Aviary, those masters of outrageous ambition, seeking to replace every piece of creative software in the world with a version free to everyone online, is out of private beta today! Now you can use their bitmap editor Phoenix (think Photoshop), their vector editor Raven (think Illustrator), their excellent color theory tool Toucan (think Kuler), and a sick node-based image generation tool Peacock, one user creation of which I’ve featured at right (think vvvv or Quartz Composer but for static images). Need I mention that these run in Flash Player?

Speaking of node-based editors, the always-busy-how-does-he-do-it Zeh Fernando is working on a visual node-based programming tool as well, called FNK, which you can already play with in alpha. Pretty sweet. Check it out!

Finally, we have a pretty neat idea sponsored by IBM’s Collaborative User Experience research group called Many Eyes. The site is a huge user-rated and user-submitted gallery of visualizations of different kinds of data. Right now it appears to only use your choice of the site’s pre-made visualizations, though they are quite nice. For me the more interesting thing is that it also acts as a clearinghouse for data sets. Though many of them seem fairly useless, it’s great to have a central place to look for data, and I wonder if you are licensed to just take those data sets to use on your own projects as well.

Happy Friday!