
Show HN: Kiddo Paint - vikrum
https://github.com/vikrum/kiddopaint
======
vikrum
Hey HN — so, after finding a 15-30min block at the end of each day over the
span of about a a month, this little side project is about done. I had a blast
working on this with my kids acting as PMs :) I haven't tested it on non-OSX,
and I imagine that the unicode/emoji support will be broken. I considered just
including the OTF for those, but that's on order of ~40MB. Ideas welcome!

~~~
jlawton
Don't let Bloomberg Magazine find this - they'll use it for all their covers!

Seriously though, this is a ton of fun!

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stevejohnson
I love the spirit of this, and I've been waiting for someone to make it for
years, if I didn't get to it first!

If anyone wants to make a similar web app, I maintain an open source library
whose sole purpose is putting JavaScript drawing programs on web pages with
custom tools.

[http://literallycanvas.com/](http://literallycanvas.com/)

Here's a simple web app I made with it that saves to local storage and uploads
to Dropbox and Imgur: [http://drawplz.com](http://drawplz.com)

(The text tool is slightly broken right now; the selection box drag corners
are invisible.)

~~~
tekromancr
Oh, cool! I actually played with literally canvas a little while ago when I
built this:
[http://tekromancr.github.io/drawchat/](http://tekromancr.github.io/drawchat/)

I eventually decided to go with drawingboard, though I don't remember exactly
why. But I was absolutely thinking about using literally canvas to build a
kidpix-style webapp!

~~~
stevejohnson
I'd guess there was some kind of missing API. I've done a lot of work on the
API over the past six months, so you might find it to be a lot better these
days.

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slig
I loved it. Have you ever thought about adding a "replay" button? It'd clear
the canvas and show, step by step, what the kid draw.

I've been building one similar, but for grown ups and I'm learning lots of
cool stuff from your code. For instance, I just learned about `createPattern`.
Thanks for sharing!

~~~
giancarlostoro
That reminds me of that one program where you would pick a scene and make
Spider Man do different things, I forgot the name of it. It was a lovely chunk
of my childhood, and my adulthood if I ever find the disk... Found a link
while googling it:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2THuctqMXis](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2THuctqMXis)

Of course featuring audio might be a slight bit more than this project is
designed for, but it is still neat haha!

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azinman2
Good job! I liked Kid Pix as a kid myself...big part of my childhood.

The other day I was thinking back to my school days when Apple's ImageWriter
II's were everywhere, and people used Print Shop (I think?) to make banners
all the time. Because of how the printing technology worked -- writing to a
continuous stream of paper -- banners were easy to do. We had banners in many
of our class rooms, birthday parties, etc. My guess is banners are just not
done anymore, and it also seems like many of these kinds of creative tools
aren't common place? Do kids even have printers? Anyone with kids care to
chime in?

~~~
vikrum
I have many fond memories of Print Shop! I remember that program would also
print "greeting cards" that you'd fold in quarters. The banners were a pre-
birthday task that'd never get overlooked :)

It's interesting that an entire category of features fell by the wayside as a
byprodct of the elimination of form-feed/perforated paper.

~~~
neovive
I fondly remember Print Shop printing cards and banners on the Epson LX-80 dot
matrix on the Apple IIe monochrome (green and black screen). Piecing a banner
together these days from a series of 8x10 sheets is just not the same. :)

------
joonoro
This is great! I can definitely see one of the reasons _why_ it works so well
for kids: there aren't any weird menu buttons that you might accidentally
press and get lost in. You just draw and push the buttons to see what
difference they make.

~~~
vikrum
It's funny you mention that — the author of Kid Pix wrote about the motivation
around his app and he specifically calls that out as well:

"I didn't want to use pull-down menus for this because, among other reasons,
Ben had trouble with them. " [[http://red-green-blue.com/kid-pix-the-early-
years/](http://red-green-blue.com/kid-pix-the-early-years/)]

I tried to stick to and follow as many of the directives he has listed with
Kiddo Paint.

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bjackman
Nice! Couple of things:

\- Firefox on Ubuntu yields "TypeError: t.srcElement is undefined" when I try
to change the colour.

\- I don't have any fonts for some of the icons in the buttons (e.g. the
arrow). Seeing as you're presumably already loading the textures for drawing
onto the canvas, you might as well just use an image for the buttons too.

Hope this helps.

~~~
vikrum
Thanks for the report; I have screenshots from others and will take a look at
fixes shortly. Cheers!

------
kbenson
It's worth mentioning TuxPaint[1], which has been around for over a decade.
That said, well done! There's no reason we shouldn't have plenty of choices
for free and open source childrens software.

