CtPaint - New paint software that runs in your browser

[Chadtech]

Hey Everyone!

I havent posted in here in a quite a while, but I am really happy to share with you all a huge project I have been working on for the last few years.



Its called "CtPaint" (ctpaint.org), and its a paint program that runs in your web browser. Aside from being good paint software that works really well in such a weird environment like the web browser, I added features like being able to save to your drawings directly to a url and being able to load any drawing from a url.

I dont have a complete list of its features, but it includes:

• replace color menu
• resize canvas menu
• RGB/HSL color picker
• scale menu
• invert
• pencil
• rectangle
• text menu
• eraser
• line
• fill
• sample
• four swatches and an expandable color palette
• zoom
• minimap
• gallery view
• select
• color transparency (kind of like how MSPaint does transparency)
• Undo / redo
• Download to PNG

Im really curious if you like it! If you have any feedback, please tell me, I want to make this software work well for you. When I started this project a few years back I talked to 10 or 20 random folks around here about what they want from their paint software, if you were one of them, thank you again!

Theres still some features I havent implemented yet, like layers, and real transparency. Right now I am just releasing a baseline paint app I can improve upon later.

[surt]

Testing in Chrome on Linux.

• Opens with pan tool selected. Panning a blank image seems rather useless. Starting with pencil tool seems more natural to me.
• Every few strokes with pencil tool the canvas gets cleared. EDIT: noticed a similar issue in one of my projects that was never a problem before, so checked Firefox and this seems fine there. May be a problem with my Chrome install.
  
• RMB opens context menu, except on colour swatches.
• Colour picker sliders only move by dragging thin, hard-to-grab handle. I want to set the position where I click.
• Drawing position is offset from cursor.
• No modeless view transform?
• Not indexed?
• Change brush size?

[Chadtech]

Thanks Surt!

• Yeah I see what you mean about the pan tool not making sense. Ill change it to a pencil tool soon then
• Im sorry you had such a bad experience, I havent experienced anything that catastrophic yet. Ive developed the whole thing in Chrome, but never on Linux.
• I dont have any features that use the RMB, except on the color swatches. What kind of functionality would you expect from RMB? (Now that youve pointed this out, I dont know how Ive developed CtPaint this long without adding RMB functionality)
• What do you mean by "drawing position is offset from cursor?" like its not drawing where you click?
• What is modeless view transform
• Yeah no indexed palette yet. I know how important that is to pixel art, but I dont have it in this first release
• Same as above, altho the eraser can change sizes, but its a square in shape

[surt]

I dont have any features that use the RMB, except on the color swatches. What kind of functionality would you expect from RMB? (Now that youve pointed this out, I dont know how Ive developed CtPaint this long without adding RMB functionality)

Conventionally either secondary colour or colour picker.

What do you mean by "drawing position is offset from cursor?" like its not drawing where you click?

The on-canvas brush preview and drawing is offset by two or three pixels to the bottom and right from the crosshair cursor centre.

What is modeless view transform

Being able to adjust the view without having to change tool mode. For example always able to use MMB/space to pan and MW to zoom, without needing to switch to any dedicated view transform tools.

[Chadtech]

Okay great, I will put the right click functionality in my todo list.

Regarding the on brush preview, okay I think I understand what you are saying now. I had a sense something was wrong, but I couldnt really articulate what and I thought it might just be in my head. Ill try and get to the bottom of that then

So you actually can zoom without the zoom tool. Its the "=" and "-" keys on the keyboard. Someone else didnt know there were key commands, so I think I need to find a way to communicate that these commands do exist, and what they are.

[Chadtech]

Thanks again Surt, I just released another build of CtPaint, that includes:

• Right click drawing. Now right clicking on the canvas will use the bottom swatch color
• The sliders in the color picker look different, have a wider click area, and now jump to new locations when you click
• The app initializes with the pencil tool

Your other points of feedback werent forgotten, they are just in the back log

[interlocutor]

Dam, this is amazing. There are so many features!

What is your plan for this project in the future?

It puts my project to shame, haha!
See here: https://pixelation.org/index.php?action=profile;area=showposts;u=77747

[Chadtech]

Thanks!

My immediate plans are to just hang out for a little while, accumulate feedback, and implement small changes when needed.

In the long term, I would like to circle back and implement a whole separate mode with all the big features I think are missing, like indexed palette, brushes, layers, etc.