Here’s an interesting sneak peek of Adobe’s project called “Rome”, shown at the MAX 2009 conference. It’s an application written in ActionScript that combines the features of Photoshop, Flash, Fireworks, Dreamweaver, and lets you work with different content types. It runs on Air, meaning it’s cross-platform and even works inside the browser.
I certainly like the idea of a mashup app of Adobe’s most indispensable tools and perhaps this is the real sort of integration people have been looking for in the Creative Suite. It’s quite smart too: the interface is not as cluttered as other Adobe programs, and the contextual palettes appear according to the currently selected object.
That it can run inside a web browser is also another golden feature; I wonder what Aviary thinks of it. If Photoshop.com isn’t enough for you, this will certainly be more than enough.
My only question is performance. Small widgets created in Adobe Air work fine (TweetDeck, for example), but can a full-blown app work better than native code? Should Adobe be building programs like this on Air? Some of the bigger questions when dealing with Flash-based apps and its cousins.
What’s the hottest thing on the Web right now? Twitter, and a host of other dead-simple, single serving websites. If you plan on making a new web app, make it as simple as possible, if not simpler. Take Aviary’s Screen Capture service.
Just a short background: Aviary is a suite of web-based graphics applications, all named after birds. The branding concept is fantastic, if I do say so myself. The fact that they run on Flash and are essentially competing against the very maker of said platform—Adobe—is a very interesting feat in itself. It is, however, a bit premature as Flash remains hardware-intensive.
Screencapped Google.com because the doodle today looks extra-nice.
So, back to the dead-simple part. All you have to do is enter the URL of a website you want to screencap after Aviary.com and wait a few moments until Falcon, the simplified image markup editor, loads the image up. Crop, resize, add a few scribbles, and save your screenshot. Done!
Of course some people will need options, which the Capture page and the Talon Firefox add-on can provide. But that isn’t really Aviary’s achievement here. It managed to create a screenshot tool that requires nothing but entering a URL in the browser address bar. No need to wait for the app to start up, no need to remember special conventions to make sure the thing works properly.
Simple, elegant, brilliant. We will always have huge, complicated methods that will get the job done, but most of the time it’s the leaner, less intimidating tools that win us over.
