We've been down for the count for 57 hours

Litha-Paint.com is online again after a massive knock-out. We apologies for such a long interruption. During the technical investigation of the server's crash we've learned a several simple lessons:

1. Never use Sun's JDK 1.5 on Red Hat 7.2.
At the first time, tomcat has been working fine for a week. But then the server hanged. Even sshd did not work. Only hard reboot did help. It seems like RH 7.2 is too old for J5.

2. It is not easy to use even jdk 1.4 on Red Hat 7.2 without X11.
AWT subsystem uses X11 server which is absent on our RH 7.2 installation. It is not enough to only run "/usr/X11R6/bin/Xvfb :0 -screen 0 1024x768x32 &" (see http://www.pokerapp.com/xvfb.html and http://www.idevelopment.info). In addition to that you must use "-Djava.awt.headless=true" option for java (see http://groups.yahoo.com).

3. Study release notes more thoroughly.
Before deciding what platform you want just be sure that your software works well on it. Quite simple, isn't it? :-)

We are happy that you are with us.

Litha-Paint has been tested under the following browsers:

1) IE 6.0;
2) FF 1.5;
3) Opera 8.5.

Please let us know if you have any problems with Litha-Paint under any other browser (excluding Lynx :-)).

Some minor bugs have been fixed.

Two hours ago we've submit a minor fix to Litha-Paint. Following bugs have been fixed:
1) now it is not neccessary to press "Bucket" button to get object filled. After selecting color and pressing "Apply" button, selected object will be filled;
2) after joining two figures there is no more duplication of object;
3) now it more convenient to target a node point;
4) "Split" menu item has been removed for terminal node points;
5) splash screen is centered and is closing by mouse click;
6) colors of the files list is fixed;
7) text area has input focus in FF 1.5;
8) text element has normal width after loading of the document.

Please note that Litha-Paint doesn't use right mouse button because some browsers have reserved it. Thus we have two unnatural UI solutions:
1) in order to finish poly(line/gon) or bezier curve press ESC;
2) press left mouse button on the node point to open context menu for that node point.

"Import SVG document" feature would be added later

After switching to Beta phase we are going to add import of SVG document feature. At the moment Litha-Paint can open images only in its own format. But export to SVG format is available right now! You can create SVG images and publish it on the Web. When user open Litha-Paint first time, two directories has been created on the server: one for storing working documents in Litha-Paint format(this directory is private and only user has access to it) and other for publishing work on the internet in any of the following formats: SVG, PNG, JPG and TIFF.

Upload command has been fixed

Hi there. There was a bug in the upload functionality that leads to JavaScript error after upload has been performed. We fixed this bug. We know that application still has bugs but it is in alpha phase after all :-). After fixing major bugs we are going to implement help system that would explain features in detail.

Rollout completted!

Hooray! Yesterday night we did rollout of first alpha version of our online vector graphic editor. The most features that are presented in this editor work pretty stable. We know that there are still some bugs in the Undo/Redo functionality. This would be fixed soon.

First Litha-Paint alpha version is started !

Do you think that it is impossible to make a graphic editor using only HTML and JavaScript?
Trust your eyes. This full featured graphic editor is written only on HTML and JavaScript.
You don't need Flash-plugins, VML or SVG on the browser anymore. There is no need to download and install traditional offline software.
You can draw fine pictures having only a plain browser without any plugins! Furthermore, you can publish your picture to the Web with several mouse clicks. Once you open Litha-Paint, you can use our server storage to save your pictures thus your work would be never lost.
Of course if you want to write your work to DVD, you can download your picture to your machine. Use the "Open" command if you decide to continue work on your downloaded picture with Litha-Paint.
If you decide to continue work in other tool you can export your picture to SVG, PNG, JPG and TIF formats.