Aviary : Where BIRDS & creative people gather

They say birds of the same feathers flock together. I guess that's why they are all flocking at Aviary - a web-based photo editing bunch of cool software :

Image Editor - there is the Phoenix
Colour Editor - there is the Toucan
Effects Editor - The Peacock
Vector Editor - The Raven

I had a go at Phoenix and because I use Photoshop, Phoenix felt alot like Photoshop Elements, which is good of course. Especially since the licence for it isn't cheap at all! I didn't have much time to explore more, but from first glance the interface looks exactly like that of PS Elements. The "layers" & "history" buttons are located on the right side and the tools buttons are on the left having all the basic "tool" funcstions such as "Magic Wand", "paintbrush", "text tool" and the likes. And if I have even more I'm sure I'd find navigating & ease of use as as easy to work on as Photoshop Elements.

I guess at this point for me, the downside is that it cannot be used offline - which means you need a relatively fast internet speed to do your work online. Of course having the software offline would probably defeat the whole purpose of it being a web-based software anyway. Am i making any sense?

Here are some screenshots of their various "birds" :

1) Phoenix

2) This illustration is gorgeous and is my all-time favourite bird, the Peacock! (PS : My first "tanglung"/lantern was a peacock - I had it when I was around 1 year old, I still remember it - how beautiful it was)

3) All the birds on their blog

So what exactly is all this bird talk??

In their FAQ section and when asked what exactly is their mission, they say shortly but sweetly " (To) Make the world's creation accessible."

I think the 5 words really do make the sentence powerful - accessible (not forgetting free) and to be able to use it for any creative work.

Their motto :
Our motto was "Creation on the fly" and the bird metaphor seemed the best choice out of all the options available to us. We didn't want to name our software after bugs (for obvious reasons). Also, haven't you heard? The bird is the word. (And they attached a clip from "Family Guy" hilarious!).

You can check out their FAQ here.

Anyway, a good tool for someone who has an internet connection and who needs to use an image-editing software but doesn't want to spend money on buying a licence for it.

So flock (Oh i can't help the pun!) there if you think this is for you!