

37signals' Chalk Dissected - sstephenson
http://samisamhuri.blogspot.com/2010/11/37signals-chalk-dissected.html

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mrduncan
I'm curious what the rationale is for drawing from a queue instead of directly
in the move event.

Shameless plug: I threw together an open-source version for browsers (or mice,
more specifically) this morning -
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1873371>

<https://github.com/mrduncan/marker>

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joakin
Maybe a demo would help to the testing :) for those of us not having git (yet)

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mrduncan
Enjoy: <http://mrduncan.github.com/marker/>

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joakin
Good job, cool but styleless :)

Can this things be done with html5 svg?

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mrduncan
Like I said, I just threw it together this morning - patches accepted :)

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adolph
Interesting (to me) UI insight: if a workspace is not scrollable or scalable,
its dimensions are limited to the minimum common dimensions of landscape and
portrait modes. Thus Chalk's work area is almost square.

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asianmack
Close to it, 768 x 690. Here's how we arrived at that:

iPad landscape is 1024 x 690. iPad portrait is 768 x 946.

(with Safari's browser toolbar visible)

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adolph
Ah, that's the math. I had forgotten about the toolbar (thinking about the
address bar hiding).

Supporting orientation changing at all is also an interesting choice. The
addressable surface area would be larger if static, so the trade is pixels for
orientation flexibility (and the appearance of gravity holding the chalk and
eraser in place, and the orientation of the light switch...).

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asianmack
Yeah, a series of deliberate decisions led us down this path. We could have
opened it up and made it more generic. The tight scope allowed us to get it
deployed in 3 days.

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joakin
Looking at the code I wander why didnt they allow this for the iPhone (it
would be adding more media queries and nothing else). It would be pretty cool
(mainly this is envy because me not having an ipad but an iphone).

Anyway, great app, they should enclose it on an iphone app with a webkit
browser stripped down and offer it for free on the store (they have the other
premium app with more features).

These guys are amazing

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masklinn
> Looking at the code I wander why didnt they allow this for the iPhone

Time, I would guess, this was apparently built and deployed in 3 days.

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jashkenas
Direct link to the CoffeeScript/JS source: <https://gist.github.com/664351>

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js4all
Excellent walk through. Great to see these new libs and touch-related
additions in action.

This is also great example how web apps can replace native apps. I think we
will see more and more of this stuff.

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toolate
I always thought it was a shame that HTML only defined two elements for
content: <div> and <a>.

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pavlov
What elements would you like to have?

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asianmack
Spot-on!

