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Partner Spotlight: Moped – The messaging app built for BOTH mobile & web
Moped is a free and beautiful way to simplify the way you communicate with your friends and family, but isn’t just another messaging app…
Unlike others, with Moped you can:
- Send messages to anyone, even non-Moped users
- Continue conversations on any PC (at moped.com)
- Access in-sync conversations and contacts across multiple devices (web, android and iOS)
- See the links, photos, and venues from your messages all in one convenient gallery
On top of that, in a Moped message you can:
- Embed venue details to explain where to meet
- Embed photos with doodles, filters, and stickers! (Powered by Aviary!)
- Attach files using our Dropbox integration on the Web
- Use IFTTT.com to get Moped notifications for weather, stocks, your friends’ Instagram updates, and more.
Download iPhone app here: 
Download Android app here:
Aviary Winners at NASA International Space Apps Challenge
On April 20-21st, NASA held it’s second annual International Space Apps Challenge. Over 8,000 participants worldwide competed to solve 58 challenges ranging from “Backyard Poultry Farmer” which asked challengers to create a PMS (Poultry Management System) for backyard farmers, to “Hitch a Ride to Mars”, a challenge to design a CubeSat for an upcoming Mars mission, and everything in between.
The event was kicked off by a welcome video from NASA reps pumping up the crowd, and a shoutout from last years winner, Sam Wilkinson, a 16-year-old from Oxford who figured out how to bake bread in space.
Over the the next 24 hours, 200 hackers hunkered down at the AlleyNYC location, keyboards a-clackin, soldering irons ablaze, on a noble mission to democratize space exploration for NYC.s
Come Sunday afternoon, there were 21 hacks ready to go at NYC HQ. Hacks like Space Races, which helps children simulate a space mission by allowing them to choose the delivery vehicle, propulsion type, and whether the mission is manned or not, and then shows actual NASA footage of the liftoff. Another app, Spot the Station, allows people to check into the International Space Station on Foursquare when it’s overhead.
One of the most dynamic hacks of the weekend was “Astroid Mapper,” a CubeSat for Astroid Exploration built by a team of 13. With parts stripped from a Parrot AR Drone, gesture control a la Leap Motion, and an onboard spatial mapping Xbox Kinect, we all watched in horror and amazement as the quad copter on steroids flew up and down the room mapping it’s interior before doing a barrel roll towards judges with a casual gesture from the the presenter. Needless to say, “Astroid Mapper” was a bit of a crowd favorite.
In the end, Judges David Hochman (Tech Consultant), Jennifer Gustetic (Prizes Program Executive at NASA), Ron Garan (Astronaut), and Liz Barry (Director of Urban Environment at the Public Laboratory of Open Technology) made the difficult decision to pick 2 submissions that will go on to compete for the international prize. The NYC Space Apps Challenge winners are:
- Ilyass Garara, Soumia Lebbal, and Amine Benabdeljalil for MySpaceCal – a beautiful mobile app for amateur astronomers that offers a user-friendly calendar for finding out when and where satellites will be.
- Ankur Oberoi and Phil Reichenberger for Tiny Sea Bots – a Leap Motion controller and tunnel for controlling an OpenROV undersea rover from across the globe.
The Aviary API prize, an Arduino + Camera + MicroSD snapon, went to Le Big BLue, which aimed to solve The Blue Marble challenge. A team of 4 intrepid high school students from P-Tech built a website that makes NASA space imagery and meta data more social and accessible by offering image editing (via Aviary) and sharing functionality to your favorite social networks. Congratulations to Rahat Mahmud (10th Grade), Nicholas Allman (10th Grade), Nikolas Rassoule (9th Grade) and Gabe Rsa (10th Grade) for Le Big Blue!
NYC Organizers Mike Caprio and Alice Ng also deserve a big shout out for putting together what looks to have been the largest Space Apps Challenge to date, and for one of the most exciting hackathons we’ve had the pleasure of attending.
