Author Archives: Maya

Aviary’s iOS SDK is now universal: iPhone and iPad support!

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You may have heard once or 10 times on our blog that we’ve launched a little something called the Aviary Mobile SDK, which allows developers to add our one-click photo editing tools to their mobile apps with just a few lines of code. Today we’re pleased to bring our partners the most-requested update so far: a universal build of our iOS SDK, which adds support for iPad apps!

Our iPad editor has support for landscape and portrait modes, and it lets you choose which form factor you want to use (the full screen iPad editor, or the smaller iPhone interface within your app). Our partners over at PicCollage did a great job of seamlessly integrating the iPhone interface, so it overlays various pictures throughout the screen.

Our mobile SDK is free to implement in your own app, so head over to our developer site and sign up for access to our brand new universal iOS SDK. Implementation takes just minutes, so your users will be editing and enhancing their photos from right within your app in no time!

Here are some more screenshots for your viewing pleasure. As always, feel free to email us at api@aviary.com if you have any questions or comments!

Five more awesome filters added to Aviary’s Cloud API

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The filters in Aviary’s Cloud API can be used alone through our server or integrated into our web/mobile SDKs. Add them to your app or website, or try them out with any pic you want!

We’ve just added another handful of new effects to our Cloud API – some of our personal favorites to date, actually.

Read on to see the details, or jump right to our developer site to check out the full list!

Note: even if you’re not a developer, you can still use these awesome effects on your photos! Eventually they’ll all be available in our embeddable editors for web and mobile, but until then you can use them through our developer site. Just upload the photo of your choice and go!

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Winners and full list of hacks from Photo Hack Day!

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We had a great turnout this weekend at Photo Hack Day, Aviary’s photo-centric hackathon. With all the awesome hacks (over 40!) that were presented on Sunday, the judges really had their work cut out for them. Check out the winners and the full list of hacks below, and stay tuned for the next Aviary API contest if these apps get your gears turning!

1st place: Photobot – Mason Du, Oscar G Torres. APIs used: Flickr, Face.com, Aviary, Shutterstock

2nd place: HoneyBadger – Abe Stanway, Misha Ponizil. APIs used: Face.com, Aviary, Twilio, Facebook

3rd place: Nostalgia – Rolf Rando, Jahanzeb Khawaja. APIs used: Instagram

Honorable mentions: Emotional Breakdown and PhotoBombr

People’s choice: HoneyBadger – Abe Stanway, Misha Ponizil. APIs used: Face.com, Aviary, Twilio, Facebook

FULL LIST OF HACKS:

ALBUM+ – Amir Shimoni. APIs used: Twilio, Aviary, Instagram, Trove/Flickr, Face.com

AllPaper – Hung Truong. APIs used: Instagram, 500px

Beard Me – Michael Schonfeld. APIs used: Face.com

BigBG – Jesse Chan-Norris. APIs used: Flickr, 500px, Magickly

BirthdayCards (iOS) (Winner, best use of Sincerely API) - Cameron Spickert. APIs used: Sincerely Ship Library, Aviary Feather SDK for iOS, Facebook Graph API

Comics Cam – Gilad Shai. APIs used: Aviary

CrowdFrames (Winner, best use of 500px API) – Ben Moss, Samantha John. APIs used: Twilio, 500px

Emotional Breakdown (Winner, best use of Face.com API, best use of Lomography API) – Andy Mangold, Anthony Mattox. APIs used: Face.com facial recognition API, Google Charts API

Everybody Can See Now! – Arcadius, Peggy. APIs used: Twilio, 500px

Faceswap – Lei. APIs used: Face.com

Facialytics – Jonathan Bensamoun, Ryan Hittner, Megan Janel Zimmer. Twitter: @facialytics. APIs used: Face.com

FlickHundred (Winner, best use of 500px API, runner up use of Flickr API) - Jesse Chan-Norris. APIs used: Flickr, 500px

Friendpocalypse – Greg Galant, Lee Semel, Wylie Conlon, Will Charczuk, Jeremiah Malina, Bojan Mitrevski, Gautier Julien. APIs used: Face.com, Facebook

Graffiti.js – Aidan Feldman. APIs used: none

Happy Mug – Greg Landweber, Andy Minkstein. APIs used: Facebook, Face.com, MoPho Engine

Hipster Hash – Joe McCourt. APIs used: none

HoneyBadger (Winner, 2nd place, People’s Choice) - Abe Stanway, Misha Ponizil. APIs used: Face.com, Aviary, Twilio, Facebook

