Archive — Aviary Blog

Swati Teerdhala

The Aviary SDK is now part of the Adobe Creative SDK!

The Aviary SDK is now the Image Editing component of the Creative SDK. Today, you’ll find a new and improved version of the Aviary SDK on the Aviary site. You’ll also find the brand new Aviary SDK integrated as the Image Editing component of the Creative SDK to give you easy access to the rest of Adobe’s incredible creative technology. Come 2015, all updates we release will go directly to www.creativesdk.com. Check out the Creative SDK now and read the Migration Guide here when you're ready to integrate.

For any future updates, follow us @CreativeSDK. If you prefer your updates through email, subscribe HERE for updates in the future.

What is the Creative SDK?

Adobe provides the world’s favorite creative technology. From editing to storage to professionally-designed assets, the most powerful creative services live in the Adobe Creative Cloud. Through the Creative SDK, we’re enabling developers to seamlessly integrate Adobe technology into their own apps and websites to quickly and easily offer the best creative experience to their users.

The Image Editing component of the Creative SDK functions just like the Aviary SDK and we’ve included a bunch of new features for your users in this release:

  • Overlays - Users can now make unique and creative images with our stencils, perfect for sharing on social media.

  • Vignettes - Aviary’s vignette tool makes it super simple to place a dark or light vignette over your photo, with support for custom size, shape, and intensity.

  • Highlights, Shadows, Tint, and Fade - These new adjustments allow your users to have more creative freedom when it comes to manipulating their photos.

  • Draw Brush - On iOS, our user-favorite Draw tool now comes with re-built brush technology that makes drawing on photos feel more natural and lifelike.

In addition to your favorite image editing capabilities, the Creative SDK also enables you to give your users an expansive creative experience with these additional features:

  • Unrestricted Access to Content: Creativity isn’t restricted to the desktop, so creative assets shouldn’t be either. Your users can browse, import and save files directly to the Creative Cloud, directly from within your app.

  • File Compatibility & Desktop Workflow: Enable your users to seamlessly send and save Photoshop files between devices and even access individual layers and groups directly from those files.

  • Creative Cloud Market: Empower your users and their imagination with access to a curated library of thousands of icons, fonts, textures, vector shapes and UI toolkits from our world-class creative community.

  • Connected Hardware: Enable third-party device compatibility, like Adobe Ink’s next-generation Pixel Perfect tip, to redefine accuracy in your app and provide custom UI controls for Creative Cloud services.

  • Publish: Connect your users to the Behance network, the world’s largest professional creative community, where they can give and receive feedback on completed projects and works in progress.

To see how our current partners use the Creative SDK, check out our Featured Apps!

Photo Hack Day NYC Recap

On December 6th-7th, Aviary hosted Photo Hack Day 6 back in our hometown of NYC. This year’s event was hosted by Aviary and Adobe with help from our amazing sponsors: Shutterstock, Walgreens, Astra by Photoshelter, Twilio, FilePicker.io, Foursquare, Imagga, Behance and Adobe.

We kicked the weekend off on Saturday morning with bagels + coffee and immediately dived into our Keynote speech and API demos! Photo Hack Day NYC was opened up with a keynote address by Shutterstock, followed by a round of API presentations by our fantastic sponsors. Hacking began and we were off! 

Hacks were judged based on technical accomplishment, cleverness originality, and overall real-world value of the application.

And now…the winners!

1ST PLACE: SHORTS

Team: Joe Biggica, Matt Hamilton, Conor Hastings, Adrian Lin

Shorts is an app where users can create shorts — small collections of pictures — and share them with small groups of people. With the use of the edit feature, users can add a more personal touch to the pictures they share. 

2ND PLACE: HANG 

Team: Nick Ihm, Emily Duong, Matt Grasser and Hang Xu

We’re so obsessed with the act of taking photographs that we rarely reflect on the many images we’ve already taken. Compared to the instant gratification of digital photography, the time-consuming steps of editing, printing, and framing your photographs can be daunting. But the results can transform your space and can be so rewarding.

Hang streamlines this process for you. With this mobile tool, you can easily visualize complicated layouts with your photo library, with real time measurements, before having to commit to printing and framing.

CROWD FAVORITE: WOOFER

Team: Bettina Enriques, Brian Lam, Jackson Lee, Denise Burgess and Benjamin Masanga

Dog-owners everywhere share the same love and the same pain. They all love taking pictures of their dog, but they all feel the same frustration when trying to get their dog to look at just the right moment. That's where Woofer comes in.

Woofer is a mobile phone photo app for dog lovers that has the ability to play a variety of sounds to grab your dog's attention. Unlike our competitors, Woofer can record new sounds tailored to your dog and take pictures in burst mode.

These are only a few of the TONS of prizes we had at PHD NYC - thanks to our wonderful sponsors. For a complete list of API and Event prizes, as well as submissions, check out the PHD NYC Submissions List.  

Thanks again to our esteemed panel of judges, Travis Beck (Shutterstock), Tobias Peggs (Aviary), Taylor Davidson (ex-kbs+ ventures), and Eric Snowden (Adobe) for having the difficult job of deciding among all of the amazing hacks submitted! 

Thanks also to our wonderful panelists, Liz Eswein (Laundry Service), Taylor Davidson (ex-kbs+ ventures), Eric Snowden (Adobe) and moderator Mike Mignano (Aviary), who helped us explore the future of mobile photography. 

For more photos of the event, search for the #PhotoHackNYC tag on Twitter. 

Congrats again to all of our winners, and thank you to our amazing sponsors who contributed amazing prizes! We had a ton of fun at Photo Hack Day NYC, and we hope to see you at the next one!

Cheers,

Photo Hack Day Team

Announcing Photo Hack Day NYC!

On the tail of our recent acquisition by Adobe, we're so excited to announce that registration is open for our sixth Photo Hack Day, this time back in our hometown of NYC! Adobe aims to enable developer creativity, and participants of PHDNYC will have the opportunity to get a hands on look at the Adobe Creative SDK and create amazing hacks with Sponsor APIs. We’re making this a more intimate event, focused on our terrific community of developers and users. 

More details below:

Who: Our friends, old and new, in the photo space
What: Another full weekend of photo-centric awesomeness!
When: December 6-7th, 2014
Where: Aviary HQ in NYC

Check out the event site for more details and a link to register!

Partner Spotlight: Sweetspot

Sweetspot for iPhone is a new and simple way to curate and share your favorite experiences. A curation is a collection of photos, text, and tags that together tell a story. Whether you're documenting a recent road trip with friends, keeping track of your favorite restaurants or bars, or sharing a list of your city's essential museums and monuments, Sweetspot for iPhone is built for you. You can use the app to follow friends, family, or your favorite actors, artists, chefs--and discover new experiences. With the power of Aviary's iOS SDK, Sweetspot provides users the ability to personalize their photos with ease. When building curations, users can pull in photos from their Instagram and Facebook accounts, add locations from Google Maps, and then use tags and text to tell their story. Oh: and it's free.

You can download Sweetspot for iPhone right now on the App Store!

DOWNLOAD HERE

 

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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