CanvasPaint is everything Web 2.0 should not be

(Credit: CNET Networks)

What is Web 2.0? It's freeing computing from the shackles of individual computers. It's using the Internet to make both machines and people part of a community. We all benefit from that. One of the side effects of Web 2.0 is that a lot of the things people do with traditional software (write, edit, plan, calculate, and so on) gets put on to the Web. Usually there's a worthwhile trade-off: we lose the speed of a local app, but in return, we get access from anywhere and features that connect us to others.

Just putting an application online doesn't mean it will live up to the promise of Web 2.0, though--especially if the app that's put online was a miserable one to being with. Case in point, CanvasPaint, a reproduction of Microsoft Paint that runs completely in a browser. Microsoft Paint is a bad app. It's hard to use and inflexible (although there are definitely Microsoft Paint savants). So why put it on the Web? Because you can, I guess.

Hats off to CanvasPaint's creator, Christopher Clay. He wrote this as an experiment, and as such, it's a neat, if incomplete (since it's missing features) piece of work. But taking a bad app and porting it to a new platform, even if it's an amazing technical feat to do so, does not make it inherently useful.

There are plenty of interesting online graphics apps, by the way. See the drawing app LithaPaint [blog post], for example. For photo retouching, the latest service is Pixer.us (easy to use, but limited features). For graphics, though, I'm still a believer in actual software, and I frequently use the free Paint.net [download].

[punkcandy]

It's not just that...

It's not just about putting lame applications online -- it's about the community that goes with these applications. There's a whole suite of online painting and drawing sites out there like ratemydrawings.com and queeky.com that are allowing artist to draw online and share each others techniques, comment on each others drawings. These applications will get better with time - Web 2 is about the community that can grow around these new tools (Not unlike having an online version of word for example and allowing people to share templates or share documents).

[paragmathur]

Integration and Collaboration

The problem with Paint (both Microsoft's version as well as any web based version) is that it's not vector based. Hence, once you've drawn something you cannot edit/modify or even move that shape. That's also largely true for all the new flash based web drawing apps out there. The flash based tools have the additional problem of having to replay the drawings to render them for a viewer (can be irritating at times). Even ImaginationCubed (the online whiteboard from GE has that problem). Finally, lack of integration of the drawing content with other types of content (media, RSS, etc) is a big drawback.

The power of Web 2.0 is the ability to integrate different types of content and then be able to reuse/share/collaborate that content with the web community. This could be any type of content including paint, media, news feeds, gadgets and a lot more. Sites like ZCubes (http://www.zcubes.com) are trying to achieve these goals. Check them out!