Thanks to the pervasiveness and performances of the Internet, it’s now possible to have very complex programs run from your web browser, programs that were only destined to your desktop before.

It’s usually called “the Cloud” (or cloud computing), and allows the access via the Internet to complex programs. You probably already knew about Google docs and your favourite word processor, or spreadsheet program, but coming from up the cloud, we are talking about different kinds of birds. Graphic programs more like Adobe’s Photoshop, except that here, it’s for free (at least for the basic version), and you don’t have to install anything on your computer.

Check out Aviary; even if you’re not interested in computer graphics, the website concept alone is worth checking out, with each project being represented by a colourful bird, the symbols’ continuity being pushed to having eggs for their coming projects (which look very interesting as well), or a broken egg for “404 not found” errors.

The latest of their release is “Raven”, a vector editor which even if quite simple compared to Adobe Illustrator or its open-source counterpart Inkscape is already quite promising.

One can imagine many more interesting ways of using this kind of program, especially on the line of collaborative work. Up to now, there was the early versions of OpenCanvas which allowed for instance sharing a common canvas and draw pictures at the same time with different individuals, but now there seem to be a wider range of possibles.