The Basics

a.viary is an online image editor. It differs from Picnik in that it’s more focused on creating and heavy imaging rather than one-click fixes. It’s more Photoshop than MS Paint. In fact, I was genuinely impressed with the range of tools available. a.viary doesn’t just stack up well against services such as Picnik, it stacks up well against desktop applications such as The GIMP.

An advantage a.viary has over some of it’s competitors is the addition of layers. This opens up a world of opportunities other “flat” image editors simply don’t have. Along with layers come some nice blending and layer adjustment options. There is also the ability to work on more than one image at a time (i.e. you can import images into your current workspace), something else that’s missing from Picnik. Have a look at this blog post to see what’s possible with a.viary compared to some of the other popular online image editors. Just bare in mind that whilst the comparisons seem fair and just, it is written by a member of a.viary’s staff. I don’t question the conclusions they come to though, in my experience.

Practical Features

I really wanted to put a.viary through its paces, so i came up with a test scenario. I have a wall image and an image of a camera. I want to put the camera on the wall. Simple enough, and a task that greats many people on a regular basis. This turned out to be incredibly easy. Despite not being familiar with the layout of the application, I had cropped and masked the camera in a couple of minutes and added it to the wall. Very easy.

That’s barely scratching the surface though. As you can probably tell from the images I’ve posted in this article, I didn’t spend a huge amount of time creating the images. There are people out there who have spent allot of time with a.viary, and the results are very impressive. This blog post covers off some of Photoshop’s bread and butter, retouching.

The Tool Set

Something that I’ve not mentioned so far is that a.viary is actually a suite of applications. So far I’ve been talking about Phoenix, the image editor. The other application currently available is Peacock, which bills itself as Pattern generator. It’s a strange tool and resembles something like Final Cut Pro. There are numerous nodes, each of which take an input, do something, and given an output. So, for example, you may have an image as your starting resource, feed it into an adjustment node, which changes the saturation, and then it outputs the image with the changed saturation. This all sounds fairly straight forward, but you can chain together numerous nodes and then merge them. One of the great uses I can see for this tool is quickly visualising changes filters and changes make to an image. You can then go and try them in an image editor. It’s drag and drop simplicity for really quite complex ideas and techniques.

Room for improvement

Identifying areas for improvement is difficult. a.viary is a suite of applications that will eventually include vector and 3d editors along with audio and video editors, desktop publishing and a file storage application. It’s clear that the development path is taking it towards this distributed platform, as opposed to one central application. So in suggesting areas for improvement, it’s difficult to know whether they fall into one of the other applications.

So, concentrating on Phoenix, the image editor, there are some areas that could do with tightening up. A problem I had with it was some slight lag in mouse movements. This may very well be down to my setup, or indeed the architecture they use (flash), but it’s there and I notice it. When you’re trying to do some precise pixel editing, you lose your confidence in the application. Quite frankly, it’s not a problem you’ll ever have with a desktop application.

Something else that surprised me was the time it took to upload documents. Uploading a moderately sized image, about 1000 pixels square, seemed to take much longer than it should. Applying filters also seemed to take a while. Don’t get me wrong, I’m on a MacBook so applying filters in Photoshop isn’t exactly instant, but Phoenix certainly took noticeably longer. What I couldn’t figure out was whether the filter was being rendered locally using Flash or whether it was being rendered on the server and served back to me. I guess either way would take longer than a desktop application. This is exacerbated by the fact that there’s no preview when applying filters, so tweaking some of the settings is a a massively cumbersome and time consuming process.

Conclusion & Invites

Overall, I’m hugely impressed with what a.viary has to offer. Phoenix is a capable and powerful image editor and Peacock is certainly an interesting concept. I was surprised to find such capable, verging on professional-level, tools in a web application.

So, do you fancy having a go yourself? I’ve got a handful of invites to give away. If you fancy one, just leave a comment below and I’ll try and hook you up.

Photo by Osbornb

As you can probably guess from the length of the list above, I’ve never really hit on anything perfect. Each system had it’s flaws, and none really suited my style. To compound this, I use these tools for different things. I like to collect information, highlight information, record my thoughts, set myself tasks, remind myself of things and share things with others. Quite the list. And really, no surprise that no system has completely met my needs. So in steps EverNote. After grabbing an invite to the beta (I’m giving some away, see the end of this post), I was really excited to try it out. Mainly because of one thing, the ability to search text within images.

Setting My Expectations

Given the list of things I want my information collecting tool to accomplish, I had to be careful when approaching EverNote. It doesn’t do task management, or reminders, it just collects information. It’s a replacement for DEVONnote, not Stikkit or BackPack. Luckily, I’m currently researching two projects, so there is a lot of information I need to gather quickly. And fortunately, neither project is at the stage where I need to task myself. So I have the perfect test cases for EverNote. If you do intend on using EverNote, I’d thoroughly recommend checking out the videos and other posts on their blog.

Something I was particularly excited to try out, was the concept of having local access, through a Mac client, to my information, which is otherwise held online. This is something missing from every other tool I’ve tried. And I can see the advantage. If I’m online, everything’s there, if I’m on my Mac, I’ve got quick and convenient access with all the extra bells and whistles.

