Zero to dogfood in one day.

Hey! I'm Jason, the guy that wrote Twiddla. Yesterday will go down as a pretty good day! We got a little over 1000 signups and tons of great feedback.

Tichy, the drawing is done with a Canvas tag and the IECanvas hack to get it to work in IE. Drawing with DHTML is really nothing new, but until recently you had to do it with tons of colored DIV tags. SVG and Canvas make life a lot easier for something like this.

yaacovtp, Thus far it seems the number one use case for this thing is to facilitate the drawing of balls onto things. Followed by tic tac toe. Followed by work. I bet it will become a bit more useful once we fix some of the major issues people found yesterday, and add some new features to make it more suited to its intended task of team collaboration.

Anyway, I'd encourage folks to check back in a few weeks to see if we've made any progress. Thanks again for all the great feedback!

Jason

Here's a great example of something that used to take a lot more effort to build. I had a bunch of friends who started a company to do annotation of websites just like this in 2000. They probably had 30 employees, and quite a bit of funding, and eventually got sold to MSFT for enough for the investors to get some of their cash back, and jobs for the founders (hiring is obsolete, right?)

And these folks just replicated the core functionality (probably 50% of it) in a day.

That was fun. I just started a game with the others there called "kill purple." I wrote that in the chat and then started drawing in purple. Other colors then squashed me.

This could end up being top productivity killer. Put the power of perezhilton.com in the hands of the people. Oy!

How does it work? I don't think it is possible to draw with JavaScript, so I suppose it is an AJAX application that loads the lines drawn immediately from the server? I am amazed how fast the reaction time is.

Not exactly related, but doesn't Thinkature fit into this space? I've played around with that a bit.

Great article. The demo works. What language was used?