New iOS SDK version 4.2.0!

iOS Devs - Update to the latest version of the Aviary SDK!

We're thrilled to introduce one of our biggest updates ever to Aviary's iOS SDK - version 4.2.0! 

We're on a mission to give the world greater creative freedom. The latest iOS SDK helps us do just that with new and improved features like new photo filters, artsy frames and awesome stickers for members of our Premium Content Network. We added some of our most requested features, including better selfie tools and undo/redo. It’s all a part of our goal to help you give your users the best tools to create beautiful photos. 

Before we dive into all of the great new features, there is one important change we would like to call out in particular:

IMPORTANT- Font changes in the Meme tool

Going forward, the Meme tool in Aviary’s SDK will no longer use the Impact font due to licensing restrictions. We have replaced it with League Gothic, a similarly styled font that is part of the Open Source Type Movement and therefore completely free for your to embed in your app forever.

Please note that if you wish to continue to use the Meme tool with the Impact font in your app, you may be required to pay a separate licensing fee directly to Monotype, the rights owner of the Impact font. To avoid any fees going forward, we recommend you update your app to the latest version of our SDK immediately (or disable the Meme tool inside your app).

...And now onto the fun stuff! 

Undo/redo

Our number one user request is finally here! Yep, you can now undo or redo any change by simply swiping from left or right on your photo. We’re positive your users will love the new addition.

​New and improved suite of Selfie tools

We can’t take enough selfies and neither can your users! Our suite of selfie tools have been massively upgraded allowing for even better post-processing and editing.

All new user tutorials on tool usage

We now have user tutorials to make sure that your users get the most out of their photo editing experience.

…And even more!

Of course, as with every new Aviary release, there are additional optimizations, improvements and other goodies tucked away in every corner. We’ve added an editor cancel confirmation alert when users have unsaved work. We’ve also included language updates and support for en_GB localization.

Download iOS version 4.2.0 now

For additional help, email us at partners@aviary.com

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A thousand new apps on Aviary's Photo Editor SDK in a week.

Aviary’s SDKs have been powering photo editing in thousands of apps, and for millions of users, since September 2011. In that time, our developer ecosystem has grown to over 7,000 partners. In March this year almost 80 million unique people edited their photos on Aviary’s platform across that ecosystem.

We talk with developers a lot - and they love the ease of integration, the quality of the technology, and the intuitive photo editing tools that Aviary can provide for their users. We’re proud to work with these developers; and to have become an integral part of their apps and business. But there's always more we can do... and are doing. 

We launched a big upgrade to our SDKs last week.

In just one week, more than one thousand new apps have signed up to join our ecosystem! (1,181 as of 9pm last night, to be exact ;)

That’s super exciting, especially as we’re now also offering developers monetization opportunities - though our IAP and Branded Content / Native Ad models, which get distributed along with the SDK. 

What’s even more exciting is the diversity of apps that are integrating Aviary’s photo editing SDK. From commerce apps, to social apps, to lifestyle apps, to creative apps, to messaging apps… it’s clear that we’re long past the point where photo editing is just about turning an average picture into a good one. Photo editing – especially on mobile – is now about enhancing visual communication across many use cases between billions of people across the planet.

The charts below provide an overview of the 1,000+ new apps that have joined Aviary’s ecosystem in the last 7 days.  

As we’ve seen consistently across the last Quarter, the number of new Android apps being built on Aviary’s SDKs is outpacing the number of new iOS apps by 3 to 2. Although iOS apps dominate the current make up of our overall ecosystem, the rapid growth of Android in that mix is startling.

Meanwhile, while new Android developers are still building a lot of photo editing and creation apps, our new iOS partners are more diverse – with social networking apps that include photo editing now accounting for almost a quarter of new apps built on Aviary’s iOS SDKs.

We'll post an update to this a month from now - and analyze additional trends we're seeing. 

But if you’re a developer who needs kick ass photo editing in your app right now – come and grab our SDK right here.

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Announcing a MASSIVE UPGRADE to Aviary’s iOS Photo Editor SDK

Great news for developers! Today we’re releasing a MASSIVE UPGRADE to our iOS Photo Editor SDK. You can get it right now, for free, right here.

It’s never been easier to integrate the world’s favorite photo editor into your app – and you’ll be in great company when you do. Huge social services like Kakao and Tango use Aviary’s SDKs to power photo editing in their apps, alongside retail giants like Walgreens and Sephora, photo-industry juggernauts like Photobucket, not to mention thousands of hit indie developers such as PicStitch – the collage-maker king. In fact, more than 7,000 developers now partner with Aviary to give their users a magical photo editing experience – thanks to an SDK chock-full with Aviary’s intuitive tools and a never-ending supply of cool photo filters, crafty stickers and fantastic frames.