Getting Information In

A key test of information managers is the ease with which you can get information into them. If it’s not easy to get information into your information manager, you just don’t use it. In my experience so far, only DEVONnote has been easy enough to add information to for it to become part of my daily workflow. For those of you who don’t use DEVONnote, or aren’t familiar with it, the easiest way to add information is to simply drag it into the application. You don’t really get much easier than that. I was glad to see that the Mac version of EverNote was the same. If I have the application open, I can simply drag information into it. Easy.

In addition to this, you also get a bookmarklet and a system bar tool. The bookmarket is similar to that found in other information gathering web apps. You highlight something on a web page, click the bookmarklet, and it gets added to your account. The system bar tool allows you to either paste anything currently on your clipboard into EverNote (without it having to be open first) or to take a screen shot an automatically insert it into EverNote.

Both new features are welcome additions to the usual bookmarklet and work well. The only gripe I have is that it’s difficult, nay impossible, to properly retain the formatting of a web page you want to clip. If you clip the entire page, by clicking the bookmarklet without first selecting anything, it strips all the style from the content. This is annoying when, as in my case, the style is what you want to clip. And using the screen shot feature gets only the visible area, not the whole page. This is the same whether you use the bookmarklet, the copy & paste functionality or drag the page into the application (which is the recommended approach).

Organising Content

No real surprises here. You can organise content into NoteBooks as well as tagging everything that’s been added. You can also add notes, which may be formatted. One very nice feature is that when you clip content fron the web, it automatically associates the source URL. This can be particularly handy when you want to give attribution for something.

The content is also displayed nicely, with varying layouts. There is also a nice visual mirror between the online version, and the offline version. You don’t have to learn EverNote’s interface twice, it’s the same in both places. Which is such a relief.

Finding Content

Search is really the feature that makes EverNote stand out from the pack. Note only can you search tags, titles and text within notes, but you can also search the text within images. This opens up a whole new world of opportunities and really allows you to be lazy in your approach to information gathering. You don’t have to worry about diligently tagging and describing images, you can just search for text within them. In the short time I’ve been using it, it has changed my approach, and removes one more barrier to me storing information in such a tool.

I can almost hear your skepticism. “Text recognition is sketchy at best, and won’t work with text that isn’t perfect.” Fortunately, your cynicism is off the mark in this case. The text recognition actually works, and works well. Even on non-perfect text. I’ve dotted some images around this post that indicate some searched within images it handled. In the example of “DANSK”, you can see that the text with clearly roughly hand written and non-uniformly written. Yet it still got picked up. Very impressive. It’s also refreshing to see the text actually highlighted when you view the search results. it would be nice if this was followed through when viewing the list of results, and not just individual ones, but that’s a minor gripe really. Another really impressive thing about EverNote is the speed with which the text recognition is performed. As soon as the note appears in your online account (you have to sync images before they become searchable) it is searchable. To the user, this is near instant.

The only slight, niggling, problem I have with the search is the fact that it filters the results based on the selected notebook. This would be fine, except for the fact there’s no real visual indication that this is happening. Considering the search box is visually removed from the notebook selection pane, it can be difficult to discern what’s going on. To compound this, if you click on a different notebook, your search criteria is lost. This is a usability issue more than anything, and it could be quickly solved by putting a little more thought into the search result mechanism.

Room For Improvement

There is room for improvement, although I’m wholly impressed with EverNote, especially seeing as it’s just a beta. Personally, I’d like to see images searchable before you sync with the online account. If I’m on the road, for example, I may not get the chance to sync. So EverNote is effectively taking away its killer feature as soon as your disconnected from the net. Almost negating the benefit of having a desktop version.

I’m also hoping they overcome one of the major failings they currently have, no FireFox 3 support. Yes, I know FireFox 3 is in beta, and I know EverNote is in beta, but there’s going to be a fair cross over in both audiences. Especially during the beta period. I’m not a Safari user, so I’m having to break my workflow to use the bookmarklet, which is the most intuitive way of clipping content. I’d also like to see support for my mobile phone. With that in place, you could really live the EverNote dream of snapping a picture on your phone and having it searchable by the time you get back to your computer. You can currently get around this limitation by emailing pictures from your phone to a special email address you get. This is something else I’d like to see expanded, so that I could send pictures and notes to specific notebooks for example.

Something else that I’ve noticed. When syncing, my internet connections gets eaten by EverNote. I’m not entirely sure what’s happening, but all my other applications lose connection to the internet, or at the best take a huge speed hit. I’m not sure whether this is because I’ve been syncing lots of images or not, but it’s not exactly welcome.

As for future features, I’d like to see the ability to annotate images after they’ve been added. One of the research projects I’m currently using EverNote for is focused on design. This involved adding a bunch of images to my account. I’d love to just highlight within those images the bits I’m actually interested in. It would be nice to see some more publishing-like features, similar to BackPack. Where I could share (properly share) my notes with others and work collaboratively. It would also be nice if I could merge notes and import/export them in a variety of formats. ideally, I’d love to see the service integrated with the smart text processing of Stikkit and the collaboration tools of BackPack. But I fear that’s a pipe dream.

