You can now use File>Open to load images from the web – including, but not limited to, ones created with CanvasPaint.

Image upload is next.

Some of my favorite reactions to CanvasPaint from the blogosphere so far:

»As proof of concept, it’s impressive and shows how close we are to migrating to a web OS.« —digital alchemy

»Might actually be faster to open it from your browser than to load it from your accessories menu.« —Straydog scraps

»Maybe we don’t need Flash so much after all.« —Adam Rossi-Kessel

»wow this person must have not left the house for months« —Justin Chelf

»HOLY CRAP MSPAINT IN A BROWSER. The Internet, by creating this work of Shakespeare, has proven that it is in fact comprised of an infinite number of monkeys with an infinite number of typewriters.« —del.icio.us user mav.rc

and then of course:

»CanvasPaint is everything Web 2.0 should not be« —Rafe Needleman

Most of the drawings saved online are random scribbles by people just experimenting with the app, a couple are insults or haphazard paintings of genitals, but some people actually take the time to create really cool art. I’ll be posting some prime examples in batches over the next few days — here’s for starters:

(Note: A few of the thumbnails have black backgrounds when the full versions don’t, due to the thumbnail generation process.)

The origins of CanvasPaint

The CanvasPaint project was originally started over a year ago, in late 2005 when I first heard of the <canvas> tag. I showed my prototype to a few friends and presented it at BarCamp Vienna, but there were — and are — still a few features I wanted to add and bugs I meant to fix before “officially releasing” it. However, I never seemed to get around to doing some more work on it and kept delaying completion.

Lesson learned

If you don’t release yourself, the blogosphere will take care of that for you: Sunday night a colleague blogged about it as a footnote to the current MS Paint pro video that’s making the rounds. A friend read it and reddit. Next was del.icio.us/popular, and then it got dugg.

As soon as I noticed, I hastily put together image saving functionality that has only just become possible for a sizable portion of users since Firefox 2 was released, moved it to its own domain, and spent the next 48 hours watching the hits pour in. Yesterday, 70,000 people tried it out, and over 2,000 images were saved online.

Step 3: Profit?

The public interest in this little tool has motivated me to continue work on CanvasPaint. How much fun it has been watching the drawings come in makes me believe the app might be useful beyond the “somewhat insane tech demo” level.
Thus the current plan is: bugfix, improve usability, redesign and add features: (re-)opening drawings, importing external images, and possibly all the cliche Web 2.0 stuff: tagging, comments, rating and whatnot. This blog (my first!) will serve as a scratchpad for ideas and progress reports.

Regardless of whether you’ll hang around to follow what becomes of this or are already bored to tears by these ramblings of some dude high on a little interweb linkage, I’d like to say: Thanks for checking out CanvasPaint!