For a more detailed rundown of the event, check out Julian Taub’s writeup on Motherboard.
If you’re in NYC and looking for a hackathon to attend this weekend, check out the “Healthy Living and Lifelong Learning” BigAppsNYC Hackathon taking place this Saturday, May 4th at the Huffington Post.
Aviary iOS SDK Deep Dive: v3 Customizer app for OSX
Alongside version 3.0.0 of our editor, Aviary is introducing the iOS SDK Customizer. It is an entirely new, simple way to customize the appearance of our iOS SDK. The Customizer is an OS X application that allows both developers and designers to experiment with and perfect their integration with instant visual feedback.
Visual customization of our editor has always been an important part of the iOS SDK. We understand that partners want a seamless transition between their app’s interface and ours. In previous versions of our editor, this customization was done completely at runtime. Developers would provide colors and images in code that would be used to customize the various UI elements of the editor.
This methodology had several drawbacks. First, the need to enter values at the code level meant that designers could not customize the editor themselves. Additionally, we received developer feedback that the old, key-based system for setting individual options was oftentimes confusing. It was not clear which keys would affect which elements of the UI. With the Customizer, we have solved both of these issues by removing the code level, key-based system from the SDK and moved all visual customization into the Customizer. Additionally, we have included a WYSIWYG preview section to the SDK Customizer so that setting a color for a particular UI element has instant feedback. Further, customization profiles can be exported, allowing designers to perform the visual customization themselves and then share the profile with a developer to include in their app.
In addition to easing integration, the customizer has allowed us to optimize the iOS SDK, making it leaner and faster. In previous versions of the SDK, visual customization was done by reading custom color and image values provided by developers and then drawing UI elements as the editor launched. Although we aggressively cached previously drawn UI, there was significant overhead associated with drawing the many elements that made up the SDK’s interface. This manifested itself in the form of a slight pause before the editor or a given tool would launch, especially noticeable on older devices.
When beginning to work on v3.0.0 of the SDK, we approached building the gorgeous new UI with the same runtime configurability methodology. However, it quickly became apparent that the new design contained too many details that required customization and using our old method for customization rendered the SDK unacceptably slow. We decided that the only way to move forward with the new UI would be to pre-render all of the SDK’s assets with the customized color scheme.
Re-building the SDK in this way had numerous advantages. First, it enabled us to more faithfully recreate our product team’s vision for the new UI by allowing us to use assets cut by our designers in Photoshop. We were also able to remove almost all drawing using Core Graphics from the SDK, comprising several thousand lines of code. Removing this drawing improved both UI responsiveness and initial launch speed by reducing the CPU’s load for rendering the UI. To illustrate how much more efficient the new customization scheme is, we have estimated that nearly 150 billion assets have been rendered on devices using v2 of the Editor in partner apps across our network. With the v3 of the Editor and the SDK Customizer, assets are never rendered on the device.
The entire team at Aviary hopes that the Customizer will make your lives easier and the new SDK, with its sleek new UI and improved performance, will delight your users. As always, we appreciate your questions and feedback, so please don’t hesitate to get in touch: support@aviary.com.
Posted in Aviary, engineering, iOS
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Aviary Partners with GapKids to Launch Special Edition Diane von Furstenberg Stickers, Frames and Filters
Pop open your Aviary app* today, and you’ll find some amazing free treats from our friends at GapKids and Diane von Furstenberg: filters, frames and a safari’s worth of beautiful origami animals (oh my)!
Inspired by Diane von Furstenberg’s second childrenswear collection for Gap (launching nationwide today), we channeled the energy of the collection into a Special Edition DVF x GAP editing suite that we think you’ll love. Each of the frames, filters and stickers take their cue from DVF’s signature bold prints and bright colors, and will add some serious summer vibrancy (and large jungle animals) to your photos.