We’re constantly capturing feedback from our developer community to help shape our products. This new iOS Photo Editor SDK is a perfect example of that approach. Here are just a handful of the highlights packed in to this new release that you've asked for and your users will love:   

• All new modern UX/UI – completely aligned with Apple’s new design language.
• Customizable look and feel – so you can make the editor fit perfectly into your own app’s aesthetic.
• Leverages all the latest Apple technologies – including 64-bit support.
• Fully updated set of photo editing tools – including an all-new text overlay tool with multiple fonts.
• Internationalization – with support for 23 languages including English, Spanish, Chinese, Portuguese, Japanese, Russian and Bahasa Indonesia.
• Reduced SDK size – along with many more technical optimizations for better performance.
• A basic version that’s feature-rich – and completely free.
• New monetization options – including access to Aviary’s Premium Content Network, which offers a revenue sharing plan on IAPs and exclusive brand campaigns.

If you're a developer who builds cross-platform, remember Aviary also has killer SDKs for Android and Web too.

Aviary’s iOS SDK, including all-new text overlay tools, a modern UI/UX, support for 23 languages and much, much more.

In aggregate, Aviary’s SDKs have been used to edit more than 10 billion photos in the last 12 months. That equates to a lot of happy developers and a lot of happy users. We hope to make many more people even happier with this new iOS Photo Editor SDK. Go download it now.

- Team Aviary

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Aviary Says ‘Hola’ to Latin America, Firefox and Telefonica

Welcome to the family Firefox OS!

Over 70 million people around the world use our tools every month on iOS, Android and the Web - and we’re thrilled to work with Mozilla to bring the magic of Photo Editor by Aviary to the Firefox Operating System.

What’s more, one of the largest telcos in the world - Telefonica – is a great supporter of Mozilla’s Firefox OS platform, so we are especially excited to be part of an ecosystem that will help meet the tremendous demand we’ve seen from consumers in Europe and Latin America!

So now that Aviary is available for Firefox, here’s how you get it:

• Already have a Firefox OS device? Simply download the app here: https://marketplace.firefox.com/app/aviary?src=featured
  
  
• Looking to upgrade to a Firefox OS device? Telefonica’s latest devices – the new ZTE Open C and ZTE Open II – will launch this year and have Aviary pre-installed, giving Telefonica subscribers something special straight out of the box.

From the basic rotate and crop tools all the way to professionally designed filters and magical auto-enhance, Firefox users will find a robust set of editing tools to quickly and easily make their photos beautiful.

We’re confident these tools will go above and beyond, but we’ll also be enhancing these tools in the coming months – like adding more content and sharing options – to best tailor our app for this new platform.

We’re thrilled to bring Photo Editor by Aviary to Firefox OS and you can be sure we are constantly listening to your feedback. So have any comments? Questions? Let us know!

We hope you love it as much as we do!

Cheers,
​Team Aviary

Big News from Aviary: 10 Billion Photos Edited!

We hit a massive milestone today. People all over the planet have now used Aviary to edit 10 billion photos!

At Aviary we strive to inspire people to play with their visual world – by giving them the magic to re-imagine, reinvent, reshape, and share what they see. Whether that happens in our own mobile apps, or in partner apps using Aviary’s SDK, it’s now happened 10 billion times.

It was only last March that we announced our 3 billion milestone. That first 3 billion took us 18 months to achieve. Acceleration to 10 billion over the last nine months has blown past all our expectations – and that growth has been driven by three main factors:

• 70+ million monthly active users. More and more people are using Aviary every single day. Our own-brand app, Photo Editor by Aviary, grew like wildfire this year – and now has over 20 million MAUs. It was also recognized in Apple's and Google's "Best of 2013" lists, as well as in The New York Times’ Best Apps for iOS 7. But the biggest indicator that we’re doing something right is the hundreds of thousands of four and five star user reviews - you’ll find over 500,000 of them in the Google Play store alone!

• 7,000+ partner apps. New apps and services launch every day that have integrated Aviary’s SDKs – meaning our photo-editing platform is now available across a huge and diverse partner ecosystem. So whether you're creating a cool photo collage in PicStitch, or designing personal greeting cards in Sincerely’s Ink, or messaging friends with photos in Tango, or designing gorgeous websites with Squarespace, Aviary is there to help you effortlessly create hugely impactful images.

• 74% of the world has Aviary’s SDK. Developers in 143 of the world’s 193 countries have downloaded and integrated Aviary’s SDK. To serve all our global partners and their users, we offer many localized options – including support for over 30 languages. Meanwhile the different Filters, Frames and Stickers we create for people to enhance their images reflect the norms, styles, visual cues and iconography of many different cultures. The photo phenomenon is diverse and global – and we have to be too.

