Aviary Image Editor: Android App Review

 

Full-featured and free! The Aviary app for Android devices performs like a paid app, offering all the bells and whistles like auto enhance, multiple cropping settings, red eye removal, teeth whitening, settings for color and tone control and much more.

But Aviary knows you want to have fun, too. It is a mobile app after all, not some stodgy desktop program. So Aviary also included the goofy features like stickers (fully manipulable), text, filters and such that mobile users seem to love.

I like the meme feature, which allows me to show the interwebs how cute my cats are while expressing their desire for cheezburgers.

I’ve only found a couple of things it won’t do: renaming and resizing. You can rename in the gallery app, but it would be nice not to have to leave Aviary to do it. Resizing I mostly do for blogging, and the WordPress app will resize it for me. But these are pretty easy things to do that most other image apps offer. I was surprised a more advanced app like Aviary didn’t include them. Two minor faults are easy to live with for so many great free features, though.

In short, I love this app. It does everything I want it to without forcing me to join since pseudo social imaging network or spamming my phone with ads. Having used it for a couple months, I’d gladly pay for it if I had to. it’s a good bet that the Aviary app will remain free, though, since Aviary’s online image editor is also free and has been for years.


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Originally posted on Web PieRat.

Silk Browsers for Everyone, Amazon Wins

Amazon is registering Silk-based domains by the hundreds, possibly indicating the future availability of the day-old Amazon Fire’s browser on more platforms. Of course, the domain registrations could be defensive, but 500 domains is an awful lot for a browser meant to live on a single tablet island. I prefer to think that Amazon’s registration of SilkSmartphone.com means that soon I can browse faster on my android phone.

Silk browsers for PCs, Macs and mobile devices would be a good move, Amazon. If you own the browser, you can suggest your services. “What do you want to do? Watch, Listen, Read, Play, Shop?” I’m envisioning a browser toolbar with tabletesque icons for each action that look delicious and seduce you to click. An Amazon browser that makes it easiest to consume Amazon products and media, plus collects all your browsing data to feed the Amazon machine, is a no-brainer.

What does the user get? Faster browsing thanks to Silk’s split processing scheme, using the power of Amazon’s cloud to condense and render pages faster than the device’s processors can alone. Well, on mobile devices anyway. And only for sites hosted in Amazon’s cloud. But still. There’s an interesting proposition there for mobile browsing, where load times over 3G or slower connections can feel like an eternity.

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