Say you need the ability to add a drawing program to your website. It could be very time consuming and expensive to have one written. Instead, why not install Draw, an open source online drawing program released by Cumulate Labs. Check out the demo of this very full-featured drawing program powered by Ajax.
Draw offers basic shapes as well as flow-chart shapes, so it can be used as a poor-man's Visio in a pinch. It also allows for text labeling, color fills, and all the other drawing tools you'd expect to find in a drawing program.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
11-06-2006 @ 1:33PM
Khuffie said...
It seems to lack the ability to...oh, I don't know...draw actual lines freehand? It's not really a 'drawing' program if you can't do that, or use a brush-like took. It's more of a dataflow diagram application. I think the name is misleading.
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11-06-2006 @ 1:40PM
Darren said...
How long until Google buys this to add it to the docs and spreadsheets?
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11-06-2006 @ 2:42PM
adam said...
Naw, this wont cut it. Flash will do a much better job of this, ajax is not a good resource for this. Only reason why you want to use something like ajax and server-side scripting is so that search engines can crawl the content. In the case of a drawing program, there is no content to crawl, except maybe metadata. Flash is the create choice for creating online drawing applications.
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11-06-2006 @ 10:40PM
L said...
AJAX and Flash can do some nice, quick, basic things, but as someone who has used a variety of online drawing apps over the course of several years, I find that the most full-featured online drawing apps are--by far--Java based. Lascaux Sketch (http://www.cellosoft.com/software/view.php?id=34) is probably the most advanced. It handles layers, blend modes, masks, a variety of brushes, and even tablet sensitivity... but it's not freely available.
My personal favorite (for a nice combination of ease of use and features) is the Japanese Shi-Painter (http://hp.vector.co.jp/authors/VA016309/spainter/index_en.html), which also has very nice layer support, basic brushes and textures, and can output all drawing data to an animation. Its also got a family of other Java drawing programs, like PaintBBS (a less advanced version) and Paintchat (a collaborative drawing program where users can chat and draw at the same time).
While none of these will be replacing any of the "real" drawing apps like Photoshop or Painter, artists who are familiar with them can produce some amazing results. I've seen photorealism done perfectly on these humble Java apps.
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11-07-2006 @ 1:02AM
Mosh said...
Impressie as a showcase of DHTML, SVG, VML, etc and programming skills but it's way too slow to be useable. Paint Shop Pro and Photoshop have nothing to fear.
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11-07-2006 @ 2:46PM
torgeir said...
I've given it a quick try and really like it's simplicity, but it still need some serious development.
I really like that it's Open Source.
For now I think I'll use http://www.gliffy.com/ for this purpose, most of all for 2 reasons :
- free placement of text
- online storage
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11-07-2006 @ 2:46PM
torgeir said...
... forgot to mention collaboration!
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2-01-2007 @ 3:43AM
heed said...
The Cumulate Labs Draw site has been updated. We now have:
1. Support for connector labels
2. Support for dashed lines, both on connectors and shapes. Look for “style” drop down on the toolbar
3. UTF-8 support
4. Windows User Interface Design Palette
5. Mac User interface Design palette
The latest source code is now available too!
http://www.cumulatelabs.com
http://www.cumulatelabs.com/blogs/
Thanks for the encouragement!
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