As we look forward, what most exciting is the fact that a new visual lingua franca has emerged. Unquestionably, photos have become the communication language of the global mobile generation. We are long past the point when photo editing was just about turning an average picture into a good one. Photo editing is now about enhancing visual communication between billions of people across the planet, in a way that embodies the full richness of emotions, feelings and inspiration. It’s often said that a picture is worth a thousand words. But perhaps it’s more accurate to say that a picture is worth 500 words. Editing that picture with Aviary adds the other 500 – and doubles the impact of the final image.

So A BIG THANK YOU to everyone - whether you’re an Aviary user, developer partner, brand partner, or just a friend - your support, feedback and enthusiasm drive us forward every day. Here’s to the next 10 billion edits!

(And if you want to help us get there faster, we’re hiring.)

Cheers,

Team Aviary

All Aviary web integrations have been upgraded to V3 of the editor

As of January 16th, all v2 web integrations have been upgraded to v3 of the Aviary editor. Everything should transition seamlessly in your integration, but please don't hesitate to get in touch if you have any questions.

Required changes for V3

1. API Keys are now required. If you don't have one yet, you can grab one from aviary.com/web. As soon as we officially make the switch to v3, any integration missing an API Key will no longer work.
2. If you are an existing Premium partner using our high resolution service, make sure you have updated to our new high-res API; the old one has been deprecated as of today. If you're not sure (or if you have any questions), email us right away at partners@aviary.com.
3. As a reminder, hardcoded URLs for the editor are no longer supported. Please make sure that you're pointing to http://feather.aviary.com/js/feather.js for http, and https://dme0ih8comzn4.cloudfront.net/js/feather.js for https to ensure that you'll always have the latest version of our editor. If you need to continue using a different url for any reason, get in touch so we can work with you to support it.

Thank you.

- Team Aviary

Aviary and WP8 SDK development

There have been a couple of stories posted in the last two days about Aviary and the Windows Platform. 

I wanted to clarify things for our developer community. 

Firstly, we are a small team passionate about helping developers add magic photo editing capability to their apps. This year has been very successful for Aviary - we have seen our ecosystem of developer partners quadruple, and have edited over 6 Billion photos on our platform. Meanwhile, through in-app monetization programs (such as selling premium filters, stickers, and frames) developers not only get fantastic technology from us, which can be integrated in minutes, but they can also make money with Aviary. 

So far so good. 

But as anyone connected with start up will tell you, success comes from focusing. The minute you do too much, you actually do nothing very well. 

For that reason, every single Quarter, we sit down as a team and plot a detailed product roadmap - a roadmap that is focused, that will meet and exceed the needs of as many of our developer partners and their users as possible, and that doesn't stretch our own team too thin. We take this exercise very seriously - and that's one of the reasons we've been able to deliver consistently high quality work. 

For this past Quarter (Oct, Nov, Dec), that focused product roadmap saw us release a new iOS SDK optimized for iOS 7; completely upgrade our Android offering to give developers the ability to sell premium filters, stickers and frames to their users; enhance our web-based photo editor to enable partners to upload their own premium content; as well as continue to invest in our core imaging technology. That was quite a lot to chew off! And it's paid off - it's been our biggest Quarter yet in terms of number of partner photo edits, number of new developer parters joining the ecosystem, and revenue we've created for that developer ecosystem.

However, in the name of focus, in this current Quarter, as has been pointed out on WPCentral and Engadget, we did not actively develop our Windows platform. We launched our SDK product for Windows last March and while we saw some initial pick up... the numbers were dwarfed by our 6,500 partners on iOS, Android and Web. Something wasn't working. So what we decided to do with Windows this Quarter was pause for breath, actively listen to feedback from the windows developer community, and rethink our approach for 2014. In retrospect, we could have done a clearer job of communicating to the Windows community what we were doing. (Especially, when we cited "lack of platform traction" in our forums, we were not bashing WP8 but talking about the pick up of our own platform on WP8 relative to its runaway success on iOS and Android). But hopefully now this blog post will clear things up.

There are certainly a lot of vocal Windows developers and fans out there! This is great news. We're looking forward to hearing more from you - please keep the feedback coming. Again, that helps inform how and what we develop in 2014. 

-- Tobias (Aviary's CEO)

Ink Mobility Releases Open Source Photo Apps with Aviary SDK

Several months ago, Aviary announced a partnership with Ink Mobility (formerly Filepicker.io) to help developers quickly and easily integrate Aviary’s Photo Editing technology with Ink's image importing and exporting SDK. Earlier this week, Ink Mobility announced their new Ink Mobile Framework which allows iOS developers to share data, including photos, between iOS applications. A sorely needed feature that is already available to Android developers. You can try one of the pilot applications, ThatPhoto, which allows users to edit their photos using the Aviary SDK and send them to a number of supported Framework applications, including Evernote and Box.com.

