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.