[kyle_jones]

I'm a long time lurker here. I've always been an admirer of the digital art you guys create.
I was never much of an artist myself so I've just remained a lurker for the last decade. I am however a fairly competent web developer.

In the past I've seen a lot of online painting apps like flock draw and I've always been disappointed in the approach used. Most are suitable whiteboard apps but always seem to come with only a single round brush, a few preset radius choices and nothing else so I've felt they're woefully inadequate for digital art.

So I've recently put together my own collaborative painting app using new HTML5 features and I'm looking for feedback on ways to improve it.
Paint with Me

Unfortunately the common area you get dumped into when you first visit the site seems to get filled with trolls scribbling inane things over what you're doing.
If you click "Create Session" at the top you can start your own separate area. Share the link with friends to have them join.

The brushes I've implemented are kind of modeled after the Photoshop features, so it should be somewhat familiar to many of you.

There's a couple of shortcuts also borrowed from Photoshop

hold alt and click for the eye dropper
hold space, click and drag to pan around
this one deviates from PS, but the mouse wheel will zoom

I'm intending to soon add UI buttons below the eye dropper to toggle the pan/zoom modes.

So anyways, if any of you would want to give it a shot and let me know what you like or hate about it I would greatly appreciate it.
And if you draw anything with it, if you could take a screenshot and share, I would love that.

Paint with Me

[Quintus Dias]

It did lag a lot, perhaps it is still in the test phase? The sliders lagged too.
The thing about the painting process which I felt was annoying was that when you lowered the opacity the stroke was full opacity and afterwards corrected to low opacity; when you paint you want to see the correct result immediately.

All in all I love this kind of stuff, was a big fan of open canvas so me and another guy here in the forum opened paintchats here many years ago.

I'm not sure about the lagging, could it be that I am on wireless broadband? the connection do goes up and down. Otherwise I have a dual core processor laptop with 4Gb Ram.....
It lagged a lot so I couldn't finish the drawing.....


btw haha you were right about the trolls, I was trying out the tools and the fuckers kept covering everything that I did Lmao.

[kyle_jones]

I suppose it is in the test phase.
I've just recently put it together and I'm still working out issues and adding features.

That's interesting about the sliders, I hadn't noticed it before. I might know what's going on with the color slider. Does it also do it for the brush radius and other ones as well or just on the color?

The opacity thing is apparently a bug in IE9 that I've overlooked. That's certainly not the intended behavior. Fortunately it should be a very easy fix.

On the lag, if you were getting the "Retrying connection" dialog then the lag might have been on my server. It's kind of had a few hiccups today which I'll be working on tomorrow to alleviate those problem.

If it was that the paint strokes lagged as you were drawing then I might not be able to help that too much with Internet Explorer.
The code is written in javascript and IE9's javascript performance is poor in comparison to other modern browsers. It works best in Chrome or Firefox. But I'll take a look and see what I can do to improve the IE9 experience.

Your picture's very nice though. Sorry you were unable to finish, :/

[T_England]

Hi there great program! i gave it a try. I will just list a few things i noticed
shortcut keys: you got alt and space there i always asign A and Z also to increase and decrease brush size as they are right next to the alt key so you dont have to look down at the keyboard to change how big the brush is. I didnt notice any major lag issues or bugs aside from it would occasionaly not register when i hit space to pan. Aside from that pressure sensitivity would be great!
_________________
www.tenglandsketchbook.blogspot.com
www.thomasengland.co.uk

[T_England]

You might want to make some kind of gate before it starts off in a public session i nearly quit because of all the trolls scribbling over That said i like how it gets streight to the painting
_________________
www.tenglandsketchbook.blogspot.com
www.thomasengland.co.uk

[Quintus Dias]