Aviary Encroaches On Adobe Illustrator With Raven, The First Vector Graphics Editor For The Web

Aviary is a small New York startup with the ambitious goal of recreating (and expanding upon) Adobe's most popular design tools in the browser. Since we first covered the company about a year and a half ago, Aviary has kept most of its 15 planned tools (at least those that have seen development at all so far) in private beta. Only three have become publicly available: Phoenix , an image editor along the lines of Photoshop; Peacock , a so-called "visual laboratory" for pixel-based images; and Toucan , a color palette tool. Now, Aviary has taken the lid off a tool called Raven as well. Raven is a vector-based image editor that mimics (and therefore competes with) Adobe Illustrator, a popular desktop application among digital artists whose work often makes it onto real paper. Like Phoenix, Raven doesn't match its Adobe counterpart feature-by-feature but it does recreate Illustrator's most essential functionality. And the results are pretty impressive; the pen tool and gradients in particular work just as they should, and the tool overall reaffirms Flex's reputation as a suitable platform for desktop-like applications.