Aviary advanced suite now officially offline

[Edvard]

I only noticed this today, but apparently it happened 2 months ago.
The tools were very good, the community was huge, and the buzz was almost unstoppable.
Then came this blog post in July

Hi folks,

As you might know, Aviary officially changed directions in September 2011 to focus more on helping developers of photo apps. We currently power the photo-editing of third party apps on mobile and web through Aviary’s simple plugin for iOS, Android, Windows Phone 7 and HTML5.  Over the past 10 months since turning down this path, we’ve grown to 11 million active users, editing more than 150 million photos in Aviary, each month. And our tremendous growth under this new direction is showing no signs of slowing down. Even our developer showcase app “Photo Editor by Aviary” has been a smash hit, shooting up to #2 in iOS’s Photos category and breaking into the Top 25 free apps in the App Store (with a 5-star average rating).
...
We therefore have made the difficult decision to retire the advanced suite of multimedia Flash editors for artists (located at advanced.aviary.com) on September 15th, 2012.

Now it's just... gone.

OK, I understand, it cost too much money, Flash is going the way of the buffalo, etc., etc., blahblahblah, ad nauseum.

To those of you inconvenienced by this announcement, I am truly sorry. I hope you understand why this is necessary and will continue to support the company on its current path.

Inconvenienced?
Guys, you dumped an entire community of millions of musicians/students/teachers/artists/designers/regular Joes who came to rely on the ease of use and ubiquitous availability of your tools daily with no alternative path and you ask for support?!?!

I hate when these things happen.

[Edvard]

For those interested:

5 Alternatives to Aviary for Creating Audio Online
http://www.freetech4...ng.html#.UJ9IqCE9Q1l

[Renegade]

This reminds me about this thread. Same basic deal, just about open source and not commercial/proprietary.

[40hz]

Hmm...so I guess it's safe to toss this book I bought last year for $35 at B&N now that it's merely taking up space on my bookshelf?




Pretty shabby IMO how they handled the shutdown. They could have very easily announced no further development would be done on the product and possibly initiated a subscription fee for access. That would have at least allowed the people who genuinely needed Aviary - and had come to rely on it - a transitional period to find other software.

The single most important stage in the execution of any strategy is how well the endgame is played - and how well the aftermath is handled. Just pulling the plug with nothing more than a short apology that says little other than "please don't be angry" is not a good way to do something like this.

[mahesh2k]

I am using Pixlr (from autodesk) which also works just like aviary in cloud. Though not many options but it does let you work with images, add effects and most of the image editing suite features.

As for aviary, this is yet another sign where you can see cloud services are not at all reliable. Slight change in IT market trend and economy, and these services pull the plug. Many desktop apps survived the economy and trends but they don't pull plug this easily. I guess aviary spent a lot of money which was basically not getting them returns.

[Edvard]

That's the thing, I understand if they weren't making money, I understand that Flash is not the technology of the future for this kind of thing, and I understand if they wanted to reduce and refocus.
But to simply pull the plug?  Rather on the rude side, IMO...

This reminds me about this thread. Same basic deal, just about open source and not commercial/proprietary.

-Renegade (November 11, 2012, 01:26 AM)

The difference, and I mean THE difference is that if Aviary were open source, it would never go away.  It may languish and stagnate without a dedicated team of maintainers, and users would complain ad nauseum, but it would never be simply and suddenly GONE.  Plenty of caveats either way. 

[Renegade]

This reminds me about this thread. Same basic deal, just about open source and not commercial/proprietary.

-Renegade (November 11, 2012, 01:26 AM)

The difference, and I mean THE difference is that if Aviary were open source, it would never go away.  It may languish and stagnate without a dedicated team of maintainers, and users would complain ad nauseum, but it would never be simply and suddenly GONE.  Plenty of caveats either way. 

-Edvard (November 12, 2012, 09:47 PM)

Sorry - I didn't mean to imply anything there. Just that the "closing up shop" case was similar.

You have an excellent point about open source still being available after the doors are shuttered.

[Edvard]

Don't worry, I didn't take it badly, just pointing out the difference.

What I mean about caveats, however, is just what was pointed out in the other thread.  An Open Source project may never be gone, but dropped projects are embarassingly common.  Much of Sourceforge.net could rightly be called an elephant's graveyard for abandoned code...  

[Renegade]

Don't worry, I didn't take it badly, just pointing out the difference.

What I mean about caveats, however, is just what was pointed out in the other thread.  An Open Source project may never be gone, but dropped projects are embarassingly common.  Much of Sourceforge.net could rightly be called an elephant's graveyard for abandoned code... 

-Edvard (November 13, 2012, 09:56 AM)

I totally hear you there.

I am planning on dropping some projects, but not willing to go back through them and clean up comments and code so that I would be comfortable releasing it into the public domain or GPL or whatever. They will simply die. And entirely because I just do not have the time for them.

I will make them available to people by email through request. But only to people that I know and actually care about, e.g. DC members, etc. For the rest, well, yeah... It sucks. And I hate to do it. But I've carried some projects for long enough. I can't continue with them.

I perfectly well understand both sides there. Effort is work. And you only have so much time.

What pisses me off are the users that complain to people that give them things for free. It's rude and ignorant. Nobody has a "right" to your labour or efforts. Assuming that you do is perverse. A bit more thankfulness would be in order. The commercial side... well.. that's a different matter...

[40hz]

What pisses me off are the users that complain to people that give them things for free. It's rude and ignorant. Nobody has a "right" to your labour or efforts. Assuming that you do is perverse. A bit more thankfulness would be in order.

-Renegade (November 13, 2012, 10:26 AM)

And that, in a nutshell, sums up what will always be the single greatest threat to continuation of the F/OSS model: Ingratitude.