Conclusion and Give Away

Overall, I’ve been hugely impressed with EverNote. As far as gathering information goes, it’s become my new go-to tool, usurping DEVONnote. There are some improvements to be made, no doubt, but considering this is in beta, I find it hard to criticise it. The unique selling point is both useful and well implemented and there are some really nice visual touches, especially in the Mac Client. There are some minor usability issues to be overcome (see above) but overall it’s a joy to use, and the similarity in design, layout and approach between the web and desktop clients is a huge bonus.

Hopefully that’s whetted your appetite for EverNote. Fortunately, I’ve got a handfull of invites to the provate beta to give away. If you’re interested, leave a comment and I’ll get back to you.

So with that understanding, you may be apprehensive about upgrading to this new version of WordPress.  In fact, many people familiar with software development will steer away from .0 releases of software they rely on.  This is down to the a history of problems with early versions of software and, more relevant in this case, initial implementations of new functionality.

So what are the risks of upgrading?  Well apart from the obvious, the blog failing, losing your data, WordPress brings with it new challenges.  namely themes and plugins.  To reduce the risk of anything going wrong you can install and run a plugin called Upgrade Pre Flight Check.  This will check your plugins and templates and alert you of any potential problems.  It identified a number of plugins that may cause issues, my theme was fine.

Speaking of plugins, one of my favourite features of WordPress 2.3 is the way it now automatically checks your installed plugins to ensure they are the latest version.  This is made possible through the tight integration with the www.wordpress.org site.  If you are not running the latest version, it alerts you and provides a download link.  I’ve previously used a plugin to do the same thing, but the native WordPress solution is far more reliable and elegant.  I did find a number of plugins I had installed stopped working on WordPress 2.3.  Namely Add Meta Tags and Categories Autolink.  I hope these two excellent plugins are upgraded soon to work with 2.3.  The preflight check plugin had alerted me to potential problems, so there was no great surprise.  Something that would make this feature even better would be to provide the option to automatically upgrade the pluging, without having to download the plugin and then upload it to the server.  There are other web based software products that do live upgrading, so why not WordPress?  Similarly the version of the core WordPress software is now checked to ensure you are running the latest version.

The plugin enhancement pales in comparison with the other big change in 2.3, the introduction of the long awaited tags.  Tags are used throughout the internet these days, so I shan’t explain them here (you can find a definition of tags here).  The net result to the end user is an additional way of classifying posts.  Tagging has been a much requested feature and is implemented fairly well.  When writing a post there is an additional field below the main editing field where comma separated tags can be entered.  Personally, I’d like to see WordPress remember what tags you’ve previously used,  For example, if I’d previously tagged a post as “blog” I may end up tagging a later post “blogs” simply because I can’t remember the exact terminology I’ve previously used.  A del.icio.us style approach would be better in my mind.

These changes may seem fairly minor to the end user, and some would even question whether it constitutes a jump to 2.3.x, but that is greately underestimating the amount of effort required to implement tagging.  The two plugins that I mentioned stopped working are down to this change.  As I understand it, they have stopped working because the old categories logically don’t exist anymore.  This is much like changing the foundations of a house.  While the rooms may look the same, a MAJOR change has taken place behind the scenes.

One thing I would say about the tagging functionality is that it may cause problems for people who have been running WordPress for an extended period of time.  This is two fold.  Firstly, unless the theme they are using is widget friendly, there’s no way of displaying these tags without a template change.  Not a huge deal but, for the immediate future at least publishers and theme designers are going to have to find a way to support templates and tags.  The reason is simple, none of the existing posts in the blog are going to have tags associated with them.  So categories are here to stay for the time being at least.  There is a category to tag converted but I’m too scared to use it and I can’t find sufficient documentation for it on wordpress.org (not something you can usually accuse wordpress of).  Something that I can see many bloggers struggling with are the structural differences between categories and tags.  In 2.2 you can assign a post to more than one category, and this means it appears on both category pages.  Compare this to tags, where you can string together multiple tags in a query to refine matches.  Bloggers are going to have to reassess their use of categories, and decide whether to carry on as is, or whether to embrace tagging.

Most of the other changes fall into the category of maintenance.  There’s a new status for posts, Pending Review, and many of the generic libraries used to provide things like the Rich Editor (TineMCE) and AJAX (Scriptaculous) have been updated, bringing with them some improvements in performance and functionality (there are some new options available in the rich editor).  You can now also search through posts and filter them in the admin interface, which is a very welcome feature.

So, in summary I think upgrading to 2.3 is worth the effort.  It doesn’t add spectacular new features but very much feels like it’s putting the foundations in place for the rooms to be rearranged at a later date.  In case you’re not overly familiar with the WordPress upgrade procedure, I’d recommend trying out the Automatic Upgrade, a plugin which does all the hard work for you.  I’ve used it twice now and it worked flawlessly in both cases.

A list of changes made in 2.3 can be found here.