March 25th, 2007

Fauxto, the online photo editor goes social; adds features

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 4:32 pm

Categories: Fauxto, Flash, Flex, Rich Internet Applications

Tags:

According to the official blog, Fauxto, the online photo editor that I covered a while back and was built with Adobe's Flex 2, has been quietly pumping out features and has now added a social aspect to the application. Fauxto will allow you to share photos you've created and store them directly on the site. The new version also includes a way to browse photos from other users. I've got a photo gallery set up for some of the new features and the interface.

The full list of features is on the blog post, but some of the most notable are:

• Capture web cam images
• Save for web in jpeg/png format
• Copy paste selections now works across images
• Improved text editing
• Maximum image size increased to 1250 x 1250
• Improved interface

When news broke that Adobe was going to work on an online version of Photoshop, I really felt bad for Fauxto. They've put in a tremendous amount of work into the product, and in my opinion, it's the best web based photoshop clone out there. I'm glad to see they were undaunted by the news and have continued to push the envelope. Frankly, I think buying these guys would be a great play for someone looking to get into the online editing space. Unless it's Adobe (which it should be), you won't have the brand recognition of Photoshop, but the product is top notch and will only get better.

January 15th, 2007

10 Questions with Fauxto, the web based photo editing application

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 11:28 pm

Categories: Fauxto, Flex, Rich Internet Applications

Tags:

I talked with Dave Brushinski of the Fauxto team and sent him some questions about Fauxto and Flex. If you haven't seen Fauxto it is a web based image editor which looks and acts a lot like Photoshop. It's an impressive bit of RIA work and they were covered on Lifehacker, Mashable and Web Worker Daily. It's an excellent example of how far web apps can go when you break out of the browser. Update: The just updated their interface so the screenshots I took yesterday are a bit old. It looks like they've added 'undo' functionality (a big plus) and revamped the UI a bit.

1. How long has Fauxto been in development?

Fauxto blossomed out of an idea conceived in late 2004/early 2005. The latest incarnation, in Flex 2, took a number of months to get into beta. We launched a bit early so that we could let the real world prove it's viability, and they have. Also, as is evidenced in our blog, we're pushing out new features and fixes at a fairly impressive clip, so it's quite realistic to say that Fauxto is still in development.

2. Why did you guys decide to use Flex? Did you look at any other technologies?

The first version of Fauxto, that won't be seen by the public (shudder), was just like the current crop of web-based image editors, although, our claim to fame with it was going to be some innovative features that aren't out there yet. Though impressive for it's time, we weren't confident with it.

To thwart any HTML vs. Ajax arguments here it was not that Ajax wasn't enough, it's that the Flash platform offered so much. XMLHttpRequest simply can't alter a pixel, no matter how much you abstract an image library on the server… we tried. Although our help system, which is still being compiled and developed dot dot dot, will be done in html with a dash of AJAX.

3. What do you think of Flex as an RIA platform?

Brilliant. Though not everyone is a Flex developer, those that are will understand completely when we say, "Duh".

 

 

4. What was the toughest part of doing Fauxto in Flex?

Because there have been roughly six versions of Fauxto done to, or near, completion before our current version even hit the public, it really wasn't hard at all, per se. Most of the codebase was updated from an Actionscript 2.0 framework. The learning curve was negligible, but not without hitches, as the massive offering of Actionscript 3 relative to Actionscript 2.0 can be intimidating.

5. You've got some great filters in Fauxto right now, are most of those coded using the bitmap filters from Flash 8?

Ample usage of matrices and some built-in features provide what is available as far filters, which is limited in comparison to desktop applications but rest assured that this is only a function of time.

6. What was the most difficult feature of Fauxto to build in Flex?

Features themselves take advantage of a very abstracted and modular architecture, so implementing a new feature is really as simple as using various aspects of our figurative Fauxto API. Building this framework to be nearly future proof proved to be the most difficult aspect of the entire project. Much of the code was "written" before it was even written just because of the sheer amount of forethought and planning required. Undo/Redo would take the cake, to answer your question specifically, but that only took us about 4 days.

7. Are there any plans to release custom components that incorporate Fauxto functionality?

Our formal plans for Fauxto are fairly scant at this point, but releasing an API for developers to include their own features is on the drawing board. Having Fauxto in third party products is a possibility though not a concrete plan right now.

