panels-www
panels
panels is a simple web-based sketching application built on top
of Ian Li's Raphael SketchPad and Mozilla's
localforage library.
Sketches can be saved to (and re-loaded (and deleted) from) the browser's
local storage database. panels can also be configured to upload sketches to a remote server or to cache all its application files so you can run it in offline mode.
Raphael SketchPad exposes a number of "canvas" and "pen" related options. None
of them are available in panels. They might be one day but for now the easiest
way to think about things is being like sketching with a pen. The default settings for the "pen" are 1-pixel wide with an opacity of 60 percent. There is no undo.
panels
uses Scalable
Vector Graphics (SVG) under
the hood so all of your sketches can
be view source-ed allowing them to be exported as a set of drawing instructions, in
plain text. This
is one of those things that never seems very important until it is (at which
point it's usually too late) so there's a
handy button for doing just that on every sketch.
Is there a demo?
Yes. There is a live demo that you can play with. There is also experimental offline-enabled demo if you're feeling adventurous.
How do I set up my own instance of panels?
Unless you are interested in uploading sketches to a remote server panels has
no server-side dependencies and can be run as-is in any old (modern-ish) web
browser. The only thing you'll need to do is copy the www/index.html.example file to
www/index.html.
The reason you need to do this is because www/index.html is
explicitly forbidden from being included in source control. That might seen a
bit strange for a web-application but is necessary because it prevents any
custom changes that a person makes to enable uploads (which are configured in the index.html file) from
being applied to everyone else's stuff.
Configuring panels to upload sketches to a remote server or to run in "offline-mode" is
outside the scope of this document. Please
consult the
main Github repository for details.