1: [http://www.tuxpaint.org/](http://www.tuxpaint.org/)

~~~
pbhjpbhj
I've never heard of KidPix before but KiddoPaint seems like a web based less
colourful TuxPaint - always loved the sound effects, the kids liked them too.

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ismail
Nice. Will test it out. As a parent of a 3 year old & 15 month I find it
amazing how quickly the pickup on things. I also belive we are witnessing the
"app generation" growing up. We limit ipad time etc. But my daughter does not
ask for TV. .. she asks for youtube/netflix.

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mmccaff
Well done! My train-obsessed 3 year old would approve of the stamp toolbar
defaulting to a train.

A button to download the canvas as a png or jpg would be nice for saving and
sharing special creations.

~~~
vikrum
Same with my kids! See also the draggable train tracks! :D

not at all obvious: keyboard, 's' to save/download :)

~~~
mmccaff
Ah, nice! :) The Github did mention that there was a handful of hidden
features.

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ohitsdom
The explosion noise when clicking on the bomb is a nice touch :)

~~~
jasonjayr
The original KidPix had that idea, an old drawing application that could
desperately use a refresh to modern interfaces .....

~~~
vikrum
I actually got KidPix 1.0 running in a virtual machine— a handful of the
"brushes" are as-faithful-as-I-could-make-them ports from KidPix! (including
the skeleton and layout for Kiddo Paint) :) Fun fact: KidPix 1.0 was released
into the public domain by the author; it was only subsequent versions that
were commercial.

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chrisguilbeau
Wow, so are we on the same wavelength or something? I made this a few weeks
ago on JS fiddle with the idea of recreating kidpix. Even used unicode chars
with a face for the undo!

[https://jsfiddle.net/97vLt5dj/24/](https://jsfiddle.net/97vLt5dj/24/)

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sanoli
Sorry for asking here, but does anybody know of a web page where you get to
see someone's drawing and then you write a caption for it, then someone else
will have the caption open on their monitor and they get to draw it, and on
and on? It was fun! Then I lost the URL...

------
joegreen
Windows + Firefox => looks like cars don't work - some icons are not visible
and all of them are just creating rectangles in the picture
[http://snag.gy/4fm3H.jpg](http://snag.gy/4fm3H.jpg)

~~~
vikrum
Thanks for the report & screenshot! What, in general, happens with other emoji
on Windows? Namely, the Apple color emoji—is there an analogue that Windows
users fall back to?

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zck
Great -- the very first button I press (the frowning cat) cleared out my
entire painting. And I have no idea how to get it back.

Clicking on every button shows that clicking the cat again brings it back.
What does this cat actually do? Labels would be useful.

~~~
machinelearning
The bomb feature could very easily turn creative play time into a traumatizing
event for a child. I second the labelling of the buttons. With that being
said, amazing product!

------
mambodog
If you'd like a flashback of the original Kid Pix:
[https://jamesfriend.com.au/pce-js/](https://jamesfriend.com.au/pce-js/)

------
sumo
We had the same idea but wanted to go much much further. You should really try
it out, its called Collusion. [https://col.lu/](https://col.lu/) You have to
sign up but it keeps your drawings like google docs and is real-time
collaborative without the other people signing up.

Works on everything too, tablets, laptops, supports ms surface etc and is free
for public drawings.

The explore page on our website also shows you what others have drawn so also
check that out.
[https://collusionapp.com/explore](https://collusionapp.com/explore)

~~~
ocdtrekkie
I don't know if I'd say it's really the same. There's tons of drawing apps,
but this is much more of a nostalgic thing, and it's for kids.

Also, it's open source, which is a huge draw. (I'm going to be porting it to a
web platform... probably tonight, I'm excited.)

~~~
sumo
Depends what you mean by kids, but actually we did a lot of work with schools
and the kids love it.

------
maaarghk
I love it! Great work man. Feel like a kid again :)

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rglover
Fantastic. So many hours spent in MS Paint and friends when I was younger.
Firing up your demo site made me feel like a kid again.

Great idea :)

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chdir
> 15-30min block at the end of each day over the span of about a month

Admire your speed ! It's a fun app with lots of nifty features.

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Camillo
The pencil sputters individual squares when you click and drag the mouse. It
should draw a continuous line instead.

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triangleman
I'm a... Commander Salamander... with a thousand toes and and a pickle in my
nose... AND... I float in the ocean!

edit: Draw me

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jMyles
On Ubuntu and Firefox, I can't seem to change the color.

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leviathan
Nice. This would actually make for a nice iPad app.

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ninjakeyboard
This is damn fun.

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ocdtrekkie
I love the heck out of this.

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lucio
very nice! I'll try it with my kid

