2008-03-27
The RIA battle started!
It all started 2 days ago when I received an invitation to test Aviary. I was more than impressed to see Phoenix in action. It looks like the long anticipated RIA revolution is alive now. And today Adobe launched Photoshop Express. So in case you missed it. Here is the quick summary.
Since today Photoshop Express is available for free and offers 2 gb of free storage. The director of Photoshop Express explained that some of the top engineers behind Photoshop rewrote some of the algorithms in ActionScript 3. At first sight it seems that Photoshop Express is more a tool to manage your pictures online. But diving deeper you'll discover that most important features, like rotating, cropping, [etc] are not missing.
I was very excited when I got the invitation to test Phoenix. I was familair with it right from the start - basically because it feels much like Photoshop. A second view convinced me that Phoenix will really replace Photoshop right away. Even the shortcuts work like expected. Layers and a history management are not missing. Dozen of filters are already implemented. Just go and browse the gallery - you'll already find some amazing work done by different artists. I am looking forward to see how Phoenix will change the RIA world once they go public.
Photoshop Express VS Phoenix?
Some voices (including myself) started comparing Photoshop Express and Phoenix! However, I think you cannot really compare them because both are so much different. Although Aviary, like Photoshop Express, provides the functionality of custom online galleries, Phoenix has much more advanced features to edit images online.
More tools are Peacock and SlideRocket. Both are still not public!
I really have no clue about Pattern editors, so a collegue who definitely knows more about that topic had a look at Peacock. He told me that it looks quite complete.
SlideRocket is a web application that provides everything you need to design professional quality presentations, manage and share libraries of slides and assets, and to deliver presentations in person or remotely over the web.
