Aviary, the company that provides a fully customizable SDKs for applications that want to include photo editing, has announced the launch of its Windows 8 SDK in collaboration with AMD and Microsoft. This means that apps for any Windows 8 PCs and tablets can start including photo editing immediately, not just ones with AMD processors.
The company has already gotten serious traction by being included within Flickr, Twitter, Photobucket and thousands of other apps, so Windows 8 was a logical move for them. The collaboration is actually backed by an investment from AMD Ventures, which came in its last round. AMD would clearly love to see popular photo apps crop up on the Windows platform. Since social photo editing is such a popular behavior on the web these days, not having a platform to easily deploy the feature within apps left a massive hole in the Windows app store.
To pump up the partnership, Manju Hegde, an AMD VP, referred to Aviary as “the standard in mobile and online photo editing,” something we’ve said about the company before. As far as the investment, Hegde shared “AMD is committed to supporting the future of industry changing innovators like Aviary, through investment by AMD Ventures and by enhancing user experiences on our award-winning APU platforms.”
AMD was involved in Aviary’s last funding round, which also included Spark and Bezos Expeditions, so these resources have clearly come to fruition.
The SDK for Windows 8 is available now and comes with enough documentation and examples to shake a stick at.
Aviary also has released its first Windows 8 app through the Windows Store to showcase the features and functionality of the Aviary SDK for Windows 8. The company has also launched a photo editor itself in the Windows Store, to show off the type of functionality that developers can now leverage for their own apps. Aviary says that with the AMD APUs, effects can be processed up to 16X faster than on other processors, an advantage of working directly with AMD.
Said Aviary CEO, Tobias Peggs:
AMD’s APUs allow us to enable the most processor-intensive photo effects we have ever been able to offer. They’ve helped to push our technology forward, and in turn, end users can push the limits of their creativity even further.
Along with Windows 8, Aviary’s SDK is available for iOS, Android, Windows Phone 7 and HTML5. Its launch partners for Windows 8 are Rowi, Memorylage, Vol8t by Volevi, MyFrames, Photo Annotater and Selektiv. The functionality from the Aviary SDK should be available for those apps within the next week on the Windows Store.
Having apps with photo editing built-in could be a competitive advantage for Windows 8 laptops (or even on a Surface!), I mean…if you’re into that sort of thing. This is good news for Aviary, especially if some of these manufacturers start including photo apps that happen to use their SDK by default.
[Photo credit: Flickr]