary suite of image creation and editing apps for a few weeks. Purchasing the pro license will set you back around $25 for a year which is extremely cheap compared to a license for Photoshop and Illustrator. If you have several machines, you can quickly see the beauty of the aviary apps which are all browser-based. No software installs and all your work is saved in the cloud.

I did feel somewhat conned into subscribing to Aviary, however, after playing around with Phoenix, I wanted to save my unfinished work and realized that it was being shared publically with the community. They make it very easy to share work with the various social media sites, and this would be an excellent feature if the paint was dry. In my case, it was very wet, and I felt caught with my pants down unless I paid up.

In order to save a private version, I had to buy the pro license. I was hooked though and that super sweet $25 price point didn’t phase me at all. In fact, it would be great to see more software developers adopt that price plan for small fry like me.

For instance, I’m also a basecamp user and promoter. I have a free personal account which I wouldn’t mind subscribing to $25 a year with 1 project. I think they should create a “minnow” or “my life” plan just for me (and perhaps the other 20 thousand or so using the free version– just a guess). The closest level they have is a “personal” plan with 3 projects for $12/month. I only need 1 project for myself and won’t upgrade. I actually support 37 signals promoting basecamp for all our client work and passing the buck to Blast Radius. It is an exceptional tool for team collaboration and project management. So I can see that offering free accounts to individual customers who work for larger agencies can benefit the company overall.

Moving into 2010, I plan to continue to use basecamp and explore Aviary more. I’ve just installed Aviary’s Talon firefox extension which is amazing. You can capture any image in your browser and easily open it in Phoenix. If you are a photoshop power-user, I must warn you that Aviary — while having a familiar environment — takes some time to get used to but after a few hours of frustration you begin to develop a strange rhythm.

A few of the tools do not behave like those in photoshop. I couldn’t get the brush tool to change paint colours and size unless I toggled the foreground to background option each time. Its an extra weird click but once you do it ten times it begins to be less annoying. Small bugs like this are to be expected for a beta app though and I’m sure will be ironed out by version 2. If you haven’t tried them yet, I highly recommend giving these Aviary apps a spin in 2010.

I’ll leave you with an unrelated screen grab of a griffin from one of my favourite sierra series of games: Quest for Glory 2 ( recently remade as a free download). Back in the day of EGA, you can see how pixel artists created shades by laying two different colours side by side in a grid. At the time, I thought these graphics were incredible, and I wonder if photoshop 1.0 was used to create them?!