Jeff Bezos is leading the B round of investors into Aviary.com - which is exactly what Adobe’s on-line offerings SHOULD be. Aviary has been gradually bulding vector based, bitmap based, recently audio and soon video editing tools - entirely on-line and based inside of a browser.
Exactly what Adobe said could never be done. If you look at Photoshop.com you’ll see a pathetic stand-in for the most valuable brand in computer graphics.
This is what happens when bureaucrats take over a tools company. AIR is coolio and what? 5 years late? The combination of Silverlight and HTML 5 will soon obsficate the need for Flash - and all that Flash video will get converted over to - what? It won’t even matter - its something that will go on behind the scenes and no user will see it.
What users DO see - is the content - which is getting tired of being locked up inside of closed proprietary standards. And they’ll see tools.
Aviary tools.
Its been years in the making, but I predict that within 5 years Aviary will be as big as Adobe, and Adobe - well you have heard of Word Perfect - right?
Date: Monday, October 26th, 2009 | Time: 11:51 am Tags: 9 comments
Oct. 2009 marks the 25th anniversary of the first music product for the Macintosh,called MusicWorks. It was published by Hayden software and created by MacroMind.
MusicWorks had several “firsts” attributed to it, including:
- first music product which featured a piano keyboard interface
- first real-time interactive WYSIWYG music notation interface
- first ‘overview’ of an entire piece, scaled ‘back’
- first MIDI product for the Macintosh (and I believe PCs in general)
- first product title which featured an inner cap (W)
- and it was our (MacroMind’s) first product
MusicWorks was a breakthrough product for many reasons, and it was one of the first products that really defined what you could do with a WYSIWYG graphical user interface. People just loved to play with it. Unfortunately there were only 100k Macs in existence in those days, so we didn’t “make a fortune” off of it.
The one MusicWorks demo I remember the best was an early ‘remix’ I’d do - while the music was playing. I’d select the boogie woogie bassline, and copy it onto the clipboard. Then I’d open up ‘Mozart’s Minuet in C‘ and paste the boogie woogie bassline into Mozart document, while it was playing. Both excerpts were exactly 16 bars long, one in C major the other in A minor. They’d end perfectly together - and the crowd would burst into applause. This was all while the music was playing.
This sort of real-time interaction with synthetic music had never been experienced before. The year was 1984. I wish you all were there.
I cannot find a wikipedia entry on MusicWorks and the term has been usurped by many many entities, orgs, books, etc. But the FIRST MusicWorks was ours all playing on the built-in synthesizer that the early Macs came with.
MusicWorks was a variant of a larger product we had started called SoundVision, in the summer of 1984. SoundVision combined music and animation editing in the same tool - all on this tiny little Mac 512k. We used it to pitch software publishers - to give them an idea of what we were capable of.
‘We’ at the time were Jay Fenton (programmer), Mark Pierce (artist) and me (musician.) We were a software rock and roll band and we were represented by New Levitt, our agent, from the Wm. Morris agency.
CBS Software and Hayden Software were the two publishers who bid on the deal, after Microsoft (our first choice) ignored us. We made the decision to go with Hayden in Aug. 1984 and shipped MusicWorks by October of that year.
One of the funniest things I remember is getting a call from Jay (now Jamie) Fenton asking “what it a triplet?” I quickly realized that this would throw Jamie a looey (and delay the release of the product) so I just told her “don’t worry about it, we’ll handle it later”. So all music in MusicWorks was in 2 or 4.
This is a video submission I did for a Flip Cam contest here at CWRU. It’s a general introduction to me and the project we’re doing here. The audio has been adjusted from the earlier version.
Poor Republicans. Now that 46% of Tennesseans think Obama wasn’t born in the U.S., they’re afraid that the Republican party might come off looking like - what? Dingos? Idiots? Crackers? We have a name for these kind of people. Republicans.
Here is a list of the location of traffic cameras that record license plate number and then trigger a traffic ticket being sent to your home!
East Side:
Chester Avenue at Euclid Avenue
Chester Avenue at 71st Street
East 55th Street at Carnegie Avenue
Carnegie Avenue at East 30th Street
East 131st at Harvard Avenue
East 116th at Union Avenue
Carnegie Avenue at East 100th Street
Carnegie Avenue at ML King Junior Drive
Lakeshore Blvd at East 159th Street
Saint Clair Avenue at London Road
Chester Avenue between East 55th Street and East 40th Street
Woodland Avenue between East 66th Street and East 71st Street
Broadway between Harvard Avenue and Miles Avenue
Lee Road between Tarkington Avenue and I-480 Ramp
Shaker Blvd. at Shaker Square
Shaker Blvd. At East 116th Street
Cedar Road at Murray Hill Road
Euclid Avenue at Mayfield Road
Prospect Avenue at East 40th Street
West Side:
West Blvd. at North Marginal Road
West Blvd. at I-90 Ramp
Grayton Road at I-480 Ramp
Warren Road at I-90 Ramp
West 117th Street at I-90 Ramp
Pearl Road at Biddulph Road
Memphis Ave. At Fulton Road
Clifton Blvd between West 110th Street and West 104th Street
West Blvd. between I-90 Ramp and Madison Avenue
The official start of the death of Adobe was announced today.
MusicWorks was a variant of a larger product we had started called SoundVision, in the summer of 1984. SoundVision combined music and animation editing in the same tool - all on this tiny little Mac 512k. We used it to pitch software publishers - to give them an idea of what we were capable of.
‘We’ at the time were 
One of the funniest things I remember is getting a call from
I agree with Om -
The Activity Streams standard is spreading. MySpace and Windows Live are now supporting it.
