Drawl is a simple drawing application for your Firefox OS phone. Users can use different brush styles, sizes and colors to draw on the canvas. They can then save the drawing to their Firefox OS Gallery app and share it with their friends.
Maureen Hanratty and I created the app through a simple collaboration process.
At first we came up with an idea for a collaborative drawing game. Stepping back we realized that, if we built a really solid drawing app it could be the foundation not only for our app but for tons of other cool drawing web apps. Maureen downloaded a bunch of apps and got a sense of what features and interactions worked well for drawing on a mobile phone. Through a series of sketches she honed in on a simple, straightforward UI for the app. To understand how the animations would work, she made a prototype in Keynote.
Maureen handed off the Keynote prototype, and I started to build the mobile web app. At first, I thought it would be great to build one app that could work across all mobile devices. But that became difficult because there are different hardware and design patterns across iOS, Android and Firefox OS. I decided to build the app just for Firefox OS. The app’s template is based off of Robert Nyman’s Boilerplate app.
After building the baseline template for Drawl, I started to create the artwork and icons for the app. I looked at the aesthetic and iconography for other drawing apps for reference. We wanted the canvas to be the focal interaction point for the user, so I made the artwork and icons stark and simple to allow the user to focus in on what they are drawing.
We want to build other apps on top of this drawing app. For instance, an Exquisite Corpse game, which you can play with friends could be great to build. We also want to get community members involved to build apps based on Drawl, submitting new brushes, color palettes, and of course taking our source code and building their own drawing based apps!
To download the app on your Firefox OS device, go here.
And if you’d like to contribute to the app (such as building apps using the drawing feature or adding new brush sets), go to the GitHub repo here and submit a Pull Request.
Happy Drawling!
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