Aviary (a.viary.com) has generated quite a bit of buzz lately, and it has certainly been warranted. There are several reasons why a complete Flex based online creative suite of applications is revolutionary, so I wanted to find out a bit more about where these applications were heading. On Monday I had a chance to talk with a member of the Aviary team, Avi Muchnick, about their applications as well as the future of software delivery. His thoughts echoed many of my own, but it was amazing to see how their product demonstrates many of the features that I thought existed only in the future. Aviary currently has two products in semi-public beta: Phoenix (image editor) and Peacock (pattern generator).
Why Flex?
When I spoke with Avi, I asked him why they chose Flex for their development platform. The main issue that he pointed out was adoptability. He mentioned that initially the only two real choices were Java and Flash. In their case AJAX was not even a possibility due to the advanced image manipulation that was going to be needed. The rapid adoption rate of the Flash Player made it very attractive to Aviary. It also provided a more seamless experience for the end user.
You might ask, "Why Flex and not Flash?" Avi stated that if time wasn't a factor, they would have done everything in Flash with their own custom framework that was specific to their applications (and he didn't rule that out for the future). However, because time was an issue, they were immediately attracted to the rapid development workflow that Flex offered.
Application Delivery
I also asked Avi if the software delivery model was in his opinion 'the new way' or 'an alternate way' to bring software to the end user. He emphatically stated that this is certainly 'the new way' that the industry is moving. He also stated that he did not see applications like Aviary taking the place of desktop applications, but rather allowing the desktop applications to take more of a niche role in places where the applications need processor and memory intensive functionality.
When asked about the development challenges, Avi highlighted the user experience. Users have experience with very responsive desktop applications, so a rich web application needs to be equally responsive. This becomes difficult if they Flash Player is required to do some complex calculation. For example, if the user grabs the Magic Wand Tool inside of Aviary's bitmap editing tool Pheonix, he is going to want a near-instant visual representation of his selection every time he clicks on his artwork. Avi and the group are trying to create an application that feels as responsive as possible, even if complex calculations are going on in the background.
Collaboration
The collaboration model in Aviary is quite possibly one of the most innovative parts of its architecture. To begin with, it provides version control for the artist's creations. At any point the artist can go back to any of his saved states. It doesn't end there. Aviary also allows artists to extend another artist's creation - from any version. Avi described this as a branching tree model.
Aviary also expands this model beyond creativity into monetization. For example, an artist could create a work in Phoenix and offer it for a set amount. Next, an author could modify a version of that work in Phoenix and offer his version for a different amount, with the original artist receiving some of the profits. The model creates many complications for the developers, but Avi assured me that there are viable solutions for these. He did state that the rights management issues associated with this model were one of the toughest conceptual issues to put into practice.
Preview
In the next article, I will be giving you a demo of both Phoenix (Image Editor) and Peacock (Pattern Generator). I might also have some invites to give away, so stay tuned.
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