Draw on our home page!

Our website is going through some redesign at the moment.  Our current design is pretty static and doesn’t work on mobile, which I feel is odd for a mobile company.  Plus, kind of dull.

I had this weird idea last week and set Izzy the Intern to work on it. The basic idea.  You can install our app, and draw directly on our website.  The app has a little simple drawing program in it, and that sends your drawing commands to our home page, which renders them in Javascript and the HTML5 canvas.

FYI, this probably won’t work in IE.  Haven’t tried it, though.  Will take a look at that soon.

Why do this? Something fun.  Also wanted to build up some experience with QR codes and twitter integration.  Not really sure there’s a product here, unless you’re looking for strangers to draw offensive pictures on your website.  Since our site is visited by people looking for Android apps (hopefully), and nobody else, its hot a huge risk.  Plus, the twitter integration should hopefully cut down on that stuff.

How does it work?

1) Download the app.
2) Login with Twitter (we don’t do anything except log you in. Promise).
3) Go to http://touchlab.wpengine.com on another device (compuater, tablet, whatever).
4) Click “Go!” in the app and scan the QR code on screen.

The app will give you a whole 60 seconds to draw.  It was originally 30.  We found 30 seconds isn’t really enough for a masterpiece.  60 seconds, however, is pretty good.

The app had zero design effort put into it, so it looks pretty rough.  Also, I’m sure there are endless ways it’ll crash if you tweak it just right.

The client code is up on github at:

https://github.com/touchlab/tldraw

I can think of several ways that you could hack this and basically shut down our server.  Please do not do this.  We’ll be tweaking things a bit to prevent that (or taking it down and doing real work.  We’ll see).

The server code is co-mingled with some of our other server code that isn’t public.  If we get interest, we’ll split that out and make it public.

On the off chance that you’d like to work at Touchlab, fork the source and do something cool with it.  Actually, do that anyway.  Go!