Two Adobe Photoshop replacements

You need to edit an image real quick and you are working either on a netbook or someone else's machine which doesn't have a copy of your favourite photoshop. Or maybe you never had photoshop in the first place.
Adobe Photoshop has become the premier digital one stop solution for image editing and it should come as no surprise that more than a few would have attempted to ride the photoshop success wave with their own clones.


The first clone which I have been using for a while is the Aviary Phoenix online image editor. Mind you, this has even support for layers and can handle almost anything you might want to get done with an image. Its completely on the cloud (and free as well) and all you need is your trusty Firefox (or any other browser) by your side to edit your image. I guess there's a sign up required but that's not so cumbersome. Being a web app has its advantages, such as being able to capture any webpage easily and Aviary even has a firefox addon. Aviary has a complete suite of applications for every possible form of image editing requirement online.

The second is a very light weight application called the Artweaver. Now artweaver is a fully functional free image editor. Users of photoshop would find themselves completely at home because of the interface. What's more, it even supports export/import as Photoshop format files (PSDs).
The Artweaver interface (I love GITS!!)

Artweaver even has a portable version which you can run off a USB key. You can further enhance artweaver with a number of plugins (which you can find on the download page), you even get to extend it to use XnView, the freeware image viewer.

Both these applications would not be able to replace Photoshop for power users. But when it comes to basic image editing, they get the job done quite well!

Filed under  //  Adobe   USB   applications   aviary   browser   cloud   design   drive   editor   falcon   firefox   image   light   online   phoenix   photo   photo shop   plugin   powerful   replacement   screen capture   substitute   web2.0   weight  
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Tour de Flex _ Helps you learn Flex, in English!

Get your copy of Tour de Flex and jump start your Flex experience. Learn with easy examples. Anyway, its better than looking at your boring HTML help! Oh! You'd better get some AIR before you do that!

Filed under  //  AIR   Adobe   coding   computers   de   documentation   flex   installation   learn   programming   reference   support   tour   tutorial   web2.0  
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Use Open Source Titanium to build your RIAs

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Appcelerator's Titanium is an open source alternative to Adobe AIR to help you build your rich internet apps easily. We first saw Titanium hit the racks of the internet around December. Its three months down the line and at least we think they haven't made the noise they ought to have generated. But we haven't seen as much of Titanium as we should be? There are a few easy things which Appcelerator hasn't done yet. And correct us if we're wrong.
  1. Average branding. Titanium is a great brand name, but my search on Titanium on Google brings up only one result on the first page which is relevant. Titanium Appcelerator seems to work though!
  2. This is something Appcelerator has to do. Write a Wikipedia page. It is after all an open source project which needs users for it to get popular.
  3. Get more people to tweet and write about it. We decided to blog about it after getting impressed with the free SDK, awesome tutorials and the wonderful twitter application, Tweetanium.
  4. Get more blogs to write about Titanium. Because we really think Lifehacker should have featured Tweetanium. True many have already featured Titanium, like the Readwriteweb blog
The Titanium App is open source and cross platform.  Preview release 2 is now out and adds support to Linux as well. We think open source is the way to go and Titanium is a step in the right direction. Download the Titanium SDK here and start making your own apps. Show your support to Titanium by downloading Tweetanium Follow them here Do you disagree with the statement that Titanium has branded itself the way it was supposed to? Do you think Titanium has already got its share of fame for the period of time it has been around? Would you be willing to give up on AIR and go open source? Leave your comments!

Filed under  //  AIR   Adobe   Open source   RIA   computers   free   internet   programming   rich internet application   subsititute   technology   titanium   web   web services   web2.0  
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