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Drawing at Colorillo makes more fun when you draw together with other people. And most probably it’s even more fun if those people are your friends! So here comes a new feature that allows you to easily notify your friends to have them draw with you.

I have cleaned up the user interface a little: below the color and brush selector you can now find the new “Invite your friends” button. Click on it, and the dialog on the right will appear.

Currently, only with Twitter and Facebook you can automatically invite your friends. To notify them on other media you need to copy the URL which can be see on the bottom part of the screen.

I have integrated three buttons into the invitation screen which let you choose where you actually want to draw with your friends. This also makes it more explicit that there are private pictures on Colorillo which sometimes gets misunderstood.

Happy drawing with your friends!

Today I’m able to announce a new feature once again. This one isn’t visible from the user interface, though.

Continuing to resemble the most commonly used features of desktop drawing apps, I have added a straight line drawing mode, and it works like this:

Use the Shift key.

That’s it. Actually it’s a little more complex. There are basically two modes operated by the shift key:

1. Hold shift and draw a line: the resulting line will be either vertical or horizontal, depending on the direction you started drawing, and stay in a straight line.
2. Hold shift and just click: this will draw straight lines between your clicks.

I actually like the latter mode better, because it feels more natural to me, but try it out yourself!

Obviously the focus on Colorillo is to enable collaborative drawing. And drawing is what it all is about. So I hesitated to implement this feature, but in the mean while I figure it is well worth it and doesn’t distract from the drawing all too much (maybe also because of the implementation I chose).

So now you can chat on Colorillo. This is not meant to be for telling the story of your life, but for short messages, for example to take people with you to a private room by sharing the address.

The implementation is unlike other chats in that there is no list of recent messages (and therefore no history, though this might change), but rather bubbles appear above the user who said something. That way you don’t need to pick a username just to chat.

So you start a chat by clicking on the little “chat” link right of your user line (in bold type) in the online list. A popup will ask you for your message, then just press enter and done. Everyone else on the same page will see what you wrote.

There are two keyboard shortcuts associated with the chat function: Enter and Esc. Use the Enter key to start a message or to reply to a message, use Escape to hide the message currently being displayed.

An unfortunate side effect of lots of people drawing anonymously on a page, is that there always seems to be someone who think it’s funny to destroy what other people are drawing.

And if the destruction would only be drawing over everything else, but people (actually I assume some men) seem to have loads of fun drawing penises.

I have a bit of a hard time understanding such people, but I figured I could do something about it nonetheless: You can now selectively ignore people.

This actually plays nicely with the online list feature that I announced here yesterday: you determine who of the people on the list is the nasty one, and then simply click on the new ignore link that is show beside each drawer. Remember that you can use the Show last line feature to discover who just drew nonsense.

How unfortunate that I had to include this functionality. But always remember: you can create a private room, also based on the image you are currently viewing.

To be honest, I am not fully content with the functionality yet: When you reload the page, the lines drawn by people you wished to ignore will still be visible. I am still working on that and trying to figure out what to do about this, I’ll keep you posted on this.

Actually the problem seems to decline now that it’s more the people who really want to draw come to Colorillo, and not the masses that have just clicked a link on StumbleUpon and are plain bored.

Today I present to you a feature that enables you to see who it actually was who just drew this magnificent thing on Colorillo.

You can view the last line drawn by any user that you see in your online list, as long as the last line has been drawn while you were on the site.

This will also come handy for a feature that I will be able to announce soon. So stay tuned!