iSketch and iScribble

The next project is a "Visual Synthesiser" and I have been toying with the idea of making a more dynamic drawing or paint program where users can draw something and watch it spring to life or move in some way.

But first I have decided to look at two online collaborative drawing communities: iSketch (http://www.isketch.net) and iScribble (http://www.iscribble.net).

Both iSketch and iScribble are flash-based sites with a focus on multi-user drawing. However, iSketch acts as more of a Pictionary-esque game while iScribble is more oriented on collaborative art.

The two sites have different goals but take similar routes to get there. Both iSketch and iScribble allow user-created and official rooms. These are accessed via a main room list menu. In iSketch this menu is quite small and dwarfed in comparison to the massive Main Chat window to the left of it (which is strange because it serves little purpose at all). This means the user has to scroll quite a lot to get through the room list. iScribble's room list is a lot larger and takes up most of the screen, requiring little scrolling to navigate. Also, the iScribble swf object as a whole is about twice the size of iSketch. iSketch's size can be attributed from the 800x600 resolution prevalence in the days of Web 1.0, but there is no excuse for this nowadays when the object barely takes up a fraction of space on modern widescreen monitors.

When it comes to the drawing GUI of these sites, iScribble is the better option for drawing. In iSketch, the colour picker and other panels are minuscule and awkward to use while in iScribble they are large, nicely spread out and easy to use. iSketch offers the user the ability to drag around panels to suit their workflow while iScribble's UI is completely static and non-customisable. In terms of features, iSketch has shape and fill tools which iScribble confusingly lacks. However iScribble offers advanced blurring and smudging tools to make up for this and users have access to 3 layers to structure their drawings (though the highlighting of the current layer could be a little more obvious - often a user will accidentally draw on the wrong layer which can at times completely ruin an image).