aviary

If Instagram's privacy policy shift (or not) has you packing in your Instagram account and looking for an alternative photo-filtering and -sharing app, you might want to give Aviary a try. In fact, you might already be familiar with Aviary. Its technology powers the new Flickr app for iOS and Twitter's new photo filters, but Aviary can also be used on its own. The company offers both iOS and Android apps. Here's a quick look at how the app works on the iPhone.

After launching the app and granting it access to your Camera Roll, you'll … Read more

Leaked from today's 404 episode:

- Instagram photos disappear from Twitter feeds.

- You can use IFTTT to post Instagram photos to Twitter cards.

- Twitter vs. Instagram in a knock-down, drag-out filters fight.

- Head-to-head: Twitter vs. Instagram filters.

- Sony putting an end to production of handheld cassette recorders.

- "Modern Seinfeld" Twitter account imagines Jerry and Co. in the Digital Age.

- Check out the CNET 100 of 2012.… Read more

It may not beat Photoshop, but Aviary is still one of the most comprehensive photo editors available for Android. What's more, it's incredibly simple to use.

From the get-go, Aviary makes it simple to edit your photos, as it opens up directly to a carousel of all the saved images on your device. From here, you can swipe through your photos straight away or go to your photo gallery and make your selection that way. Otherwise, the app also gives you the option to take a new photo to import into the editor.

Once you make your selection, … Read more

Google announced that it is shutting down its photo-editing service, Picnik, much to the dismay of many Picnik users.

Once Picnik closes its doors for good on April 19, Picnik users will be forced to seek out alternative photo-editing tools. There's always the popular free desktop tools like Paint.NET or GIMP, but true alternatives to Picnik are Web-based editors. Here are a few of them to consider:

Photoshop Express Adobe's Photoshop Express has all the basic editing tools like crop, resize, red-eye, as well as more advanced editing features like fill light, sharpen, and exposure. It also … Read more

Online image editors and smartphone apps like Aviary and Instagram give everyone the tools to manipulate images on their phone, but a small group of contemporary artists are already exhibiting these works at the URL phonearts.net...probably because pharts.com is already taken.

The site is a gallery of works curated by an international coalition of artists who only use cell phones and illustration apps. It started when Daniel Littlewood and Hugon Guillaume found friendship on Flickr based on their shared interest in interactive design, and decided to recruit others to exhibit similar creations online.

All the images you see on the site are the size of the average phone display, roughly 3 or 4 inches, and one thing they all share is their temporal nature.

The subjects jump from rotating GIFs to application screenshots and other images I don't even know how to describe, but they all communicate themes of spontaneity, cyber-nostalgia, and universal access.

View them with a sly eye, and enjoy the infinite scrolling!

More photos after the jump.… Read more

Creating digital audio has long been one of the best arguments for using locally installed software rather than a cloud service, but that's beginning to change. The latest entrant, launched Thursday, is a program called Roc, which lets you create simple 8-beat loops from a library of hundreds of sounds, all without leaving your Web browser.

Roc is the latest creation from Aviary, which offers a free set of Flash-based online applications for creating and editing content. Most of Aviary's tools are for graphics, but in September it launched the Myna audio editor, which lets you record and … Read more

There are plenty of times that screen captures come in handy; sometimes it's for something practical, like capturing an error message while you're in the process of troubleshooting, and sometimes it's as simple as wanting to share something funny with a friend. Aviary Screen Capture is an extension for Chrome that makes screen captures incredibly easily, and it boasts some pretty impressive extra features as well. This is by far the best image-capture utility we've come across.

The extension appears as a small icon to the right of Chrome's address bar, and taking a screen … Read more

Aviary is great at making advanced Web-based artists' tools that I haven't a hope of being able to fully use. Case in point, the new audio editor, Myna, that joins the company's suite of graphics tools like the Phoenix image editor and the Raven vector editor.

I have dabbled a bit in GarageBand and I do some of my own podcast production work, so I get the concept in Myna, although I'm far from skilled at editing audio. The app is a multitrack audio editor, and for a Web-based app it's freakishly capable. It's easy … Read more