Posted 14 January 2008, by Aaron
A small group of Internet software developers in New York are hoping to turn the world of online art on its head with a new suite of creative applications called Aviary.
Aviary will consist of an entire flock of bird-themed applications to help you perform any creative task, from manipulating images, creating unique patterns and drawing vector graphics, right through to creating 3D models, audio mixing and even video editing.
It’s all one giant web-based RIA (Rich Internet Application) suite based on Adobe’s Flex platform. The guys developing the suite are keeping a blog which offers quite a few screenshots and even a few Flash videos of the applications in action.
My impressions based on these screenshots and videos is that the suite looks like a very slick toy. But toy it most certainly is - very bright and colourful, slightly Fisher Price!
However, as a demonstration of what is possible with RIAs it is nothing short of breathtaking. Sure, there are a few existing image manipulation tools and drawing tools knocking around, but this is an entire suite of webby-ajxay-flashy goodness - video editing… on the WEB?!
Looking deeper into the suite than just the creative toys, there seem to be some clever-sounding social media elements being built in, such as the ability to collaborate and share, and perhaps significantly, an online market place to trade your works of art.
I’m all for it! It’s not going to replace any serious professional tools we might use, but as a way of oiling the creative cogs and perhaps inspiring youngsters to try their hand at creating and sharing their work, it’s a great idea. And as an example of what is possible over the web these day, I’m very exited to see it in action!
I’m not the only one excited. Alan Mejer thinks Aviary promises to be one of the most exciting Web 2.0 apps yet. So what do you think Aviary promises? Will it gracefully soar to new heights and set new standards? Or will it come crashing to ground with bird-flu and gimmick stamped all over it?
BETA invites can be requested from the Aviary site.
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Tags:Adobe, Creativity, Multimedia, Rich Internet Applications, Web 2.0
Posted 11 January 2008, by Aaron
Hello…? … HELLO…? Cough, cough, please excuse me whilst I blow away some of these cobwebs and wipe the place down. Jeepers, it’s been a while hasn’t it?
First of all lets get the crap excuses out of the way: busy, Christmas, work, bla bla. And now the good excuse: I haven’t had a working Internet connection since 6th December. Good old BT have been buggering around with cables in the area and breaking a few thousand homes’ broadband connections. Mighty inconvenient for an Internet-addict such as myself, not to mention the web design projects which I’ve supposed to have been busy working on.
I won’t harp on about how utterly, utterly incompetent BT are, today is a day for rejoicing. At last I can log on to miLienzo.com again and make my first post of the year. And what a better way to start the year of blogging than to drop the bombshell that I’m going to stop! Well… not stop, but rather evolve.
I started this website almost a year ago and the reason was to network with other designers, learn from them, share what I was learning in college, and to try and establish myself in the industry. And I’ve done all that! I’ve learnt loads this past year and now I’ve got a great job, and I get enough freelance work to keep me out of trouble. The truth is miLienzo.com has lost a lot of its purpose so I need to give myself a new reason to commit to spending several hours a week running a blog.
I really want to push the freelance work this year so I have decided to build up my online portfolio and attach a blog to it. This will sit on my aaronrussell.co.uk domain (currently hosting my vastly out of date portfolio site) and I will aim to write more focused and relevant articles to my industry.
This idea is very much modelled on the success of fellow design-bloggers and country-folk David Airey and Mark Boulton. I don’t want to blabber on too much about self promotion and personal branding and all that Internet jazz-talk, but I’m not sure miLienzo.com as a ‘brand’ can achieve what I want it to. It’s clear to me that this site has served a purpose and it’s time for me to realign my aims slightly.
So that’s that really. I still haven’t decided what I’m going to do with this site: whether to move all the content to my new site, or to just kill it and start from scratch, or even to try and flog it? I’d be interested to hear what you think I should do?
Over the next 4-6 weeks I’ll be pretty busy setting up the new site and creating a new design but I’ll continue to write updates on this site. I’m also busy working on another personal little project - a web app which I hope to launch this year and try and make a few bucks from. So there’s a few things in the pipeline keeping me occupied.
So 2008 looks like an exciting year. I hope you’ll stick around with me 
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Tags:Blogging, Goals, Personal, Portfolio, Success
Posted 24 December 2007, by Aaron
It’s been almost a month since I last posted on miLienzo.com and warned you that, well, I wouldn’t be posting much whilst I was going through a busy period of work. It seems some blog-readers prefer not to read apologies and excuses from bloggers who are not blogging… bah bloody humbug to them!
Now it is important for me to take five minutes over Christmas to let you know that I’m still alive and well and continuing to read your blogs as and when I can. But more importantly I want to wish all of my subscribers a very merry Christmas and thank you for the support that everyone has shown over the last ten months since I began blogging.
During the last couple of weeks of my blogging down-time I have been musing over what to do with this blog and even whether I should continue it. One thing that is certain is that the last ten months blogging has proven to be a really rewarding experience and not one that I want to give up. I do however have some big changes in mind.
I’ll save the details of my plans for a new post. For now there is only one thing that’s important: it involves lots of food and drink, family and loved ones, and dodgy knitted sweaters! Merry Christmas everyone - I hope you all have a great few days.
