The Advanced Suite is Officially Offline

Posted on September 15, 2012 by Avi

As per this blog post from July, we have officially closed the advanced suite of Flash tools (previously located at advanced.aviary.com) in order to focus on our new company direction powering the photo experience in 3rd party apps. While we hoped that everyone would have taken the time to retrieve their files since our notice, we recognize that the message may not have been seen by everyone.

Therefore, if you were not able to retrieve all of your files to date, please contact us at support@aviary.com from the email address associated with your account to help retrieve your files. Do this quickly. Please note that after September 30th, 2012, we cannot guarantee that your files will still be available for us to retrieve.

While the tools will remain offline, we may continue to explore new homes in whole or in part, for specific elements of the suite. If interested in discussing, please contact us at partners@aviary.com with the subject line “Interested in Advanced Suite.”

I would like to make a few recommendations for alternate tools to try:

  • Advanced Photo Editing (layer based) – GIMP
  • Vector Editing – Inkscape
  • Image Markup – Skitch
  • Audio Editing & Music Creation – GarageBand or Audacity
  • Node-based image editing (like Peacock) – watch this blog for more information…
I have a number of thank yous to make, but I’ll leave out names because there are so many and I don’t want to risk leaving anyone out:
Thank you to the Aviary staff who worked on the advanced suite, some still with the team and some not. You are some of the most ridiculously talented people I have ever met and I can honestly say you have set the professional bar higher for me for having gotten the opportunity to work with you.
Thank you to our wonderful moderation volunteers – our Aviators are amazing people who brought out the creativity in thousands of people, expecting nothing in return. I’ll miss reading the Bird Bath newsletter.
Thank you to those of you who wrote tutorials, especially those of you who wrote and published 2 books on the advanced suite. How cool was it to go into a Barnes & Noble, and see it in print!
Thank you to the dozens of press outlets who covered the advanced suite. The tools would have gotten nowhere without you.
Thank you to those of you who gave awards to the advanced suite. We have the trophies adorning our coffee table in the office and we’ll never forget the excitement when we won them.
Thank you to our investors, who helped us turn an idea into a reality and continue to back our vision of democratizing creativity in our current direction.
Thank you to our advisors who gave us guidance along the way in shaping the advanced suite.
Thank you to my co-founders, who made the advanced suite their driving mission in life while we worked on it.
Thank you to our families, who selflessly continue to put up with our long hours. Welcome to the 3 babies who joined our families while we worked on the advanced suite.
And most importantly, thank you to the millions of users who gave the advanced suite a try, especially those of you who made it your primary form of editing tools and for whom I know today represents a real loss.
I love all of you and hope we can continue making creative expression accessible for everyone in the world, going forward.
Best,
Avi
Avi Muchnick
CEO / Aviary
Posted in Aviary | 953 Comments

Aviary SDK + Filepicker.io

Posted on August 10, 2012 by Ari

We get a lot of feedback that our web-based photo editor is quick and easy for developers to integrate, but one thing we’re often asked about is photo storage. Today we’re announcing that we’ve teamed up with Filepicker.io to allow users to export and import files directly from their own online storage accounts.

To get started using our web-based photo editor, use our code generator to select the tools you want to include, the layout you want to use (lightbox vs embedded), and voila! – it provides you with JavaScript code to drop right into your website. The code gives you a button to launch the editor with any photo you specify. When the user saves, we programmatically provide you with url to the edited photo so you can upload it to whatever backend you’re using.

This is all most developers will need to get started; but what about sites that don’t have their own file storage? Or developers who don’t want to worry about storing their users photos?

Enter Filepicker.io. Their API allows users to directly export and import files from Facebook, GDrive, Dropbox, Flickr, etc. Best of all, their API takes a similar file approach to Aviary.  All files can be imported and exported via web urls.

Because Aviary’s API generates a file url on save, you’re able to pipe that right into Filepicker’s API which can take it from there. Check out this quick tutorial that’ll get you up and running in no time.

Coming soon: A tutorial for Aviary + Filepicker.io for mobile.

Posted in Aviary, Partners, Web widget | 4 Comments

JuicyBits Adds Aviary to their New iPad App, Layout

Posted on July 25, 2012 by Nam

JuicyBits, creator of many popular apps including our favorite, Halftone, has just launched a new photo arranging and sharing app called Layout!

 

 

Despite being just out for several weeks, Layout has already positioned itself at the top of the app store,  being named by Apple as Editor’s Choice in the U.S., Canada, and many other countries.

Layout lets you quickly combine your favorite photos into one. Swipe your finger to quickly split a frame into sections, and use the radial menu to add photos directly from Facebook, Instagram, or Flickr.

