The Metaverse is an enhanced version of the internet, an actual visual representation of everything that happens online today and even more. Each person has his own avatar, with which he is able to interact online, walk along the Street and even own buildings.

The story of the novel concentrates around Hiro Protagonist, a hacker and world’s best sword fighter and Y.T., a fifteen year old Kourier, who try to track down the creator of the Snow Crash, a virtual drug, that is able to crash the computer and your brain system simultaneously. This drug, in it’s virtual form, is however effective only on hackers, because it transmits a crash signal in the form of a binary code to the visual canal of the recipent, which only they can read, causing irreparable consequences to their minds.

Since I don’t want to spoil your reading enjoyment, I won’t divulge into further details of the story. But I’ll add only one interesting curiosity. Thanks to the wide popularity of the book at the time of it’s release, the word avatar, which was introduced by Stephenson, is since then used as the standard definition for the visual representation of a person in the internet.

But of course, for someone that exhibits his extraordinary image editing skills only on special occasions, even that free software doesn’t look too appealing, and those 10 minutes of installing usually take a whole lifetime to finish. That’s why we’re glad there’s Mr Flash.

With his help, and with higher internet connection speeds, we are finally able to experience image editing within the browser, on the internet, and without any fastidious installations. Well, this is actually no big news, such internet applications were around already a few years ago, but they weren’t so powerful, and there wasn’t such a wide selection, that would cover most of the graphical operations the real programs can perform.

First there is Photoshop Express, which is considered to be, what is his bigger brother on the computer, except for the price, which is nicely rounded down to zero.

Right beside Photoshop Junior we have Splashup, that surprisingly enough even surpasses his competitor with its added functionality. You won’t be able to edit your photos as quickly and achieve similarly amazing results, but you’ll be able to draw and create your own artistic installations just as easily.

Another very powerful online program is A.viary‘s Phoenix, which is in combination with Peacock and Toucan, the best set of tools you can find right now, and will cover almost all your needs for graphical creativity and image manipulation.

And the last one among a quite larger group of such software, that I find worth to mention is FlauntR, another very useful collection of tools for professional image editing, all on the internet, again, for free.