PaintWeb integration progress

Article published on:4 August 2009, 11:15

Hello everyone!

I would like to update you all on the latest happenings in the Moodle and PaintWeb land.

I have fixed some bugs in my TinyMCE plugin which prevented it from working properly in Firefox 3.0. I also made a number of improvements to the plugin and PaintWeb itself: images can now be saved as JPEG, not only as PNG. In Opera 10 and Firefox 3.5 developers can now save Canvas images as JPEG - which is great. Thus, when you edit a JPEG image, PaintWeb uses the JPEG format to update the file. Another improvement for the plugin is now you can click the PaintWeb icon in the TinyMCE toolbar even when an image is not selected. When you do this, a dialog comes up which allows you to create a new empty image - you can setup image dimensions, background color and other options.

PaintWeb now offers better visual feedback when the image you are editing is transparent. Background color support is now improved, albeit it's missing a GUI option to change it at will - this is going to be implemented some time after the end of GSOC. Also, as explained above, PaintWeb can now save images as JPEG, thus I should provide a GUI feature for users to pick the file format they want.

Moodle 1.9 integration has progressed up to the level that now PaintWeb is entirely usable and I am quite happy with the result. Image save is currently implemented in two ways: images are saved as data URLs or as files inside the Moodle data directory. Both saving method have advantages and disadvantages. Me and Martin, we are currently discussing ways of improving image saving as files. You can read all the gory details about the Moodle 1.9 integration of PaintWeb in a Moodle Docs wiki page I wrote.

In related news, I have created a Twitter account for "ROBO Design" (for me and my twin brother). You can follow our updates on Twitter as they happen. Additionally, I published the Planet ROBO Design site, where you can follow all the updates on what we do (and I mean all updates). This small "planet" aggregates all the feeds related to us - it's a single place where you can follow anything we do.

Don't forget you can always try the PaintWeb demos online. Any feedback is always welcome!

Published in: gsoc2009, moodle, paintweb, twitter.