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Picnik's Got Game, By Making Photo Editing Fun!
by Larry Sivitz, Managing Editor

Darrin Massena could easily be forgiven for developing a bit of a swagger these days. After winning the WTIA's 2009 Tech Innovator of the Year award, scoring a hat trick in the Seattle 2.0 Web awards including Best of Show honors, and joining the winner's circle of the CNET WebWare 100, the company he helped found, known as Picnik, is at the very top of their game.

Built entirely in Flash, the Picnik photo editing Website is so silky smooth it actually makes you forget you are retouching, resizing or revitalizing your photos with a fun house full of special effects, inside of a Web browser. To underscore the point, the UX is so astoundingly fast, fluid and friendly, it's almost like playing a video game. That should come as no surprise. Picnik's co-founders hail from the "recreational" side of the Web where you don't need a manual to intuitively understand how a game is played . Letting your fingers find their way is the rule of thumb with Picnik.

We caught up with Darrin to get the back story on Picnik including this CTO's illustrious past as a Microsoft Leonardo DaVinci award winner, the co-author of the ground breaking real-time strategy game Warfare Incorporated, and the father of desktop wallpaper!

Seattle24x7: You won the Leonardo Divinci Award at Microsoft. Was that an award for a single achievement or for a range of things?
Massena: It’s an award for innovation and covered several things I worked on at Microsoft. Mostly, it was for a little idea I came up with which was to have a photo display as a background on a computer. This was back in 1987-'88, and at that point, the customization you could have on your desktop was limited to color. This was before digital cameras, so pictures were hard to come by. We did some things to generate redrawn images so they could be displayed that way. That feature was then taken by the Windows team and they called it Wallpaper. Now every computer has Wallpaper.

Seattle24x7: Does that make you the father of desktop wallpaper?
Massena: Absolutely.

Seattle24x7: Speaking of innovation, one of the most impressive things about Picnik is its interface and its ease of use. Is there a philosophy that guides you in developing the user interface?
Massena: There are a few things. Before I worked at Microsoft, what brought me into the industry was a love of video games. Back then, I thought the best job ever would be one where I could create video games and that’s what I went into straight out of high school. I worked for a company in Renton called Synergistic Software. That’s where most of my ideas about the design of user interface came from. It's the idea that computing doesn’t have to be challenging or frustrating. It can be something that is fun. The design concepts that go into a game experience lead you through the game as you go, you don’t need a manual. It can be visually interesting, it can be engaging, it can be lighthearted, all those concepts can be applied to a wide range of applications.

Seattle24x7: Is there a name for this style of development or programming?
Massena: There are a lot of names people might use to describe it. A lot of what we do would fit under the umbrella of “agile development” where you have small teams and do things very iteratively. But we don’t subscribe to any particular dogma. After you’ve been doing it as long as we have, for better or for worse, we have picked up our own set of practices that we think have been successful and apply them.

Seattle24x7: What is the coolest but least known thing about Picnik in your view?
Massena: One of the coolest is something that happens in the background but people may not realize it . It's the ablitiy to load photos without involving an upload. When using the current version of Picnik in Flash 10, the waiting is gone. You have Flash 10 installed, you can open the photo, it can be a 16 Mb photo, a very large image, and when you click open, it’s just instant. In the background, we’re actually uploading it to our server so that we can support the other features that we have that require having the photo on our server, but from the users' standpoint they don’t have to worry about that. The image is on their screen right now. They can use all of the editing tools immediately.

When you go to save we can compress it all inside of Flash and save it straight to the hard disk so you don’t have to wait for the download. I don’t know any other photo editors that have that feature. It’s my favorite kind of feature in a way because we’ve erased lots of the negative things out of the experience and you can just float through and do what you want to do.

Seattle24x7: Picnik has become a part of many partner sites. Anyone doing something unique with the API that you’re impressed with?
Massena: From an integration standpoint, Flickr is the most seamless in terms of making it a part of their site. We love to see that.. Where Picnik is integrated, like with Facebook, we try to find ways to take advantage of what that site offers but also find a way to put in all that Picnik offers. That's to name only two.

Seattle24x7: You were a founder of the PDA open source community and did authoring for the Palm. Is there a connection between Picnik and mobile?
Massena: I do have a long history with the mobile space. We will certainly look at that in the future. We’ll look at the Palm in a fairly mercenary way and see what adaptation it can have. The iPhone is another force. We don’t have an app out for iPhone right now. We get a lot of requests.

Seattle24x7: What's next for Picnik?
Massena: You can expect to see greater integration, working with other partners. The photo space online is vast and growing, yet a lot of companies still don’t have the photo editing capabilities their sites should have, and we’d like to help plug those holes.

Seattle24x7: Congratulations again on all the awards. Are you buiiding a trophy case in your lobby now?
Massena: You should come check it out.

Visit Picnik at http://www.picnik.com