iphone scribble webapp
As already mentioned through twitter i’m playing around with the iphone and the canvas element to build a scribble webapp running on the device (and android devices as well). It should be possible to save/upload the scribbled image afterwards. Here’s a first code snippet
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://code.jquery.com/jquery-1.4.2.min.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://jasonkuhn.net/mobile/jqui/js/jquery.iphoneui.js"></script>
<meta content="width=device-width; initial-scale=1.0; maximum-scale=1.0; user-scalable=0;" name="viewport" />
<meta charset="utf-8">
</head>
<body style="margin: 0; padding: 0; -webkit-text-size-adjust: none; padding-left: 10px; padding-top: 10px;">
<button id="save" style="position: absolute; margin-left: 10px; margin-top: 10px;">save</button>
<script type="text/javascript">
$(document).ready(
function() {
$("body").append("<canvas id='canvas' style='border: 1px solid #000;'></canvas>");
$("#canvas").attr("width", (window.innerWidth ? window.innerWidth : $(window).width()) - 20);
$("#canvas").attr("height", (window.innerHeight ? window.innerHeight : $(window).height())- 20);
$("#canvas").addTouch();
var ctx = $("#canvas")[0].getContext("2d");
ctx.lineCap = "round";
ctx.lineWidth = 15;
var start_x = null, start_y = null, drawing = false;
$("#canvas").bind("mousedown",
function(e) {
drawing = true;
start_x = e.pageX - $("#canvas").offset().left;
start_y = e.pageY - $("#canvas").offset().top;
}
);
$("#canvas").bind("mouseup",
function(e) {
drawing = false;
}
);
$("#canvas").bind("mousemove",
function(e) {
if(!drawing)
return;
var x = e.pageX - $("#canvas").offset().left;
var y = e.pageY - $("#canvas").offset().top;
ctx.beginPath();
ctx.moveTo(start_x, start_y);
ctx.lineTo(x, y);
ctx.stroke();
e.preventDefault();
start_x = x;
start_y = y;
}
);
$("#save").click(
function() {
var data = $("#canvas")[0].toDataURL("image/png").replace(/^[^,] ,/, "");
$.ajax({
type: "post",
url: "/images/upload",
data: "image=" encodeURIComponent(data),
processData: false
});
}
);
}
);
</script>
</body>
</html>
Step 1: Drawing
Drawing within the canvas is straight forward. We use mousedown, mouseup and mousemove to recognize the mouse events and draw lines between the coordinates.
Step 2: Upload
Uploading the the scribbled image is straight forward too, thanks canvas.toDataURL. toDataURL encodes the canvas using base64 what allows us to upload the encoded image using ajax or a form.
Of couse we need some server side processing. Using rails this could look like
class ImagesController < ApplicationController
def upload
open("#{RAILS_ROOT}/public/images/upload.png", "w") do |stream|
stream.write decode64(params[:image])
end
render(:update) { |page| page.alert("saved") }
end
end
Step 3: Iphone
Thanks to this jquery plugin getting this to work on the iphone is as easy as including a javascript file. It translates the iphone’s javascript touch events (touchstart, touchmove, touchend) to mousedown, mouseup, mousemove, … if you addTouch() to the element.
That’s it. Maybe it’s worth to continue working on it and publishing it as a real project, because adding a scribble-webapp (within an iframe maybe?) could be a nice feature for many mobile webapps.