An Unusual Paint Program | Hacker News Reader

An Unusual Paint Program

bomomo.com

63 pointsskenney2642 comments

HTML5 looks to be a real Flash killer. Nobody will ever want Flash or SilverLight when all browsers start to support <canvas>, <audio> and <video>.

Flash 10 has udp support, kinda handy for game connections.

HTML 5 will support some kind of raw-ish TCP connection (accessible from JavaScript). I think most games able to run performantly in the browser will be just fine without UDP.

yes, most games would be, we've got a realtime fps running (in flash) over standard tcp at the moment. But udp would let us scale from 2 players to 16 per game room in a much smoother way.

The one issue we have with lag is an occassional dropped packed that holds everything up.

Not to mention flash 10 will allow direct peer to peer connections, bypassing several hops...

The big advantage of Flash is that you write once and it runs everywhere. Anything that leaves it up to browsers to implement will not be able to boast that any time soon.

Flash doesn't run on iPhone and it is often slow and buggy on anything but Windows. I bet that Apple, Google and browser developers will support standards-based alternatives. We can see this happening in the original post.

iPhone is some tiny fraction of a percent of the overall market, and I'd be surprised if it ever gets to 1%. I'd be more surprised if it does so without flash support.

Flash works fine on OSX in my experience. A good portion of our startup depends on it, and my cofounders code on Macbooks.

For those of you trying bomomo.com through the iPhone, it is intriguing - it looks like a flash-based application (albeit non-interactive).

If only Apple were to create some hook for WebKit/Sproutcore that allowed iPhone web applications to do something with finger touches (this is difficult because of the pinch gestures require mouse/t-pad tracking - but maybe they can have a JS API hook to toggle/disable pinching for webapps)

Come on, iPhone will go fine, nothing can stop it. Only Android has some chances, but nobody knows when they will appear. It's a future, man, and it will do without Flash support.

The iPhone can be wildly successful and still be less than 1% of the browser market - a market that includes every desktop and laptop computer as well as every other smart phone.

Well, nothing has to stop it. It has serious inherent limitations. Tiny screen, being tethered to one carrier, etc. It could become the most wildly successful phone on the market and still be only 10% of phone-based browsing, and phone-based browsing, having those limitations, could only be 10% of all browsing.

Only the first setting makes anything I want to look at, but I'm very inspired that that's canvas and not Flash. For me (FF3, Ubuntu) it runs better than Flash usually does, too.

This site uses <canvas> and javascript, no flash.

Unusual? Yes. Practical? Not really. Hacker News? er... Nevermind. :)

It is nice to see this type of stuff here sometimes, it's interesting and amusing.

As a hacker who's always been fascinated with multimedia applications I thought it was a perfect fit.

Just clarifying in case that didn't come through as I thought, that was sarcasm. It wasn't a bad post. :)

The sarcasm didn't come through, sorry.

Recently it seems like almost every post has a comment thread about how the post isn't hacker news... those threads end up being more annoying than the posts imho.

I've noticed that too. These comments are in the same category as people complaining about being downmodded; they don't make very interesting reading. Perhaps I should put something in the site guidelines about them.

Please do. It's really getting ridiculous at this point.

Meh. I had really meant the above post to be a sarcastic satire of the 'this isn't hacker news' posts you all just mentioned. Sorry, I suppose it sounded different in my mind.

Perhaps before posting any post that contains red flag words or phrases should require an additional confirmation:

This post contains words that suggest you are being boring. Are you being boring?

Strings that stick out: "belong.*on hacker" "doesn't belong" etc...

Interesting idea. Though of course the way to do it is to train a filter...

I can't wait to read a post on the use of Markov chains or Bloom filters to prevent boring posts.

If your Markov chain can plausibly generate the post - it's boring?

Even more concerning to me is how frequently these "not hacker news" comments are added to posts that are off the beaten track (i.e. not about code, startups, and such) but which I find genuinely interesting. The last thing I'd want for this site is diminished diversity. I don't like the spam or bait posts either, but I'm glad you haven't cracked down on them in a way that triggers this other, imho more significant risk.

Edit: while I'm at it, the "not hacker news" noise belongs to a more general class that I've been training myself to tune out, which is the "meta hacker news" category. A bad day here is one in which there's more discussion of the site itself than anything else. And yes, I'm fully aware that I'm doing it right now. :) But I've been resisting it successfully for weeks...

>Recently it seems like almost every post has a comment thread about how the post isn't hacker news...

Most of the ones I've noticed are on stories such as "entertainment celebrity x dies", "politician y does z unrelated to tech", or "OMG we're all going to die as soon as the economy collapses and we devolve into cannibalism and the last survivor is driven insane from Global Warming and kills himself".

I don't read every comment thread, but it's mostly those stories that I see "not Hacker News" on.

It would be quite amazing to see someone who has mastered this tool use it to paint something.

Like Jackson Pollock.

does anyone know how you write code to implement drawing operations like this efficiently? i remember in the late 90s there was stuff you could do, for instance, where you had a large number of low-opacity swirling ellipse objects that looked like smoke (basically a very crude particle system) - and it brought my Pentium 3 450 to its knees. (this is what i'm referring to: http://www.presstube.com/project.php?id=212 )

have computers just gotten faster, or does Flash have some way of doing, say, hardware-accelerated graphics?

Try the new HTML <canvas> tag. But yes, Flash can do all sorts of animation and drawing pretty efficiently.

It's very therapeutic; perhaps they should market it to art therapists.

amazing and beautiful

kills my browser (ff3)

Works great here, fast and snappy.

FF3 final on Ubuntu 8.0.1 - I'd check my plugins if I were you.

In the latest Webkit with the squirrelfish javascript engine it runs very smoothly. Really nice program.

Just. Wow. I've never seen anything like this outside of a sandbox like Flash/Silverlight.

Runs very slowly in Fx3.0_rc1.

weird, runs smoothly on a core 2 quad 2.4 ghz machine with firefox 3.0 rc1, windows xp sp 2.

I'm using Ubuntu 8.01 and have the same problem as the grandparent.

Slow for me, but I'm still using opera 9.20 and an 800Mhz Coppermine.

That's really neat, thanks for sharing.

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