Autodesk Labs: Project Draw Offline
February 1st, 2008 | Published in Google Gears
David Falck and Shelly Mujtaba, members of Autodesk Labs, recently announced a new release of Project Draw that allows you to take your diagrams offline using Google Gears.
Project Draw is a browser based diagraming utility that lets you draw to your hearts content, without the need for plugins of any kind.
I got to meet David and Shelly, and we discussed their work, and experience with Google Gears.
They talked about how they are able to get a drawing experience that performs across browser, where it turns out they abstracted SVG and VML. They thought it would be a good idea to see a SVG Gear that made sure that SVG support was in the browsers that didn't support it natively, which is a good idea.
They also talked about how they did offline, and the difference between being offline, and being connected.
They actually used their own tool to create a state diagram of how Project Draw handles synchronization issues.
For example, they check the network in the application using code like this:
var netCheck = new NetworkDetection("ping.html");
netCheck.addEventListener("online", function(eAja){
$("display").innerHTML = "";
$("display").removeClassName("offline");
this.connected = true;
});
netCheck.addEventListener("offline", function(eAja){
$("display").innerHTML = "d\ni\ns\nc\no\nn\nn\ne\nc\nt\ne\nd";
$("display").addClassName("offline");
setHelp("You are disconnected from the Project Draw server.");
this.connected = false;
});
Listen in to the chat below:
If you are working on an interesting Gears project, or know of one that we haven't covered, let us know in the comments!