paintAcquaint

It's something I whipped up in about a week. Hope someone finds it useful :). Here's the Desktop version: http://westerneducation.org/games/play/Challenge_SAT_Vocab_Q...

If you want to test out the Web Version:

http://westerneducation.org/games/play/Challenge_SAT_Vocab_Q...

http://westerneducation.org/games/play/Challenge_SAT_Vocab_Q...

The desktop version doesn't require a login.

You can find a working instance of it here: http://cmsfire.timnuwin.com/

I created this tool because I was tired of Resizing icons when publishing apps to the iOS store. Also because I don't have an iPad or the latest iPhone the screenshot generator handles that [despite it being distorted slightly].

I'm running Safari on it.

This thing's unplayable on my iPhone4. Welcome to the fragmented world of HTML5. Runs perfectly fine though on my i7 2.8ghz desktop rig.

on the iphone 4: "Result of Expression 'document.getElementByID("drop down_progress")'[null] is not an object. File: undefined line: undefined.

Just implemented the ability to process payments for utilities / rent / groceries, etc.

Bovis.In allows tenants or landlords to make public announcements within a house, pay each other for rent, utilities, etc, and you can also post anonymously to avoid being confrontational.

If anyone's interested on the technical stack, I'd be more than happy to explain it.

Probably going to implement by next week depending on how busy I am, but I'll be adding:

-Ability to pay certain tenants utilities

-Emailing

-And any layout / UX changes that makes sense based on critique.

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But anywho, I made this site because I'm going to be moving in with a bunch of people who I'd rather not connect with on Facebook yet I still want to stay in contact with.

I added the anonymous feature too because previous roommies were too scared to confront other roommates who were too loud + obnoxious. I don't know how effective it'll be but we'll see.

Also, I wanted to play around with CSS + twitter's bootstrap:

The template that i used for the bootstrap theme was from here: http://bootswatch.com/

Ted Leo was kind enough to let me use one of his songs in my kick-starter video.

I'll be more than happy to answer questions if anyone's got any!

For those of you who want to test out the program just visit my site: www.PaintAcquaint.com

This is very cool. Great job! I wonder how cpu intensive it'd be to generate a simple bounce animation.

This thing crawls to the next page on my iphone 4. Is this really a good alternative to flash if the only machines fast enough to handle this animation smoothly already have the horse-power to handle flash?

Development time. Flash has a broader range of libraries and tools to accomplish this much faster than in html5. Also, the game doesn't run on my iPhone because it can't support sending key-presses, it's stuck on the intro screen. The clouds that are being animated are moving a 10th of the speed compared to the desktop version.

My question is, by the time that smart phones become fast enough to run stable versions of these html5 games, won't they also be able to handle flash games with relative ease as well?

This site's really slick! Do you think you could add an auto-play feature so it'll be a slideshow? I've got two monitors hooked up and it'd be a good screen filler to have that just running on one screen.

Where are the sources saying that Adobe's moving away from flash?

If anything they've been amping up their efforts to keep flash alive by focusing on Air (Machinarium was the number one app in the app store, and it was created in flash) and allowing to port Unity games over.

Moblyng an html5 gaming company blew 7.5 million in one year. The regular casual web-gamer isn't going to play a game that's half-baked. It's just not a viable alternative to flash right now. And there's no amazing IDE, which definitely led to the growth and explosion of all these flash games / apps, that's out there for html5.

Part of the beauty of a closed environment is not having to worry about trying to convince other browsers what features to standardize. They can just march on and implement features they feel are most important. And they're doing a pretty damn good job.

Sorry for the rant, but it really irks me how the media has completely skewed the public's perception on the state of flash.

I completely agree. It's a shame, I remember in middle school the excelerated writing class would be the only class that was learning about critical thinking. My problem was that the teachers were under-mining the capacity for other students in being able to handle that topic / skill.

Well, it's a lot sooner than you think. Flash 11 already has the unreal tournament engine ported.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQiUP2Hd60Y

Well, the site's starting to bottom out. If anyone's still reading this, does anyone know what's a good way to pull in more traffic?

I've been kinda relying on reddit and deviantArt the past couple of days.

Hmm.. Maybe I'll have the text tucked by the side, and when its clicked or mouse over it'll appear? I'll play around with the design.

I was debating whether or not to add text chat, but I think the general consensus so far from people using it is they wanna talk. I'll definitely be adding it in the near future!

Thank you! All this positive feedback means a lot :D

Oh! Glad finally someone asked. The front-end's using flash w/ as3. It was the 2nd project I made using flash, so it was really exciting when I was scrambling across the web for resources. The original front-end the client was actually layering each stroke on top of each other, so what ended up happening was the client would crash after 20ish minutes of moderate use. So I fixed that and ended up using bitmapping to handle the screen. I had a bunch of other features that I disabled for this release [opacity and the undo function] just because they were too buggy.

The server's running I believe CentOS 5.6? or .7? And it's written in Java. Anywho when there's incoming information it stores the coordinates that are being drawn into a buffer. If the buffer becomes full then it shoots it out those coordinates. There's also a 50ms cycle that checks the size of the buffer, so even if it's not full, it'll shoot out the points.

-edit-

I mean, for now the server architecture can handle light load but I definitely plan on implementing a more scalable solution if I get more traffic.

Hey JoshTriplett,

Colorillo does a pretty good job at real-time drawing collaboration. There's a bunch of online-real time painting programs out there, like Flockdraw or scriblink. I purposely coded it to have the users pair-up to kind of emulate Omegle or Chatroulette.

The only reason why I didn't decide to make this application using HTML and JS is because I wanted to teach myself Flash + AS3. This was my only 2nd project in flash. I'm definitely planning on porting it to Mobile once I have free time.

Yeah.. I'm still trying to figure out how I should tackle the issue of just trollers. I was considering as soon as the current user wants to draw with a different person, they'll never get paired up with their previous partners for as long the session on the website lasts for. And it just keeps track of who they rejected.

haha awww. That's awesome! I remember when I first showed the prototype to my classmates earlier this year they ended up killing an entire lecture just using it and the professor ended up yelling at them to stop. I really hope this time around it can catch some steam online.

Hey guys,

I'm re-releasing PaintAcquaint and I wanna know what you guys think about my site! I'll be doing a live-stream at 8 o'clock buuut here are the updates:

Updates from Beta:

-Cleaner UI w/ new icons courtesy of #tehkseven

-Updated Java Server

-Bitmapping so no more layering for each brush stroke for a drastically improved performance

-Full Screen Mode

-Hard Link for your saved photos

=]