The Examined Life is No Picnik

The future of computers is in the clouds. The days taking a CD/DVD and popping it into your computer to install some software has pretty much gone the way of the dinosaur. All software applications will eventually become just a URL you enter on your web browser. Computers will become more lightweight and energy efficient because the need for hard drives will be obsoleted with high-speed/low drag solid state memory. There is no spoon.

Enough of the technobabble. You do more "cloud computing" than you're probably aware of. Just get that e-mail from EBay to your GMail account about something you were bidding on? Using the webcam on Yahoo IM to talk to your family half a world away? Upload your attempt at becoming a filmmaker to YouTube? Welcome to the "cloud" my friends.

A friend of mine got me hooked to a new web-based application used for editing photos. It's called Picnik and it basically makes you look like a Photoshop expert in a matter of minutes. Think I'm kidding? Take a look at some before-and-afters I did in no time at all using this, very addictive, tool (click on thumbnail for larger view).







































All of those edits were done with the free registration, although you can pay for access to a lot more fun and advanced edits (annual Premium membership is only $25). You can either upload your pics to their site, or do what I do and browse your web photo galleries (Picasa, Flickr, MySpace, FaceBook, PhotoBucket, etc) and repost your updated works of art back to them. So, go out to Picnik's website and reinvent your photos while having fun doing it! I have to extend props to Vadinne for enlightening a brotha!