Draw: an open-source online drawing program

Filed under: Design, Developer, Fun, Internet, Text, Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Productivity, Web services, Open Source

Draw: an open-source online drawing program

by Jason Clarke Nov 6th 2006

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.

Tags: Cumulate Labs, CumulateLabs, draw, drawing, online drawing, OnlineDrawing, open source, open source drawing, OpenSource, OpenSourceDrawing

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Khuffie said 1:33PM on 11-06-2006

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.

Darren said 1:40PM on 11-06-2006

How long until Google buys this to add it to the docs and spreadsheets?

adam said 2:42PM on 11-06-2006

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.

L said 10:40PM on 11-06-2006

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.

Mosh said 1:02AM on 11-07-2006

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.

torgeir said 2:46PM on 11-07-2006

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

torgeir said 2:46PM on 11-07-2006

... forgot to mention collaboration!

heed said 3:43AM on 2-01-2007

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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