About
inkoid is an experimental drawing environment intended to facilitate collaborative art. It's an infinite canvas that remembers every mark made.
Thank you
- Morgan Gregory for everything.
- Mark Pesce for guidance.
- Catherine Gleeson for aesthetics.
- Peter Giles for the time.
- My fellow digi students: Ben Wright, Ed Coy, Patrick Clair & Susan Danta for the company.
- Best of luck with your works. - Tanya Vale, Paula Lane & Cassandra Joslyn for keeping the ball rolling.
Inkoid is my ( Angus Fraser / angusf ) major research project developed while studying for an MA in Interactive Media at the Australian Film TV & Radio School (AFTRS). I spent from May 2006 until March 2007 learning the required technologies: Macromedia Flash, Javascript, PHP, Mysql, Unix admin and planning and developing an initial proof of concept. As of my graduation in 2007 it has basic implementations of all the core functionality that I think makes the project interesting and versatile:
- A canvas that can be navigated spatially and chronologically
- Points in space and time on the canvas can have unique URLS: for example
- Natural feel drawing tools rather than vectors, though only crayon at this point :-)
- The canvas is embedded into a HTML web site that provides social and meta interfaces
- User accounts so that all drawing and other activity can be related to/retrieved by users
- The canvas can be annotated by "saving a place" allowing that part of it to be rated and commented on.
- A full history of any part of a canvas can be retrieved in HTML (& soon RSS): for example
- Areas of the canvas can be exported for use elsewhere.
Post AFTRS, while the time available to me will be much less, I plan to continue to develop the project and build it into something stable, fun and useful for people who need to draw together. To give you some idea of where it's going to, slowly, go these are my priorities:
- Revising much of the existing code to improve reliability, scalability and cross-platformness (currently works best on Windows with Firefox which happens to be my home setup)
- More efficient tile loading, saving and storage functionality
- Improved history navigation interface
- More drawing tools: marker, pencil, watercolour, image upload, history brush
- More export options:PC/Mobile wallpaper standards, blogs, animated, posters etc.
- RSS for everything and an API for cool stuff.
- Slowly build the user-base and find out what users need and how to increase the value of the system for users and the value of the content they create with the system :
- Find ways to fund ongoing/faster development/hosting :