Comments on: bomomo flash drawing/physics app

bomomo flash drawing/physics app

mathowie — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 13:34:05 -0800

bomomo is a fun little drawing tool that creates some pretty interesting brush patterns using a variety of physics and mouse behavior. You can even save your finest works (Firefox and Safari only though) [via mefi projects]

By: mathowie

mathowie — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 13:34:42 -0800

Here's something I came up with in five minutes of playing with the app. Too bad it doesn't host the saved images on its own server.

By: Dizzy

Dizzy — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 13:41:57 -0800

It's like an electronic Spiro-graph!

By: saulgoodman

saulgoodman — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 13:50:06 -0800

this is really cool. thx!

By: Outlawyr

Outlawyr — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 13:52:33 -0800

Cool, thanks for posting this.

By: missmagenta

missmagenta — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 13:53:11 -0800

Its not flash though (as the tags might suggest) - thats what makes it so cool.

By: R. Mutt

R. Mutt — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 13:58:36 -0800

That is strange and cool. (Kinda looks like a "how to become a dad" film strip though.)

By: rooftop secrets

rooftop secrets — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 14:19:03 -0800

wish there was an 'undo' feature. i just ruined my masterpiece.

By: Joakim Ziegler

Joakim Ziegler — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 14:19:34 -0800

It's like a screensaver, except more manual. Actually, the first few tools seem to be quite effective for drawing things that look a lot like subway maps.

By: weapons-grade pandemonium

weapons-grade pandemonium — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 14:20:44 -0800

Cool. Thanks, Matt.

By: mathowie

mathowie — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 14:22:21 -0800

oops, I removed the flash tag. What the heck is Canvas?

By: enn

enn — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 14:37:35 -0800

Is everyone using this on Safari? It's unusably slow on Firefox for me. (Or is that just my crappy ancient computer?)

By: R. Mutt

R. Mutt — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 14:41:59 -0800

Yeah, it looks great on Safari.

By: tkchrist

tkchrist — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 14:47:08 -0800

I wish I could choose my own colors.

By: Freen

Freen — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 14:52:46 -0800

This is HAWT.

By: missmagenta

missmagenta — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 15:19:56 -0800

Is everyone using this on Safari? It's unusably slow on Firefox for me. (Or is that just my crappy ancient computer?) I'm using it in FF (win xp) and its running exceptionally smoothly - I would have thought so much scripting would kill my little laptop but its seemlessly smooth. How much ram do you have?

By: enn

enn — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 15:25:48 -0800

1GB of RAM on a P4 2.4GHz. Looking at the comments on the creator's blog, it seems like maybe this is a Firefox on Linux thing?

By: missmagenta

missmagenta — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 15:26:11 -0800

oops, I removed the flash tag. What the heck is Canvas? Canvas

By: missmagenta

missmagenta — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 15:31:08 -0800

1GB of RAM on a P4 2.4GHz. Looking at the comments on the creator's blog, it seems like maybe this is a Firefox on Linux thing? I'm on a celeron 1.73Ghz with 1Gb RAM and it works fine. Must be a Linux thing.

By: philipp

philipp — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 15:41:21 -0800

Sorry for slowness, can't pinpoint it to any specific machine or setting yet... will keep listening to feedback. Matt, Canvas is a vector framework that you can access in JavaScript... it works natively in Firefox, Opera, Safari, and with a little trick even in Internet Explorer... it is a lot of fun to use, but unfortunately, I don't know if there's any way to make it work fast enough in IE, all my speed tests were incredibly slow as soon as you add a couple of sprites or actually draw something. If there's any Flash guru out there who likes this project, please ping me at info@blogoscoped.com :) My friend who does Flash wanted to look into it perhaps after July.

By: public

public — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 15:58:15 -0800

Canvas is a vector framework that you can access in JavaScript... it works natively in Firefox, Opera, Safari, and with a little trick even in Internet Explorer... If you count extremely slow and largely broken as working then yes, it works just fine in IE.

By: DU

DU — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 16:03:30 -0800

Another vote for impossibly slow on FF/Linux with very recent hardware.

By: freebird

freebird — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 16:15:45 -0800

(Firefox and Safari only though) Can I just say that - despite myself - I love seeing this?

By: R. Mutt

R. Mutt — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 16:59:25 -0800

BTW, I just showed it to a nine year old - whose immediate response was: OH MY GOSH COOOOOL!

By: loquacious

loquacious — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 17:03:30 -0800

FF/win2k = runs like frozen molasses. (older 1.5 ghz machine) By "frozen molasses" I mean "one particle update about every 2 seconds or so" which means it would take me approximately 25,000 years to draw Matt's doodle.

By: gwint

gwint — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 17:15:37 -0800

Here's something slightly similar I made eight years ago.

By: dbiedny

dbiedny — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 17:46:00 -0800

I sometimes wonder why we don't see standalone graphics apps with these types of procedural capabilities - the closest yet is Studio Artist (currently Mac-only), the particle brushes in that program are just astounding. Thanks for this post, it's just too much fun!

By: yhbc

yhbc — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 17:59:32 -0800

A new version of Microsoft Paint that I need to open up a separate browser for? Color me underwhelmed.

By: artifarce

artifarce — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 18:22:31 -0800

Actually, the first few tools seem to be quite effective for drawing things that look a lot like subway maps. This is either the subway map for a city that hired the mayor's nephew to plan it, or the art commissioned to hang in the women's bathroom in said subway.

By: Muddler

Muddler — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 18:45:38 -0800

If this only worked on IE, half this thread would be people complaining that it didn't work in firefox or Safari.

By: thylacine

thylacine — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 19:37:11 -0800

One of those mirror-like brushes caused a momentarily flashback to the days of Deluxe Paint IIe and it's mirroring brush.

By: dirtynumbangelboy

dirtynumbangelboy — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 19:55:15 -0800

Very pretty. But yeah, feature request: ability to select own palettes.

By: super11

super11 — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 20:48:16 -0800

Very nice, can I save my drawings?

By: gen

gen — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 04:13:42 -0800

Canvas support will be much better in Firefox 3 which is shipping sometime this month. See one of the Firefox platform developer's blogs, HTML Canvas in Firefox 3, as well as documentation from the Mozilla Developer Center, Drawing text using a canvas, Canvas tutorial, for more detail.

By: artifarce

artifarce — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 06:58:55 -0800

The "save" is the little disk icon on the right side of the screen. Just realized what a bad representation that is for save, nowadays.

By: vsync

vsync — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 09:01:12 -0800

Runs terribly slowly in FF3rc1 on Linux.

By: rusty

rusty — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 09:09:34 -0800

Works great for me on FF 2.0.0.14 / Linux.

By: philipp

philipp — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 05:20:16 -0800

Bomomo is now available in an IExplorer version too, using a Flash conversion created by Nikolai Kordulla!

By: Sitegeist

Sitegeist — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 03:41:18 -0800

Running fine for me in FF 3 on Ubuntu 8.04. Thank you philipp, lovely project.