Instagirl (iOS) – Ajay Chainani. APIs used: Face.com, Instagram

Kinect Photos Proof of Concept – Justin Hart. APIs used: Photobucket, Kinect

Moodify – Michael Schonfeld. APIs used: Face.com, Spotify, EchoNest

Protestr – Chris Haseman. APIs used: Imgur, Tumblr, Flickr

SocialPhotoStock – Jose de Cabo, Alex Dantart, Pau Sabria, Luis Sanz, Sebastian Alvarez. APIs used: 500px, Picplz, Facebook, Flickr, Instagram, Picasa, Photobucket, Twitter

Stash Your ‘Stache (Winner, best use of Aviary API) - Sara Chipps, Christina Lutters, Brenda Storer. APIs used: Face.com, Aviary

Tag Fight! – David Huerta. APIs used: Twilio, Flickr

TrueLookAlike - Carmen Delessio. APIs used: Face.com, Facebook

Underwear-Model-ify Yourself via MMS – Robb. APIs used: Face.com

Voronoi Diacam (Winner, best use of Flickr API) - David Chan, Max Gribov, David Cilia, Alexander Sagalovskiy, Shepherd X, Axel Forest, Christopher Kennedy. APIs used: Flickr, Face.com, Foursquare

ZoneMinder – Jesse Chan-Norris. APIs used: Twilio, Foursquare

If you want to add a URL for your hack or have a correction, please email us at photohackday@aviary.com or hit up Erin on twitter.

Six brand new filters added to our Effects API!

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Great news, everyone! Our awesome effects engineer Joe (I like to call him our imagineer) has been hard at work cranking out even more awesome filters to use with Aviary’s Effects API.

Here are the five we launched earlier this week, including our beloved Auto Enhance, if you need a refresher.

Note: even if you’re not a developer, you can still use these awesome effects on your photos! Eventually they’ll all be available through our simple editor Feather, but until then you can use them through our developer site. Just upload the photo of your choice and go!

Here’s a peek at today’s new filters. Take a look, and then try them out yourself over on our developer site. Enjoy!

 

Always Sunny: Bring the sun with you wherever you are. Make all your friends jealous by going on a tropical vacation in your own backyard! They’ll never know.

Code Red: Tired of looking at life like it’s not a post-apocalyptic video game? We’ve got you covered.

Color Operations: Mess with the colors in your photos all you want. You’ll find the regulars like saturation and brightness, but also some advanced things like hue shift and gamma adjustments.

Meme Generator: Already a crowd favorite here at Aviary HQ. Everything is funnier when you put silly text on it! This filter has been tested and approved by your fellow Redditors.

Negative: Turns your world inside out!

Outline: This one’s really cool. You kind of have to try it to get a sense of its power. Try variations with different outline colors and backgrounds for a ton of effects.

To stay up to date with the latest filter releases, subscribe to our blog, or follow us on Twitter and Facebook!

Five New Filters Added to the Effects API

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A few months ago, we revealed the newest member of our API family: our Effects API. It’s a server-side API which allows developers to quickly and easily apply utilities and cool filters to photos on their own site. For example, instead of just uploading your users’ photos, you can crop them to avatar proportions and automatically fix the color levels of the photos or turn them into polaroids. Whatever floats your boat!

We launched with 20+ filters, and are pleased to announce five brand new ones which are available today! These filters are even more user-friendly, as they all improve photos with just one click, and a little birdy told us that more brand new filters are coming next week :)

We think these are pretty great, but we also know there can never be enough variety! If there are utilities or effects you’d love to be able to apply to the photos on your site, email us and let us know! You can always reach us at support@aviary.com.

Note: even if you’re not a developer, you can still use these awesome effects on your photos! Eventually they’ll all be available through our simple editor Feather, but until then you can use them through our developer site. Just upload the photo of your choice and go!

So, without further ado, here are today’s new filters. Take a look, and then try them out yourself over on our developer site. Enjoy!

 

Auto Enhance: Bring out colors and details, fix levels, generally make your world a better looking place! (We’re already applying this filter to all of our photos.)

 

Cinematic: Your life, if it were a movie. Specifically, a docudrama starring maybe Tom Hanks. Not that we’ve thought about it that much or anything.

 

Daydream: The soft white glowy vignette that you’ve been dreaming of.

 

Heatwave: High saturation, intense colors, and that general feeling of an oasis just a few more steps ahead.

 

Indiglow: It doesn’t just make your photos purple.