“Our partnership with Aviary is an exciting way to generate awareness of our DVF ♥ GapKids collaboration through a limited edition digital experience targeting Aviary’s socially savvy network. It’s also an opportunity to tap into consumers’ digital behavior of taking, editing and sharing mobile photos of their shopping hauls,” said Rachel Tipograph, Director of Global Digital and Social Media for Gap.
To download these free effects, just click on the Effects, Stickers and Frames buttons in Aviary, then look for the free DVF x GAP downloads. And if you want to show off how much fun you’ve been having, share your edited images with the hashtag #DVFlovesGap on Twitter or Instagram. We can’t wait to see what you create!
* The DVF x GAP editing suite can also be found in some of our most popular partner apps. Have fun editing in Tango, PicStitch, Muzy and more!
Posted in Aviary, iOS
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Aviary iOS SDK v3.0 is Officially Live!
Starting today, the long-awaited version 3.0 of the Aviary iOS SDK comes out of beta for its official release! This is one of the biggest SDK updates we’ve ever released, stacked with lots of new features, bug fixes, and even some changes to the way the SDK works under the hood, specifically around customization.
3.0 has all of the great features we rolled out to our iOS Showcase app, which has gotten tremendous feedback from our users. This app is used by millions around the globe, so you can be sure that the features we’re introducing today in the SDK have been officially road-tested and are ready for prime time. If you haven’t had a chance to check out the app, let me recap on what we’ve introduced and also fill you in on the SDK-specific stuff:
- Sleek, Streamlined Interface with Improved Customization
- New Interface Customizer - Dedicated Mac App that makes editor interface customization simpler and much more flexible
- New Focus Tool – Also known as Tilt Shift, this tool draws attention to the subject of your photo by defining the photo’s focal point
- New Warmth Tool – Adjusts the photo’s color balance
- Improved Enhance Tool – Hi-Def enhance smartly sharpens and adjusts contrast, Illuminate improves poor-lighting, and we’ve renamed Balance to Color Fix
- Instant Editor Load – Actual editor load time has been drastically reduced due to improved interface rendering
- Less Memory Consumption for High Resolution Editing
- Reduced Bundle Size – Halved the weight of the SDK’s asset bundle
- Bug Fixes
- Stability Improvements
- Removes all references to UDIDs – We’ve updated our Localytics analytics library to the most recent version to comply with new App Store guidelines.
That last bullet is incredibly important. After May 1st, Apple will start rejecting apps that make reference to UDIDs, so if you plan on submitting an update to your app after that day, you’ll need to update to 3.0 before doing so. Check out Localytics’ blog for more information on the UDID issue.
So head over to aviary.com/iOS to grab the brand new SDK and get started with your integration. And as always, if you have any feedback, we’d love to hear from you!
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Some Initial Information on Aviary’s Native Advertising Experiments
This year over 500 billion photos will be taken worldwide, and nearly half of them will be taken on smart phones. Considering that all those mobile photos can be shared widely across text messages, group messages, social networks, blogs and more, it’s clear that mobile photography is massive.
So what opportunities do brands have to tap into all this mobile activity?
Brand engagement on mobile has been a difficult case to crack. Because of the intimate place mobile has in peoples’ lives, it’s important that any kind of mobile advertising is “harmonious” – i.e. native and additive to the users’ experience, not interruptive and out-of-context like a banner ad.
For the past few months, we have been quietly testing and iterating our own version of “harmonious” native advertising on mobile.
To Aviary – as the world’s favorite mobile photo editing platform – a great native advertising offering has to:
- Help brands engage authentically in the mobile photo workflow
- In a way that harmoniously adds value to tens of millions of end-users across our partner network
- And brings the necessary brand engagement to deliver ROI
We’ve been fortunate to work with some of the biggest brand names during our testing phase, including Red Bull, H&M and Atlantic Records. For these brands, we’ve created harmonious, native, branded experiences that users appear to love.
You can see the results of a recent campaign for Atlantic Records by searching Twitter or Instagram for “#EvilFriends”.
