

Show HN: Doodle with strangers 1 on 1 in real-time - paintAcquaint
http://www.PaintAcquaint.com

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paintAcquaint
Hey guys,

I'm re-releasing PaintAcquaint and I wanna know what you guys think about my
site! I'll be doing a live-stream at 8 o'clock buuut here are the updates:

Updates from Beta:

-Cleaner UI w/ new icons courtesy of #tehkseven

-Updated Java Server

-Bitmapping so no more layering for each brush stroke for a drastically improved performance

-Full Screen Mode

-Hard Link for your saved photos

=]

~~~
ssebro
I just had a CRAZY session with some random dude. We wound up playing tic-tac-
toe together, without saying a word.

edit*-> I guess I'm assuming it was a dude...

~~~
paintAcquaint
haha awww. That's awesome! I remember when I first showed the prototype to my
classmates earlier this year they ended up killing an entire lecture just
using it and the professor ended up yelling at them to stop. I really hope
this time around it can catch some steam online.

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nrkn
Great idea. Unfortunately all of the people I was paired with wanted to draw
pictures of penises, scribble over the whole thing, or leave after 15 seconds.

~~~
alatkins
As soon as I saw this story I thought "DoodleRoulette!".

~~~
nrkn
Had better luck this time:

<http://www.paintacquaint.com/gallery.php?ID=231>

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anrope
Aww just had a good sesh where we drew (I think) a guy with a poster about
looking both ways before crossing the road. Accidentally clicked leave.

This is fun, and I understand the idea of communicating through drawing... but
I still find myself wanting to type at some point.

Maybe if you hang out for x seconds, you can text chat?

~~~
paintAcquaint
I was debating whether or not to add text chat, but I think the general
consensus so far from people using it is they wanna talk. I'll definitely be
adding it in the near future!

~~~
anrope
Also, completely separate thought, but I think the reddit crowd would love
this if you could draw rage faces.

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mrpollo
I was painting a guy then someone did a dog, then someone painted the sky,
some trees, and someone was starting to do an elephant but i got disconnected,
if you saved that image please share!

EDIT:

here's how it started

<http://www.paintacquaint.com/g/221.jpg>

~~~
mrpollo
I was looking for my drawing on his images folder when i got this (NSFW)
<http://www.paintacquaint.com/g/245.jpg>

Not my drawing by far but hilarious!

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BlackJack
<http://www.paintacquaint.com/gallery.php?ID=235>

This was a really fun thing and really creative picture imo!

Wow, some of the other links here are terrific. I'm amazed two random people
have enough dedication to build such detailed stuff.

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joe24pack
That was fun, I tried to paint a happy sky and a landscape, just like Bob Ross
does on his shows. But I think I did it in the wrong order. Wonder if you
could capture some of the pictures as they were being doodled and then show it
as an animation, then let people vote on their favorites.

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paintAcquaint
Well, the site's starting to bottom out. If anyone's still reading this, does
anyone know what's a good way to pull in more traffic?

I've been kinda relying on reddit and deviantArt the past couple of days.

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JoshTriplett
<http://colorillo.com/> does the same thing, using HTML and JavaScript with no
Flash, and it allows arbitrarily many participants at once.

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paintAcquaint
Hey JoshTriplett,

Colorillo does a pretty good job at real-time drawing collaboration. There's a
bunch of online-real time painting programs out there, like Flockdraw or
scriblink. I purposely coded it to have the users pair-up to kind of emulate
Omegle or Chatroulette.

The only reason why I didn't decide to make this application using HTML and JS
is because I wanted to teach myself Flash + AS3. This was my only 2nd project
in flash. I'm definitely planning on porting it to Mobile once I have free
time.

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jtchang
I think I win:

<http://www.paintacquaint.com/gallery.php?ID=224>

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peacemaker
I had a great time playing with this tonight, got into a virtual cartoon
"fight" creating super-heroes and so on. Great app.

~~~
paintAcquaint
Thank you! All this positive feedback means a lot :D

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kevinherron
<http://www.paintacquaint.com/gallery.php?ID=233>

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WestCoastJustin
Pretty neat, but needs a chat window or something. I just found myself
painting messages ;)

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ww520
Pretty cool. What's the technical stack behind it?

~~~
paintAcquaint
Oh! Glad finally someone asked. The front-end's using flash w/ as3. It was the
2nd project I made using flash, so it was really exciting when I was
scrambling across the web for resources. The original front-end the client was
actually layering each stroke on top of each other, so what ended up happening
was the client would crash after 20ish minutes of moderate use. So I fixed
that and ended up using bitmapping to handle the screen. I had a bunch of
other features that I disabled for this release [opacity and the undo
function] just because they were too buggy.

The server's running I believe CentOS 5.6? or .7? And it's written in Java.
Anywho when there's incoming information it stores the coordinates that are
being drawn into a buffer. If the buffer becomes full then it shoots it out
those coordinates. There's also a 50ms cycle that checks the size of the
buffer, so even if it's not full, it'll shoot out the points.

-edit-

I mean, for now the server architecture can handle light load but I definitely
plan on implementing a more scalable solution if I get more traffic.

