Tuesday, June 29, 2010

HTML 5, Canvas and diagrams

This post could be named "How it started" but first it was HTML 5 and then the story unfolds.

All started back in March 2010 in Rome, Italy. I was there in a vacation with my lady and after a full day visiting interesting museums I wanted a piece of IT.

Grabbed my lady netbook and sneak out of the hotel apartment while she was in shower. Went down the stair to the hall, found a cozy couch and start browsing for something interesting.

I ended up on w3 site and from there to html 5 specs. Later on I found some interesting stuff you can do with HTML 5 (at canvasdemo) and ended up with the new tag canvas. I was amazed....it was like the first applet or first flash animation I saw...but hey WITHOUT any plugin.

Vacation ended and I went back to work. As I'm involved in many projects at the same time I had to make same basic diagrams to explain stuff to people I work with. Every time I had to use Visio or other desktop application.....until the apple bump my head and I said: "Wait a minute mister, why don't we have a browser diagram editor?"

From there it's only sweat, blood and hubris. I've made a small 'prototype' and later on Zack joined me to move this to 'proof of concept'. Later on two of my friends (Toni and Augustin) joined me to make a beta release of the application.

I'm personally embarrassed by how unpolished the application is at this point but I think it's good way to show people what HTML 5 is capable of. See diagramo.com

So give it a try and let us know how do you like it.