To support Atlantic Records’s goal to build excitement around the upcoming launch of Portugal. The Man’s new album, Aviary collaborated with the band to design a sticker pack that put their distinct creative aesthetic in the hands of their fans. Millions of music-loving mobile photographers created their own “evil friends” – then shared their work on social networks. The results are highly creative, and the engagement very obvious.
Equally important during this test phase is that we’ve been collaborating with a select set of Aviary partners, who have integrated our SDK into their apps, to ensure that these new native experiences work well for different types of users across our network – from PicStich’s creative collagers to Tango’s social IMers. The conclusion is: they do.
It’s exciting to announce that we’re now moving this program into ‘Public Beta’. This means we’re opening the opportunity to more brands, and expanding the network of partner apps – while continuing to learn and iterate.
We’ll have a lot to share in the coming weeks and months. Ping us if you’re interested in getting involved –partners@aviary.com.
This blog post was adapted from Tobias Peggs’ talk at AdAge Digital on April 16, 2013.
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iOS Partner Spotlight: Notabli – The story of your kids, and the kids you love
Notabli is a simple app for saving your kids’ amazing moments and instantly sharing them with loved ones to a private network.
It’s a central location for parents to safely keep posts about their children using photos, videos, audio, quotes, and stories. With the latest integration of Aviary’s iOS SDK, parents now have the ability to fully customize each photo with effects, frames, stickers and more to make it just as unique as the moment itself.
Although the idea here is to keep these photos safe within a private network, you do have the option to share them to your favorite social networks if you choose to.
It’s the perfect way to keep close friends and family in the loop. We highly recommend it.
Download it for free here: 
Posted in Aviary, iOS, Mobile, Partners
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Aviary iOS Showcase App v2.0 Available Now
After months of brainstorming, white-boarding, designing, coffee-drinking and coding, we are incredibly proud to announce the release of Photo Editor by Aviary, version 2.0, for iOS. This is the most significant update we have ever made to the app, with tons of enhancements, tweaks, changes, features, improvements, and a whole lot more. We couldn’t be happier with this release and we’re confident our users will be, too. Plus, all of these great improvements that we are rolling out today will be available in our iOS SDK in the coming weeks. So developers, stay tuned!
Now, about those improvements. There are lots, so lets get into it:
- New Focus Tool – Focus helps draw attention to the subject of your photo by defining the photo’s focal point and blurring out background objects. This tool is known as ‘Tilt Shift’ among some photographers, and is also used to make objects in certain types of photos appear miniature.
- New Warmth Tool – This tool adjusts color balance to bring out both cool and warm tones within your photo. It’s a feature our Android users have been able to take advantage of for some time now, so we’re excited to finally be able to offer it on iOS.
- Improved Enhance Tool – One of our all-time most popular tools, Enhance, has been…enhanced. The new Hi-Def enhance feature smartly sharpens, adjusts contrast, and brings out the best parts of your photo, while Illuminate makes poor-lit photos look like they were taken in great lighting. We’ve also renamed Balance to Color Fix to better inform users of what it’s actually doing to your photo.
- Instant Editor Load – In previous versions of Photo Editor, some users had to wait up to two full seconds for our editor to load after choosing a photo. Not the case, anymore. Now when you choose a photo, the editor loads near-instantly. This is due to drastically improved interface rendering (Devs – you’re going to be able to take advantage of this feature big time in the SDK).
- Less Memory Consumption for High Resolution Editing – Your iPhone is essentially a computer in your pocket, but that doesn’t mean it has an abundance of memory inside. So apps needs to be careful about how much of it they’re using up, which makes high resolution photo editing tricky (it’s a very memory-hungry process). But when editing high resolution photos in version 2.0, much less memory is consumed, which means quicker rendering & saving times and better functioning of your device, in general.
- Blur is 10x Faster – On the surface, blur may not seem incredibly important to the average user, but under the hood its used in many features inside the editor. Certain Effects, Sharpness, Blemish, and even our new Focus tool all take advantage of Blur, meaning those tools are now lightning-quick.