Playing with Fauxto's Filters

8. What is your long term goal for Fauxto? Is there a business model in place?

We do actually have a business model proper, but it's not conventional. Long term goals include features, paradigm shifts, and changing this marketeer "Web 2.0" phrase into the user-centric "Web you point oh" that it should be. Our goal has essentially been, "Instead of working so hard to put the content on the web, let us put the tools to create the content on the web and the clever public will take care of the rest", because at the end of the day it is absolutely about them.

9. What's up next for Fauxto?

As said above, we're thinking about allowing developers to create their own features through an API, but that's a bit in the future as you can imagine. There is a considerably impressive list of things to consider when executing something of that magnitude. Also, we're currently developing our own file specification which will allow users to actually save a source file, similar to desktop applications, and resume editing any time they please. With this comes the possibility of allowing third parties to use our specification to export to Fauxto format within their own tools. We think that this feature alone will make Fauxto "the most desktop-like, web application" out there.

10. Have you guys looked at Apollo and the ability to incorporate Fauxto into the desktop?

We're certainly going to be. Although it seems a little funny to bring a web-based image editor to the desktop we certainly think it's an interesting approach to RIA technology. We'd love to see our own icons on the desktop and Fauxto being used as the default image editor for an operating system.

January 2nd, 2007

Rich Internet Applications I couldn't live without

Posted by Ryan Stewart @ 11:21 am

Categories: Brightcove, Fauxto, Flash, Jumpcut, New York Times Reader, Pandora, Rich Internet Applications, Wallop

Tags:

After seeing Mike Arrington's post about Web 2.0 companies he can't live without, I thought an RIA-themed version would be fun to do. I'm also very curious which RIAs you use on a daily basis, so if I missed any, leave them in the comments.

Goowy

This year I switched from Outlook to the Flash-based Goowy and I've been happy with the switch. The integration with YourMinis is great and it gives me a snapshot of my day in the form of sports scores and comics and news. The email client has gotten much better over the pas few months and while there are still some issues, having a robust email client, contact list and calendar anywhere I go has been great. If the Goowy guys release an Apollo version of the app that allows me to take my content offline, it will make me a very happy camper.

Pandora

I don't know what I would do without Pandora. I've got channels for everything from Garth Brooks to Enya and this year I'm hoping to get a Slingbox so I can use Pandora from anywhere in my apartment. Pandora is written in OpenLaszlo and makes for a great showcase application.

The New York Times Reader

I used to hate the New York Times. I hated having to register and I figured I could get my news from other places. But the Times Reader changed that. I leave it running overnight so that it can download all the news for me and then when I wake up I browse it between reading articles from Techmeme. It's been one of the more surprising RIAs that I've found myself using but it's won a spot in my morning routine which is the highest praise I can give it.

Yahoo! Maps

I know, I'm a sucker for Flash, but I've had nothing but good experiences with the new Yahoo Maps interface. It is built in Flex 1.5 and I think it's a richer experience than Google Maps. It was very, VERY slow when I was still running Flash Player 8, but with the upgrade to Flash Player 9 I haven't had any slowdowns. The traffic overlay has been very helpful and I think the integration with Yahoo Local is a big plus.

Brightcove

YouTube is great for looking at popular videos or random clips, but for regular content I always turn to Brightcove (I love the Wall Street Journal channel and the Smart Money channel). I wish that Brightcove had something like an Apollo app or a richer app that I could pop out from the website and browse through, but I do love the full screen feature that they implemented after the Flash Player supported it.

Wallop

The flash based Wallop is my social network of choice for right now and the big reason is because of the media integration (being able to listen to my networks songs is great) and the mods. The mods make it pretty easy to trick out a page and do it in a way that it doesn't totally look like a MySpace disaster (though you could be close). I think the business model is good for RIA developers because it gives them a way to create interesting content for a growing userbase. My only complaint is that it's still hard to find people. I use MySpace because it puts me in touch with old High School friends (and because everyone is on it) but I like Wallop much more - it's more free form and fun.

Wishlist and Honorable Mention

The one thing I wish I had was a richer news reader that I could take with me offline. I've succumb to Google Reader, and I really like it, but I wish I had something like the NYT reader that I could sync and take with me later on.

Two applications I like but haven't had a chance to use are Fauxto, the web based image editor, and Jumpcut, a video site which provides a very cool video editor web application. I haven't used Fauxto just because I found out about it only a week ago and I haven't used JumpCut as much because I haven't gotten into uploading video yet. The video editing suite of JumpCut is fantastic and seems to have gotten better after being bought by Yahoo. I can't wait to see what else these guys come up with.