I keep encountering new web-based applications. The most recent is picnik – an online photo editing application. If what this means does not strike home, it amounts to uploading one of your photos to a remote server, appying various basic editing features to this photo (crop, resize, modify colors, sharpen, remove red-eye, etc.) using your browser, and then saving the modified image back to your computer, Flikr, etc. This is not a Photoshop level app, but how often do most of us really require the photoshop-level power. Even if you own a quality editing program, you probably don’t (and shouldn’t) have it loaded on your office machine, your home machine, your laptop, etc. Schools face a similar challenge – how many copies of photo editing software do they purchase and which machines do they load what they purchase on?
Take a look. The present offering is a beta version. When fully developed, there will be a free version (with basic editing features – I did not read what these would be) and a premium version.
This image was uploaded from my collection. I used the crop and resize tools to arrive at something appropriate for a blog and then downloaded it back to my own computer.
Image after application of vignette effect.
These web-based apps amaze me. At the most basic level, I must admit I do not really understand how they work. My programming background and web/server activities end up making what I experience even more confusing – no idea how you can do things like this through a browser. However, such technological advances are not really what fascinates me the most. I keep trying to understand why those who create these tools do so. Some might describe this reality as the “business model.” I don’t think this is a for fun, open source venture. There must be some long-term vision here. Include ads? Become popular and sell to Yahoo or Google? Beats me.
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