Use Aviary’s editor inside Layout to enhance images with built-in filters and effects, adjust saturation and contrast, add some stickers, and a whole lot more.

To access our editor:

  1. Tap on any photo to bring up the radial menu
  2. Choose the magic wand, and Aviary’s Editor will slide up
  3. Make your edits, hit apply, and you’re done!

 

Aviary is a free solution for developers to instantly inject a photo editor inside their own site/app. If you’d like to do what Layout did, you can get started at aviary.com/ios.

Once you’re done editing, you can also add a caption to each photo, apply a background color or pattern, and share your layout with friends and family via e-mail, Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr. If you want to go back, Layout includes undo and redo, and best of all, you can store your projects in iCloud to share them with other devices.

Layout is available on iPad (Layout runs on iPad 2 or later) , and will be coming to iPhones shortly! You can download it here.

Posted in Aviary, iOS, Mobile, Partners | 2 Comments

ADVANCED SUITE OF MULTIMEDIA FLASH EDITORS FOR ARTISTS WILL BE RETIRED IN SEPTEMBER

Posted on July 21, 2012 by Avi

Hi folks,

As you might know, Aviary officially changed directions in September 2011 to focus more on helping developers of photo apps. We currently power the photo-editing of third party apps on mobile and web through Aviary’s simple plugin for iOS, Android, Windows Phone 7 and HTML5.  Over the past 10 months since turning down this path, we’ve grown to 11 million active users, editing more than 150 million photos in Aviary, each month. And our tremendous growth under this new direction is showing no signs of slowing down. Even our developer showcase app “Photo Editor by Aviary” has been a smash hit, shooting up to #2 in iOS’s Photos category and breaking into the Top 25 free apps in the App Store (with a 5-star average rating).

This incredible adoption has proven to us that we are currently on the right path on our mission of democratizing creativity – making it possible for anyone, no matter what their talent or skill levels, to express themselves creatively. And it’s also clear that we need to continue to focus on this path and dedicate our development resources accordingly.

Since rebuilding our team late last year around this mission, we have effectively left the advanced suite of multimedia Flash editors for artists untouched, except for time spent fixing bugs (and with each new update to the Flash platform, there continues to be new ones introduced). With Flash’s general decline as a platform over the last few years, it is becoming more and more of a time sink for our team to fix and support these issues.

We therefore have made the difficult decision to retire the advanced suite of multimedia Flash editors for artists (located at advanced.aviary.com) on September 15th, 2012. Between now and this time period, you are encouraged to download (and/or export) any files currently residing on the system as they may not be available after that time.  

We will unfortunately no longer be able to offer additional support for this suite between now and then, though you are welcome to continue to use it without support until it officially closes.

This is obviously a very difficult and sad announcement for us to make – much love, sweat, passion, investment and energy went into building our advanced suite of multimedia Flash editors. But our team, board and investors all recognize that continuing to support and develop a suite of legacy products on a platform that is declining would be a tremendous waste of resources, in addition to being too big a distraction to the success of our current focus.

To answer the obvious question: Will we rebuild the advanced multimedia suite for artists in HTML5 (or natively on mobile)? We have no plans at this time to do so. We feel that we’re currently on the right path to success and it would be too distracting to have to completely rebuild products from scratch that are off that path, at this time.

We have no recommendations for other editors you could use as alternative to our advanced suite of multimedia flash editors for artists right now, but will try to compile some closer to September when we send out a reminder notice. We do recommend that if you are a member of the artist community at advanced.aviary.com, you join the awesome community of artists at Worth1000.com.

To those of you inconvenienced by this announcement, I am truly sorry. I hope you understand why this is necessary and will continue to support the company on its current path.

Best, Avi

CEO / Aviary

=======================

EDIT ADDED JULY 25th, 2012:

A number of commenters have asked why this change was necessary (i.e. why can’t we just leave the apps running unsupported?). I should have communicated that better in this announcement and apologize.

There are a number of reasons, which I’ll illustrate here, but first, please realize that this announcement represented a last resort for us. If there was anything that logistically made sense we would not have made the decision to close the suite.

So why aren’t we just leaving it running unsupported? There are a number of reasons, all important:

1) Lack of time / resources. Any time spent fixing bugs (or hiring staff to fix bugs), is time spent away from our new direction. The amount of work the suite requires to maintain is too big to sustain with incremental maintenance. Flash is constantly releasing new versions of their player. Browsers are constantly releasing new versions as well. Each change represents a potential introduction of bugs. If we would leave the suite running, but unsupported, it would quickly turn into a suite of broken junk. Not only would I not want that outcome for something we all worked so hard on, it would reflect badly on the company’s ability to create great software – which is crucial under our current direction.

