inkoid Blog

Draw Ball had been around for a long while I found it in my bookmarks from a few years ago & it looked pretty established then. The drawing area is circular and to draw you must zoom in on a circular area three times before you’re at the base level of the canvas. Drawings are recorded as vectors & you have a full colour palette and several preset brush sizes. It also seems to allocate you a standard amount of ink - I’m not sure how that works. There is a hall of fame with some polished/realism examples of what users have been able to do with the drawing tools. My favorite bit is the “Drawball Playback” where 1 year of drawing is played back at 40hrs per second. It’s fascinating to see the amount of time some user’s put into creating large motifs on the canvas then the titanic struggle against entropy as they try to counter the encroaching efforts of many many smaller drawings that gradually replace their work.

I discovered Mydrawings.com about 3 months into the design and build of inkoid. It is a community drawing tool with a tile based canvas. It has/had quite an active community of contributors who rate and comment on each others drawings, drawings can be embedded on other websites. At first I thought, shit. But as I looked closer I realised that while they have also implemented the idea of an infinite canvas there are some significant differences. These differences keep me excited about completing inkoid and seeing how it will be used:

• MD is tile based, users can only draw on 1 tile at time, inkoid uses tiles for image storage/loading only, not to define drawing areas, drawing rights
• MD is vector based, Inkoid requires bitmap drawing to get naturalistic effects
• MD is vector based, Inkoid requires bitmap drawing to get naturalistic effects
• Inkoid’s canvas has a history like a Wiki. Pixel positions in 2 dimensions and in the edit history can be addressed with a URL

Seeing mydrawings.com while developing Inkoid also allowed me to identify potential problems areas and think about how to overcome them. e.g. how to try to encourage more collaboration and better quality drawing?

Sending email from PHP for the invites, password reminders, account setup confirmations continues to be a headache. Most email addresses seem to determine the emails I send as spam. It’s frustrating, I’ve not encountered this problem before on shared hosting, and think it’s something to do with the way the servers & DNS are set up but just not sure where or what to fix. Any ideas?

I’ve changed the domain details for inkoid.com to point to xlhost’s domainname severs, so now http://www.inkoid.com is pointing to the new dedicated hosting. Everything appears to be working but I’ll be checking things closely for a while. Definately noticing a slowdown in tile loading here on my home broadband - hopefully it’s faster in the US. It’s motivating me to hurry up with some optimisation ideas I’ve had, especially for grid loading. Email from PHP still apears to be a little flakey so that is a priority so I can get the registration process working well.

The basics of something I’ve been thinking about for a long while now have finally been added. Today I got it working so that from the page where you edit your profile you can change your “User icon” (the image that represents your activity throughout the site) either by uploading an image or exporting an area from the canvas. Yay!. This functionality demonstrates a simple kind of export, hopefully I’ll be adding many more export types from now on. I thought of ideas for two export types while doing this work.

One was the idea of a “LiveImage” where you export a section of the canvas and a special page/script is created that updates the exported image and an rss feed whenever the area the image represents is changed. So a remote site could have an image that changes when it is changed on inkoid embedded in it. I think I’ll demo this with the Logo for the inkoid site giving users the chance to edit and change it.

The other idea was for mobile wallpaper exporting but rather than have the user choose a phone size allow the marquee to be resized in steps corresponding to standard phone screen sizes. And maybe save the last used size to the users profile.

A few months into the development of inkoid I came across Line Rider and had a kind of epiphany. While I was building a monolithic tool that requires all kinds of server equipment, bandwidth, and months of complicated application code here was something that probably took at most a week or two to develop, was a quick download and was just plain simple fun. It took a brilliant shortcut to the idea of interactive animation that i was and still am lumbering towards. And as it turns out this simple tool was enough to allow enthusiasts to create brilliantly complex works like Techdawgs “Departed”.

Sketch Planet is described on the site as “an online user-driven sketching community” It is developed by Yong Fook and is now at version 2. It provides a very simple vector based drawing tool but with added html interface for forming groups, viewing a individuals work, rating etc. much like I am trying to do with inkoid. Also despite the simplicity of the drawing tool some users do contribute skillful complex drawings. Read more here.

I’ve changed the way the flash canvas interface works for adding places. It’s an improvement, I think, but now that it’s done still not quite right. Now when you press the marker mode button found currently down the bottom right of the canvas the select area appears immediately and upto 20 places saved in the viewable area (before the currently selected canvas date) appear. This allows you to see if the place you planned to save has already been saved, in which case there is no need to save it yourself. It has aside-effect of you being able to move back through the history of the local area.

Now that it’s complete I think that It should show markers both before and after the current canvas time. And perhaps markers should be indicated by a icon symbol only on rolling over any of them they should unfold to show thumbnails & the select area should fade out.

Sketch Swap invites visitors to contribute a sketch and motivates them by offering access to view a random sketch by someone else for every sketch they contribute. It’s kind of a “crowd sourcing” application for drawing, all contributions are moderated for quality and child friendliness.

SwarmSketch is a collaborative drawing application created by Peter Edmunds at the University of Canberra, he says on the about page:

“SwarmSketch is an ongoing online canvas that explores the possibilities of distributed design by the masses. … Each user can contribute a small amount of line per visit, then they are given the opportunity to vote on the opacity of lines submitted by other users. By voting, users moderate the input of other users, judging the quality of each line. The darkness of each line is the average of all its previous votes.” The projects tag line is “Collective sketching of the collective consciousness.”

I find the resulting aesthetic fascinating, reminiscent of toilet grafitti as often is the resulting subject matter - a friend I showed it to described the resulting drawings as the “definition of mediocrity” - which I think is harsh. But it is a challenge I’m hoping to overcome with inkoid - how to facilitate group think and obtain high quality artistic results.