I’ve been hearing about this website for a few months now, but finally been able to login and create an account today to find out more about what makes it so exciting.

Aviary is a suite of powerful creative applications that you can use right in your web browser. It’s also a community of friendly artists to share and collaborate with. The current tools available are:

• Phoenix – an image editor that has layers, masks, effects, undo history, and all that other good stuff.
• Toucan – a color swatches and palettes tool will help you find colors you didn’t even know exist.
• Peacock – it does so many wonderful and amazing things, that they decided to call it their visual laboratory.

What intigued me most was how the website came to life and why they decided to offer such fabulous tools online and for free! I had a little poke around their website and found some interesting background info:

• What is Aviary’s mission?
  Make the world’s creation accessible.
• Why did you choose the name Aviary?
  Our motto was “Creation on the fly” and the bird metaphor seemed the best choice out of all the options available to us. We didn’t want to name our software after bugs (for obvious reasons).
• Why did you start Aviary?
  We have our roots in the grassroots hobbyists community. We are artists ourselves and know that there are so many other potential creators out there like us… all they need are accessible tools.

I haven’t had a chance to play around with the software for more than a few minutes so far, but it looks like a fantastic resource and there are also some great tutorials on the site to help get you started with ideas on how to use the full capabilites of the tools. Let me know if you have had a chance to play around with Aviary and share your creations!