2) It’s really expensive and we will not recoup those costs. The suite alone costs us several thousand dollars a month in hosting fees. Any time spent continuing to maintain the suite still costs us a lot of money. There is no way to recoup those costs and building in some kind of new business model to do so at this stage would be a tremendous (and probably futile) distraction. Investors in our newest round provided us with capital to focus on our new direction and we need to use those funds to maximize our traction under the new direction.

3) Flash is declining. Even if we would spent the money to continue to host AND maintain it, we would be supporting a platform that would potentially disappear in the near future, instead of building on platforms that will be around for a while (native mobile and HTML5). Sorry, but even if we were continuing on our old path, we would have eventually made the decision to retire our flash apps in favor of new HTML5 or mobile apps written on a platform that we knew would be around for a while.

There are other additional reasons too, but those listed are probably the most important. I hope that helps explain the situation a bit better.

Posted in Aviary | 219 Comments

Photo Hack Day 3 Recap: 300 developers, 70 hacks, and 21 APIs

Posted on July 17, 2012 by Archie

On July 14-15, Aviary brought our groundbreaking series of hackathons to the West Coast with Photo Hack Day 3, hosted by Dropbox at their lovely San Francisco headquarters, headline sponsored by Facebook, with additional sponsorship by Walgreens, Sincerely, 500px, FlashFoto, Flickr, FujiFilm, and Tumblr.

In just 24 hours, more than 300 developers teamed up to create an astonishing 70 hacks utilizing 21 featured APIs, making this the largest photo hackathon ever — even larger than Photo Hack Day 2, the current record holder, which we threw on our home turf!

The event was kicked off with API presentations from our sponsors and our friends at Cheezburger, Filepicker.io, Foursquare, IQ Engines, Microsoft, Shutterfly, Stupeflix, Teleportd, TokBox, Twilio, and Via.me.  This versatile mix of APIs inspired developers and provided them with a hefty toolbox from which to build.

From there, developers built teams, constructed plans, and dove right into their laptops, clicking away until dinner, when they finally took a break to listen in on our discussion panel about “The Future of Photos,” featuring some of the most talented names in this corner of the industry: Avi Muchnick (Aviary, CEO), Dirk Stoop (Facebook, lead Product Manager on Photos), Jim Heiser (Adobe, Marketing Manager), Lucas Buick (Hipstamatic, CEO), and Kristen Berman (Lytro, Product Manager for Web and Mobile). After wrapping up the discussion panel, hackers logged in for a long night, only breaking away for the occasional midnight cookie or a swift scooter race through the lovely Dropbox campus.

Thankfully, our energy drink sponsors — Redbull, 5 Hour Energy, and Guayaki Yerba Mate — with the help of coffee and snacks from Walgreens and Sincerely, helped everyone power through the night.

To check out more photos of PHD3, check out Photosugar’s newsfeed of the event.

Clearly the caffeine worked, as, come morning, developers logged 70 hacks, covering both web and mobile.  Merely finishing an app in 24 hours is an accomplishment; however, only 3 hacks could win.  Apps were judged based on technical accomplishment, cleverness, originality, and the overall real-world value of the application.

The winners are as follows:

Best use of Aviary API - Filter compare: a hack that adds a button called ‘ALL Filters’ to Aviary’s Web editor. If the user clicks on this, it will automatically apply multiple filters and show them as a grid, making it EASY to compare filters.

link coming soon!

by Raja Rao.

For his clever usage of the Aviary API, Raja won an NYC start up immersion package, featuring $1000.00 to cover a trip out to NYC where he can work from our HQ and meet with several of the biggest names in the NYC tech community.

3rd place ($1,000.00) – Just a second - An app that captures one second videos to share the beauty of a single moment. - http://justasecondapp.com

by: Jeff Kiske, Ben Perez, Eric Berdinis, Ayaka Nonaka

2nd place ($2,000.00) – Sizzly – Sizzly is a social photo editing platform. Users can upload photos or capture new images via a native iOS app or website. Photos are then shared via social routes so the community can submit their edits. Edits are ranked by votes, then options are given to have the photo shared via Tumblr, Sincerely, Walgreens, or Fujifilm’s print services. Users earn points by making successful edits. As points are accrued, those users can be sought out for photo-retouching related jobs. – http://sizzly.com

by: Chris Faulkner, Joey Hiller, Elliot Lee, Mohamed Mansour

1st place ($7,000.00) – Pics with friends – A game between friends where one clicks a picture and challenges the other to guess it.  The other friend sees the picture with Image effects like blur and tries to guess the caption for the image. - http://signup.picswfriends.com

by: Parashuram Narasimhan, Artur Rivilis, Sean Ren

“Future Of  Photos” Panel L to R: Jim Heiser (Adobe), Kristen Berman (Lytro), Lucas Buick (Hipstamatic), and Dirk Stoop (Facebook – not shown on the right)

