Pixlr – Terrific, Free, Web-based Image Editor

Have you also tried Photoshop Express?
http://www.photoshop.com/express

No. Have you? The fact that I have to 'sign up' is already an impediment to even try.

I signed up, but never really used it. My brief experience seemed more tedious and limited than just firing up Elements which I already own. There's one other service, I played with and maybe Mari blogger, but I don't remember. Just because I can do something online, doesn't mean I want to? Hm.

Yes ... me too ... I'll continue to use paint.net. I was mostly impressed with what can be done online and in the fact that I can use it on my iMac where I need a decent image editor.

Thanks for sharing this. Nice to hear of these kinds of apps becoming available.

Everyone likes web-based applications because of the simple deployment (nothing to install, always up to date, etc). But in general, building web-based apps has just been a pain. All the frameworks just try to implement work arounds for the missing parts: session, state, validation, widgets, and the like.

Rich applications with the benefit of web deployment will ultimately come through virtual machines (in this case Flash). Two years ago, Bruce Eckel (C++ and Java author, ISO committee member) wrote an interesting piece which started with "The Web is a Mess" and ended with "Use Flex for the front end" (http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thre...). As a Java evangelist, he took a lot of flak for that article. I think it holds true. But the major effort still seems to be put into web frameworks. I guess that may be justified when one thinks of mobile devices.

Terrific article Glen.

Eckel makes some good points but I don't think he's fully giving credit where credit is do and what makes Silicon Valley so successful - its a willingness to take Risks, as Sun did, and ship something that is 'good enough' rather than wait around for perfection.

Clearly JAVA, Javascript and AJAX have limitations and we need to evolve to advance standards, frameworks, front ends etc. But I'm delighted Sun did what they did. The Internet revolution was, in part, fueled by Java, JavaScript and AJAX (limited as they were) - especially the whole Web 2.0 phenomena.

Couldn't agree more though that building for the web is a pain - even today. As I developed wishhh.com (PHP, MySQL, CSS - and a little java that I could crib off from others) I needed to constantly test across a half dozen browsers (old and new versions). While wishhh.com works on almost everything, making it do so came at a huge cost of time and energy for me. For future projects I think I'm going to scale back and focus on only the top 3 browsers of the day and say ' to hell with the rest'. I'm a one man shop when it comes to development. If users are unwilling to move up to a current browser (when they are ALL free) I'm not going to feel sorry for them if they can't use my site.

If there ever is a global CSS standard adhered too by all browsers, I'll be the first to cheer! As for building with Flash, I've never even looked into it. I have assumed it would be either too complex or too expensive for me to tinker with. And, for the moment, I'm immersed in all things iPhone development related. Though I do hope to get back into web development once again in the future - more likely mobile to web interactive apps with the iPhone and Android.