To stay up to date with the latest filter releases, subscribe to our blog, or follow us on Twitter and Facebook!

Feather now available in any language!

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Great news for our international partners! Our embeddable simple image editor (Feather) is now available for localization in any language. If you’re interested in implementing Feather on your site in a language other than English, please contact us at api@aviary.com.

If you’re interested in being notified the next time a new Feather feature is available, sign up here!

Aviary Education News: Direct Download Buttons!

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If you’re subscribed to our Aviary Education newsletter, you’ve already heard about these updates. If you’re not, and would like to be notified first next time, sign up here!

It’s the moment all teachers and their students have been waiting for! You’ve all been patiently relaunching and resaving the apps in Aviary Education in order to download your creations, an arduous process that we despised from the beginning.

Luckily, you won’t ever have to do this again. Each creation on Aviary Education (images and audio alike!) now has its own download button directly underneath it. Just click and it’ll download – it’s that simple! Phew.

Please note that teachers can download any creations, but students are only able to download their own. Also, remember that you have the ability to download .egg files (the layered Aviary files) from within the apps to your desktop for backup saving, but this isn’t the same as flattening your creation and saving it as a normal image or audio file.

A couple other minor updates that we think will improve your experience in a major way:

  • Creations are now ordered with most recent first.
  • We added paging, so you won’t have to load all creations at once.
  • And in case you missed it, last time we announced the ability to delete teacher accounts, persistent project info, and optional comments.

As always, your feedback is invaluable to us. Let us know how it goes, or if there’s anything else we can do to make your experience with Aviary Education even better! Email us at edu@aviary.com or follow us @aviaryeducation to join the conversation.

Regarding Roanald

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Sooo… we’ve been getting a ton of tweets and emails and pigeon-delivered encoded messages asking if Aviary ever hired that guy Roanald. (Proper warning: Roanald’s application contains some mild profanity, so please only click through to it if you’re ok with that.)

The short answer is yes.

The long answer, for those of you who missed all the action, is that Roanald actually applied here way back in August. We obviously hired him on the spot when he rode in here with his team of trained eagles, but his story of success didn’t make the rounds on the internet until our buddy Jonathan joined us for lunch a couple weeks back and thought to snap a picture of Roanald’s application, which has been hanging proudly in our kitchen since the day it arrived in our hearts.

It was the cover letter heard round the world, and we watched with delight as the story was retweeted, liked, shared, and picked up by the likes of Buzzfeed, Huffington Post, and even AOL. Heck, even Dwight Schrute himself tweeted about it. Roanald was especially tickled as he skyrocketed to fame, and we didn’t even yell at him when his productivity plummeted to an all-time low.

Anyway. We just wanted to assure everyone that Roanald is employed, and that you can all stop emailing him and offering him jobs – unless of course you can help him out with his ultimate dream of working in Disney’s Animal Kingdom Park as a wrangler for the African Safari. Then you can have him.

Be a part of the Roanald saga:

Follow @RoanaldDvorak on twitter Meet the rest of the Aviary flock Come work with us!

Aviary Education Updates and Improvements

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We’ve been releasing a lot of exciting stuff lately (Effects API, flash app updates, the list goes on!), but don’t worry teachers: we haven’t forgotten about you!

Here’s a quick overview of Aviary Education improvements that we think will make it much more convenient for you and your students to use:

  • Streamlined account setup process. Turnaround time for new accounts will be much faster, so feel free to invite your friends and colleagues to try it out :)
  • Delete teacher accounts. Fixed the bug that was affecting student accounts when a teacher should have been deleted.
  • Persistent project info. If you go back in to edit a project, all the information will be stored so you can do just that – edit – instead of having to do it all over again. (Sorry about that!)
  • Comments are now optional. If you don’t want your students to comment on projects or each others’ creations, you can now turn off student comments. (Teacher comments will always be enabled so you can grade/review creations or add notes to projects.)

We hope these improvements are a great first step toward the ideal Aviary Education experience. We’ve got lots more coming, and always welcome feature requests and ideas for future versions! Follow us @aviaryeducation to stay updated on new features, and feel free to contact us by clicking the Support button from within your class in Aviary Education or by emailing us directly at edu@aviary.com.

Super Suite Updates!

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Today we released more great updates for some of the apps in our flash suite: Roc (music creator), Myna (audio editor), Phoenix (image editor), and Raven (vector editor). Details below!

Note: If you’ve signed up to be an alpha tester, this update won’t be huge news to you, but you can head over to the alpha testing changelog to get a peek at what’s coming up next :)

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