- Saving Photos is Up to 50% Faster - There are all sorts of behind-the-scenes enhancements going on in this new editor, and the payoff is huge. Saving photos is super fast now, and in some cases, up to 50% improved. That means more awesome photo editing in a lot less time.
- Sleek, Streamlined Interface - The most noticeable change in version 2.0 is the beautiful new interface (and we can’t stop looking at it). The main editor toolbar now scrolls instead of paging, making it easier and faster to find your favorite tools. Plus, the dark-colored layout and reduced padding help to bring out the most important part of Photo Editor by Aviary – your photos. (Side note to our partners: this new darker layout will still be completely customizable in the upcoming SDK release, with an all new way to change the editor’s colors)
And there are tons of other small (yet significant) improvements going on in the background that make for a much better photo editing experience, all around. We think you’re going to love this new editor. So check it out and start editing some photos!
Have you tried Photo Editor v2.0? Let us know what you think on Twitter!
Photo Hack Day 4 Recap: 300+ developers and 68 apps in less than 24 hours
On April 6-7th 2013, Aviary brought the Photo Hack Day love back to the west coast at the beautiful Facebook Headquarters in Menlo Park with help from our amazing sponsors: Facebook, Walgreens, AMD, Shutterstock, Windows 8, FilePicker.io, Dropbox, GettyImages, Cater2.me, Fujifilm, Chute, ImageShack, FlashFoto, Sincerely, Foursquare, Tumblr, 500px, EyeEm, Imgur, Imagga, IQEngines and TokBox as well as our design sponsors Macadamian, Monkey Republic Design, Method, and Yeti.
In just 24 hours, more than 300 developers and designers teamed up to create over 63 amazing web and mobile apps! The event kicked off with API presentations from our sponsors. From there teams quickly formed and hackers were off to the races!
At 6pm we were joined by this year’s speakers for an incredible panel on “The Future of Mobile Photography.” Brett Wayn (Flickr), Jack Levin (ImageShack), Flo Meissner (EyeEm), Liyan Chang (FilePicker.io), and moderator Avi Muchnick (Aviary) regaled us with well-earned insights on the future of photo apps and talked about the trials and tribulations of building a business around this burgeoning industry.
The panel was followed by a taco bar from Cater2.me and beer supplied by Strike Brewery a la API sponsor FlashFoto. Facebook generously allowed us to stay overnight, and let me tell you, walking around Facebook HQ at 2am was a humbling experience. Thanks again to our energy drink and hydration sponsors, Red Bull, Guayaki Yerba Mate, and Zico.
Caffeine taken care of, we organized a game of late-night developer trivia to keep the troops motivated. Accepting the first correct response on twitter, we gave away 20 prizes thoughtfully donated by Mosaic and Joby. Pro-tip: Twitter feeds are eventually-consistent, so if you’re counting on the “first response” for anything, you’ll have some ‘splaining to do. We had more than enough prizes though, so most participants walked away with something. This is definitely something we’ll be bringing back at PHD5.
When noon rolled around on Sunday, we had over 63 mobile and web apps submitted and ready to demo! After a lunch break and a brief campus tour by our favorite Facebooker, Bear Douglas, we all piled into the demo area and watched in awe as the attendees took a mere 2 minutes to walk us through some of the best, most polished apps we’ve seen to date!
Hacks were judged based on technical accomplishment, cleverness, originality, and the overall real-world value of the application.
And now…the winners!
1st Place: letsgo.io ($5,000)
Team: Mohamed Mansour, Joey Hiller, Ray Spaddy, Justin Ormont, Jeremy Benaim
This service functions as a very photo-centric version of Google Maps, although it’s powered by Bing Maps. Users can enter their initial and final destination and Letsgo.io will display photos from Getty Images and other sources to give you a more visual experience.
2nd Place: Snapsplosion ($2,500)
Team: Jesse Ditson, Keith Axline
Snapsplosion is an iPhone app that makes it fun & easy to make photo mosaics from your photos – Take a picture, and snapsplosion finds thousands of photos near where you are and creates a beautiful mosaic from your photo.
