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Show HN: Kiddo Paint

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Re: Show HN: Kiddo Paint

#11

Post by giancarlostoro »

slig wrote: post #5

I loved it. Have you ever thought about adding a "replay" button? It'd clear the canvas and show, step by step, what the kid draw. I've been building one similar, but for grown ups and I'm learning lots of cool stuff from your code. For instance, I just learned about `createPattern`. Thanks for sharing!

That reminds me of that one program where you would pick a scene and make Spider Man do different things, I forgot the name of it. It was a lovely chunk of my childhood, and my adulthood if I ever find the disk... Found a link while googling it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2THuctqMXis

Of course featuring audio might be a slight bit more than this project is designed for, but it is still neat haha!

Re: Show HN: Kiddo Paint

#12

Post by joonoro »

This is great! I can definitely see one of the reasons why it works so well for kids: there aren't any weird menu buttons that you might accidentally press and get lost in. You just draw and push the buttons to see what difference they make.

Re: Show HN: Kiddo Paint

#14

Post by ZenPsycho »

vikrum wrote: post #2

Hey HN — so, after finding a 15-30min block at the end of each day over the span of about a a month, this little side project is about done. I had a blast working on this with my kids acting as PMs :) I haven't tested it on non-OSX, and I imagine that the unicode/emoji support will be broken. I considered just including the OTF for those, but that's on order of ~40MB. Ideas welcome!

re: emoji you could try picking and choosing the svg's you need out of here:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Emoji

gzipped by the server, they should come out pretty tiny compared to an OTF full of PNGs

Re: Show HN: Kiddo Paint

#16

Post by vikrum »

joegreen wrote: post #13

Windows + Firefox => looks like cars don't work - some icons are not visible and all of them are just creating rectangles in the picture http://snag.gy/4fm3H.jpg

Thanks for the report & screenshot! What, in general, happens with other emoji on Windows? Namely, the Apple color emoji—is there an analogue that Windows users fall back to?

Re: Show HN: Kiddo Paint

#17

Post by azinman2 »

Good job! I liked Kid Pix as a kid myself...big part of my childhood.

The other day I was thinking back to my school days when Apple's ImageWriter II's were everywhere, and people used Print Shop (I think?) to make banners all the time. Because of how the printing technology worked -- writing to a continuous stream of paper -- banners were easy to do. We had banners in many of our class rooms, birthday parties, etc. My guess is banners are just not done anymore, and it also seems like many of these kinds of creative tools aren't common place? Do kids even have printers? Anyone with kids care to chime in?

Re: Show HN: Kiddo Paint

#18

Post by vikrum »

jasonjayr wrote: post #8
ohitsdom wrote: post #6

The explosion noise when clicking on the bomb is a nice touch :)

The original KidPix had that idea, an old drawing application that could desperately use a refresh to modern interfaces .....

I actually got KidPix 1.0 running in a virtual machine— a handful of the "brushes" are as-faithful-as-I-could-make-them ports from KidPix! (including the skeleton and layout for Kiddo Paint) :) Fun fact: KidPix 1.0 was released into the public domain by the author; it was only subsequent versions that were commercial.

Re: Show HN: Kiddo Paint

#19

Post by stevejohnson »

I love the spirit of this, and I've been waiting for someone to make it for years, if I didn't get to it first!

If anyone wants to make a similar web app, I maintain an open source library whose sole purpose is putting JavaScript drawing programs on web pages with custom tools.

http://literallycanvas.com/

Here's a simple web app I made with it that saves to local storage and uploads to Dropbox and Imgur: http://drawplz.com

(The text tool is slightly broken right now; the selection box drag corners are invisible.)

Re: Show HN: Kiddo Paint

#20

Post by mmccaff »

Well done! My train-obsessed 3 year old would approve of the stamp toolbar defaulting to a train.

A button to download the canvas as a png or jpg would be nice for saving and sharing special creations.

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