Additional prizes went out to developers for best usage of each API, plus additional fun prizes were given away by Photojojo, HTC, and Viewbug.com.  We wish we could have given a prize to everyone, though, as we’re absolutely thrilled with the large turnout and incredible participation, especially considering this was our first time out on the West Coast.  Many thanks to all of our excellent sponsors as well!!!

Hope to see you all at Photo Hack Day 4!

Cheers,

The Aviary team

 

Posted in Aviary, Fun! | 3 Comments

Squarespace Introduces New Platform, adds Aviary to the Mix

Posted on July 17, 2012 by Nam

Squarespace just announced the public availability of Squarespace 6, a complete overhaul of its successful website creation platform. The Squarespace 6 platform adds over 50 new features to Squarespace’s core service, including Aviary’s photo editor!

For those who don’t already know, Squarespace is a state-of-the-art website creation platform with breakthrough features that make innovative web design more accessible to the public than ever before. Since 2004, the platform has empowered millions to create and maintain modern, high-quality websites regardless of technical ability.

If you’d like to check it out, visit them at www.squarespace.com and register for a free 14-day trial. If you’d like to move past the trial period, the new platform is available today starting at just $8 per month with 24/7 support and a free custom domain.

Squarespace is committed to building products integrated with the most popular services on the web, which is one of the reasons why they chose Aviary.

To access the editor:

  1. Upload a photo inside the Content Manager
  2. Double-click the photo and an “Edit Image” lightbox will appear
  3. Hover over the thumbnail and click on the pencil
  4. Aviary’s editor pops up – Edit as needed
  5. Hit save, and you’re back to where you were!

Aviary is a free photo editing platform for both web and mobile. It’s completely customizable to match your site/app, from the tools that are inside, to the user interface. If you’d like to add Aviary’s editor to your own site or app, visit Aviary.com and choose your platform to get started.

Posted in Aviary, Partners, Web widget | 2 Comments

What the Heck is a Hackathon Anyway?

Posted on July 9, 2012 by Ari

We’ve been building up to Photo Hack Day 3 for a while now, and figured it was probably time to explain what exactly a Hackathon is all about.

Note: If you’re already convinced, click here to sign up! Otherwise, read on.

A Hackathon can be described as room full of driven developers and designers, each trying to build the next big app in 24 hours. It’s a veritable hot-box of creativity. For obvious reasons, our Hackathons are photo-centric which helps focus their scope and keeps the post hack demos visually interesting.

We know 24 hours can seem like a short amount of time, so we’ve put together a list of API’s you can use to help get your ideas off the ground. You’re not limited to the API’s on the list of course, but a number of them do offer a prize for best use of their API.

Come Photo Hack Day, you’ll find yourself in the company of passionate evangelists for these API’s, each excited to answer any questions, and troubleshoot any problems you might have.

It’s also a great networking opportunity. Not only are you rubbing elbows with company reps from the likes of Facebook, Tumblr, Flickr, and Aviary ;) but you’ll also get to show off your hacking and design skills to an audience of your peers.

Don’t have any hack ideas? Join a team! We’ll be posting hack ideas up to and throughout the day of the event.

Let’s not forget about all the free food, free beer and general camaraderie.

In short, a Hackathon is a 24 hour coding marathon with refueling stations at every checkpoint, and helpful devs and evangelists cheering you on along the way.

Bay Area developers + designers, won’t you join us? Register for free at photohackday.org 

Posted in Aviary, Fun! | 1 Comment

Photo Hack Day 3 Update: $10,000 in prizes + Fireside Chat Panel Announced

Posted on July 5, 2012 by Nam

Since announcing the West Coast Edition of Photo Hack Day July 14-15 at the very cool offices of Dropbox, Bay Area developers and designers have been patiently waiting to hear what prizes will be up for grabs… well wait no more, here is the official list!

1st place: $7,000

2nd place: $2,000

3rd place: $1,000

Hacks will be judged on technical accomplishment, cleverness, originality, and of course, the usefulness of the application.. with bonus points for something completely unique!

With more food and drinks then you could ever ask for, Photo Hack Day 3 is free to register and attend.  Visit photohackday.org to learn more, or register at  photohackday3.eventbrite.com.