3rd Place: iMaze ($1,000)
Team: Boris Suska, Zbynek Nedoma, Jimmy Liu, Zuhayeer Musa, Danish Shaik
iMaze is an innovative web application that allows people to take an image and create a maze in which users are immersed within a virtual maze experience. The game has two modes: one in which the user can take on the maze by themselves and the other in which the user can compete against each other in a neck-to-neck battle of intellect and endurance.
Crowd Favorite: Cardified ($1,500)
Team: Yang Shun Tay, Joe Chee, Soedar Lim, Benedict Chan, Bang Hui Lim
Cardified creates invitation cards with customized text and photos automatically from your Facebook graph. For each friend, we automatically search for photos with the two of you and create a pretty invitation card that is addressed to them.
Thanks again to our esteemed judges, Ken Yeung (TheNextWeb), Drew Olanoff (TechCrunch), Kristina Shen (Bessemer Venture Partners), Eric Kim (Maverick Capital), and Brent Baisley (Shutterstock) for making the hard decisions and whittling the hacks down to 3! We had a ton of amazing submissions, so this wasn’t an easy task. In fact, the judges were so impressed, that they listed a slew of honorary mentions.
- Moma2.0 by Yuriy Dybskiy: Museum of Modern Art 2.0: Support artists on a whole new level.
- Musaic by Ming Fu, Puran Singh, Jacob Jennings, and Karen Fojas Lee: Musaic is the hottest new way bring your images to life through sound. Just swipe and tap across any image to make magical new music.
- Billie by Arel Cordero, Huy Nguyen and Jack Culpepper: Billie takes the pain out of paying in groups by doing the hard work for you.
- Big Gallery by Tony Casparro: BigGallery is a WordPress plugin that allows you to easily search, select, purchase, and upload royalty-free photos directly into your blog posts. Integrating with both the Shutterstock and Bigstock APIs, BigGallery brings the world pictures directly to your content creation platform.
- Johnny 5 by Conor Buckley: Voice controlled image editing.
- PrePost by Archie Archiebong: Simple, yet effective, PrePost allows you to compare untouched photos with an edited photo by simply touching the screen.
- Rebus by Mike Mignano, Andrew Rudmann, Michael Vitrano and Nir Zicherman: A word is worth a thousand pictures. Rebus transforms yours into a shareable piece of art.
- Charity Stock by Gaurav Sharma, Chris Hermanowicz and Gregarious Narain: Allows users to donate their photos to charity. All purchases for use are distributed across your favorite charities.
For a full list of the submitted hacks, check out the Submitted Hacks List, or head over to the HackerLeague page for the event.
For more photos from #PHD4, check out the Flickr tag #PHD4, or search your favorite social network for the #PHD4 tag. We’ll be adding some of our favorites to the Photo Hack Day Facebook page.
Here are some more fantastic write ups by PHD4 Judges and Sponsors: Judge Ken Yeung, TheNextWeb, Judge Drew Olanoff, Techcrunch, Walgreens, EyeEm, IQEngines, Chute, Monkey Republic Design.
We had an amazing time at PHD4. Hope to see you all at PHD5!
Cheers,
The Aviary team
PS – If you’re itching to get hacking this weekend, make sure to find us representing Aviary at the International Space Apps Challenge at AlleyNYC, or find an event in your own city!
Partner Spotlight: Trendyful, the magazine of your life
Ever had the desire to have your photo on an iconic magazine? Look no further, Trendyful is your chance to do just that.
Download for free here:
Take your best shots (or upload from all your favorite networks with one click), edit & enhance them with Aviary’s iOS SDK, add intriguing captions and publish them on Trendfyul to feel the glamour of being on the cover of a magazine in a matter of seconds. The best and most talked pictures will give life to the daily, weekly, monthly editions of Trendyful.
Posted in Aviary, iOS, Mobile, Partners
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