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Tags:Blogging, Christmas
Posted 28 November 2007, by Aaron
OK, a bit of a melodramatic headline, but what’s going on? Eight days without a post? Only six posts throughout all of November?
Well, the good news is that I haven’t fallen off the edge of a cliff or been run over by a hippopotamus. I am alive and well. The bad news is that this pattern of irregular and infrequent posting is set to continue.
Ironically, November has been an amazing month for this blog. A few stumbles early in the month led to staggering levels of traffic and a significant increase in subscriber numbers. If you are one of these new subscribers I am really sorry - I feel like you’re a guest at my party and that I’ve been ignoring you. I’m not normally like this, honest!
A few potential blogging days were wasted earlier this week after I broke my brand new Mac at the weekend. Well, I didn’t break it, but when you give a new toy to an eager chap like me and mix it with a very limited knowledge of UNIX code, bad things can happen. And they did.
So a few days were spent reinstalling everything and moving all my data from my PC… again! In addition to this I’ve been trying to sell a few things - eBay really can be a time-consuming business - and of course, Christmas present buying is at the front of my mind, or more accurately, should be at the front of my mind - I haven’t bought one thing yet!
On top of all this, today I was offered a pretty big freelance contract which is going to keep me occupied most evenings and weekends for the next seven weeks. Who said Christmas was for partying and getting merry? I can’t moan because it means 2008 is going to start with a bumper pay slip, but it does mean blogging is slipping further down my list of priorities than I’d like it to.
Of course I will reserve some of my time for miLienzo.com - in fact I’ve got a great article coming up on how to set up a web server in Mac OS-X without bricking the computer! However, in an ideal world I’d post three or four times a week - this just isn’t going to happen for a while.
Thanks to everyone for sticking with me during this time of sparse bloggery. It’s great to see lots of new subscribers and I look forward to getting to know you all once I get my blogging butt back in action.
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Tags:Blogging, Christmas, Freelancing, Personal, Workload
Posted 20 November 2007, by Aaron
Last week I revealed to the World something that’s had me quite excited for a while now: that I was a Mac owner in waiting.
Well, the waiting is over and for the last five days my brand new Mac Pro has been taking a pasting as I’ve made it earn it’s position on my desk. So how’s she doing? And how have I found the experience?
Christmas has come early
Last Friday I finished work early because I couldn’t bare the thought of my new toy just sitting at home all boxed up and feeling lonely whilst I wasted valuable Mac-time sitting at my desk doing far less important things. I rushed home to find a larger-than-expected box waiting for me.
After opening the box up in a frenzy of excitement and getting the beast up and running, one of the first things I did was unplug it all again and open her up. I had an extra 2 Gb of RAM to stick inside her and an extra 500 Gb hard drive. What a lucky little Mac!
In my life I’ve opened up more PC’s than you can shake a stick at and it’s always the same. Turning the thing upside down, twisting fiddly screws at the back, damning your clumsy fat fingers when you drop that tiny screw into the deepest corner of the motherboard, wiping the sweat from your brow as you nervously stick your fingers into inaccessible crannies to remove and replace delicate cards and components - you know what it’s like.
The first thing that struck me about the Mac Pro is how much of a pleasure it is opening her up. One sturdy lever at the back releases the aluminium side plate revealing what can only be described as a work of art. The build of the Mac Pro is unbelievably solid, everything is organised into a neat modular layout and everything just slides out with ease and and clicks back in to place with reassuring solidity.
The sign of a true convert
There are two Mac applications that historically I’ve never been much of a fan of: namely iTunes and iPhoto. There are lots of reasons why I was anti these apps but mainly it was to do with there being better alternatives on the PC - Winamp and Picassa respectively. After spending a few days really getting to know iTunes and iPhoto I can reveal that I am truely converted - I love them both!
With iTunes it’s just feels and performs much better than it ever did on my PC - it just feels as if it belongs on the Mac. My 16 Gb of music is now sat on my Mac and iTunes is getting a lot more use than Winamp ever did because… it’s better!
With iPhoto I have to admit, I’m not sure if I still prefer Picassa or not. In the past I’ve tried iPhoto and it’s fallen short of my expectations. However, iPhoto 08 introduces the new feature of ‘events’ - the equivalent of albums. This new feature alone is a VAST improvement over previous versions of iPhoto and if nothing else it certainly pars with Picassa.
So far there is only one thing that is disappointing me with the Mac, and that’s my beloved Firefox. It’s crap! Firefox crashes on me several times every day and I have to do a forced quit. It seems to be when using JavaScript intensive sites or apps like Gmail, Google Docs etc.
Unfortunately my research seems to suggest I’m not the only one with Firefox problems on OS-X and there’s not much to be done about it. Safari, Opera and Camino are all good browsers that work well, but they don’t have any of my Firefox plugins which unfortunately have become essential parts of my browsing experience these days. For now I’ll stick with Firefox but I’m sure hoping it becomes more stable with future releases.
So to conclude, I’m absolutely in love with my Mac. The PC still clings on to a small amount of desk space as I haven’t finished moving everything across yet and I don’t have any of the Adobe tools for OS-X. However, the PC knows its days are numbered - it’s been dumped for a sexier machine that is a better performer, and well, just has a nicer personality.
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Tags:Apple, Firefox, iPhoto, iTunes, Mac Pro, Personal