Along with the top 3 prizes, our awesome partners will reward participants with prizes for the best use of their API. Make sure to follow @photohacksf on Twitter for the latest news, as this list will be updated regularly! More prizes coming soon!

Aviary:

  • New York Startup immersion – We’ll sponsor your trip to NYC with free use of our office space, networking opportunities, and $1000 cash to help subsidize your NYC adventure!

Facebook:

  • $2500 in Facebook ads credits, and FB sweatshirts for the winning team

Fujifilm:

  • A Fujifilm X10 premium compact camera from the award-winning X-Series for the best hack using their API as well as other FinePix digital cameras for runner-ups.

500px:

  • A free one year 500px Awesome account for everybody participating in the hack day. They’ll also be giving out special prizes for the best use of 500px API

Stupeflix:

  • Startup accounts ($300 value) to all dev attendees.

Twilio:

  • Kindle Fire + $50 Twilio credit for best use of the Twilio API

Photojojo:

Fireside Chat Panel announced!

The topic will be “The Future of Photos”, and will include:

  • Avi Muchnick, Aviary, CEO (moderator)
  • Lucas Buick, Hipstamatic, CEO
  • Dirk Stoop, Facebook, lead PM on Photos
  • Bryan O’Neil Hughes, Adobe, Senior PM for PS and Lightroom
  • Kristen Berman, Lytro, Product Manager

Visit photohackday.org to learn more, or register for free at photohackday3.eventbrite.com

Posted in Aviary | 1 Comment

Aviary Windows Phone 7 App Now Available

Posted on July 3, 2012 by Maya

Last month we released the Aviary Windows Phone 7 SDK, and although we launched with a handful of impressive partners, lots of WP7 developers have been asking us for a basic example app which can quickly show off Aviary’s SDK in action for the platform.

We partnered with identitymine, who built this demo app for us, and we thought it was worth sharing for any developer who wants to see Aviary’s photo editing SDK in action. It’s called Photo Genius, and here’s how it works:

  • The app displays a list of all your photos.
  • You can click on any photo to get basic recommendations for how to improve it in the editor.
  • Then, you can invoke the Aviary Photo Editor and make the suggested fixes. Simple, really!
The app includes all the tools featured in our SDK, which includes auto enhance, color balance, a handful of stunning effects, stickers, crop, blemish removal, among others to touch up any photo.

We do plan to continue to improve this app experience to make it even easier for developers to experiment with Aviary’s SDK. Check it out now in the Windows Phone Marketplace!

If you have any questions, please feel free to send them to mobile@aviary.

Posted in Mobile, Windows Phone 7 | 5 Comments

Photo Hack Day 3: West Coast Edition

Posted on June 19, 2012 by Erin

Bay Area developers: Aviary is absolutely thrilled to announce that Photo Hack Day is headed west this summer! On July 14-15, 2012, join our awesome headline sponsor, Facebook, and our kind hosts at Dropbox for a third weekend of hacking, cool giveaways, and $10,000 in prize money. Our friends at Sincerely, Walgreens, and Tumblr are also onboard to throw some food, drink, and a few surprises into the mix.

(We’re tempted to cue up some Phantom Planet, for those of you who watched the OC, but we’ll spare you.)

The original Photo Hack Day was the first image-centric hackathon in New York City, bringing together the brightest minds in photography, photo-editing, web design, computer science, and more. In 24 hours, over 200 developers put together an impressive 43 hacks with APIs contributed from 25 companies — a full day display of burgeoning talent in the New York City tech community. NASDAQ, our first headline sponsor, gave away the opportunity to showcase the winners on their screen in Times Square!

After garnering a wonderfully enthusiastic response from the community, we organized Photo Hack Day II, which brought over 250 developers, 30 APIs, the founders of reddit, Tumblr, and Cheezburger Inc., and $10,000 in prizes to General Assembly — plus a livestream of our sister Photo Hack Day taking place simultaneously in Berlin.

Award-winning hacks in the past have included:

  • PhotoBot, a robotic photo analysis tool that provides suggestions for taking better pictures
  • Synviary, a collaborative image editing platform
  • HoneyBadger, a motion detector security system that enables your computer to know who’s looking at your screen

Plus many more exciting, creative projects!

At Photo Hack Day 2, we had 496 RSVPs and a full house at General Assembly (demo tickets sold out a full week before the event!), so we’re looking forward to doing the same on the west coast. Have questions? Check out the event website, or get in touch.

Can’t wait to see you there!

Posted in Aviary, Fun! | 1 Comment