Today, we have even more exciting Aviary/Ink Mobility news! Ink has just released a series of open source mobile applications in an effort to show off their new Mobile Framework, and more importantly, to encourage growth in the Open Source mobile app movement. The aforementioned ThatPhoto is among these open source applications, and is a fantastic reference for anyone looking to build a mobile Photo Application using the Ink and Aviary SDK’s. Because these applications are publicly shared on Github, any iOS developer looking to developer a photo application will have a published reference app that they can fork and improve upon for their own needs.

You can find a complete list of FilePicker's open sourced applications below:

• ThatPhoto iTunes | GitHub - Includes Aviary's SDK
• ThatPDF iTunes | Github
• ThatInbox iTunes | Github
• ThatCloud iTunes | Github

Developers looking for further Aviary integration samples can always check out the Sample Application included in our SDK download.

Aviary web widget v3 now out of beta!

The new and improved v3.0 of our Web Editor is officially available, so you can update your integration at any time. It looks beautiful, includes some awesome new features, and runs more smoothly than ever! For instructions on updating and details about how long you have before it becomes the default for all partners, read on.

v3 Highlights

• Gorgeous, streamlined interface: better customization for you, and improved performance for your users
• Improved a number of tools, including Enhance, Crop, Draw, and Text
• Improved the top and bottom toolbars of the editor: tool name displayed above, image size below the photo
• Removed last page (feedback/get this editor) from top toolbar
• Greatly improved general performance and responsiveness
• Note: We are officially dropping support for IE7. It's less than 1% of our web usage, and after talking to a sample of our partners it seems like most of you are dropping IE7 as well. If you still require support for IE7, get in touch and we can discuss your options.

How to Update!

1. API Keys As of v3, API keys are now required. If you don't have one yet, you can grab one from aviary.com/web.

2. Feather.js URL Make sure you're using the url http://feather.aviary.com/js/feather.js for your integration. As of September, no other urls will be accepted, so you will be forced onto this version even if you've been pointing to an outdated url previously. You can also use our code generator to grab the full web widget code, which comes with a couple theme options and works straight out of the box!

3. apiVersion Number When you're ready to update to the new version, change the apiVersion configuration parameter to 3. As of today, this will work immediately on production. (It is also now the new default value for apiVersion, so if you are not currently specifying an apiVersion and want to remain on v2 for a bit, be sure to set apiVersion to 2!) Note: On September 16th, version 2 will be deprecated and apiVersion will be forced to 3 for all integrations. If you're currently doing anything anything unsupported, make sure you test your custom CSS and update to v3 before you are forced into it in September! See our Timeline below for instructions for staying on v2 past that date.

4. Customization Start with the dark or light default theme and customize the editor from there. If you're currently doing anything anything unsupported with CSS we highly recommend removing any existing customization and starting fresh with the new version (this should be much easier than tweaking existing code - a lot has changed!). If you have any questions or concerns about achieving a certain look for your integration, don't hesitate to get in touch.

5. minimumStyling If you'd like to take it one step further and build your own theme for the editor, you can use the minimumStyling configuration with either the dark or light theme. That said, we highly recommend building on top of one of our default themes, as those come with built in transitions, hover states, etc - try them out, they feel really nice!

Timeline

• Today, July 15th: v3 is officially available. The apiVersion parameter will default to 3 if it isn't specified. To remain on v2 past this date, make sure to set apiVersion to 2.
• September 16th: v2 will be deprecated entirely. Hardcoded apiVersion numbers (as well as any url besides http://feather.aviary.com/js/feather.js) will no longer be valid and will be overridden with these defaults. If you need to stay on v2 or a custom url past this date please contact us.

We hope you love this new editor as much as we do, and we're looking forward to hearing your feedback!

Cheers, Aviary

Aviary Android SDK 3.0 Now Available

Photo Editor for Android

Today we're bringing all of the awesome changes we introduced last week in our Android Showcase App to our new SDK, version 3.0. In case you missed it, these changes included a beautiful redesigned interface and some important new features for both users and developers.

To recap, this huge update included a sleek, streamlined interface that's optimized to highlight photos (the most important part of the experience) by switching over to a darker theme and reducing padding throughout the editor. We also drastically improved the ever-popular Enhance tool by adding a new Hi-Def feature that sharply smartens and defines, an Illuminate function that's great for improving poorly-lit photos, and renaming Balance to Color Fix, which performs incredible color correction to photos. Plus, the Text Tool now finally supports multiline text editing!

Also, like all SDK releases, 3.0 includes many under-the-hood tweaks and improvements, including support for a whopping 30 Megapixels (for Premium Partners) and a 10% reduction in SDK bundle size. That reduction means a smaller file size for app developers, and less precious hard disk space taken up on users' devices (your users will thank you for that one).

Visit our website to check out the nitty gritty in the official changelog and to get your hands on the SDK. Already up and running with 3.0 and have some feedback? Let us know what you think by hitting us up on Twitter!