Litha-Paint (Beta)

Looking for Hosting Sponsorship

2009-03-11T02:43:00.000-07:00

As long as we unleashed source code to public we lost our only revenue stream coming from selling sources. Until we find another one, we need to cover our hosting expenses (104USD/month).
We looking for a java hosting sponsorship for the next 6 months. It shouldn't necessary be a dedicated server as we are currently having. Good shared java hosting would be enough for the first time.
If you have an extra hosting resource and willing to help us, please write us to litha.paint@gmail.com.

Litha-Paint Became Open Source

2009-03-02T10:38:00.000-08:00

Hi there!
Despite of world-wide downturn there are still some pleasant moments in our life. Having no investments nor obligations we can afford ourselves such crazy little things like throwing our project to the public.

You can download it from https://svn.codehaus.org/litha-paint/ anonymously.

Go ahead until i changed my mind :-)

We have got a new license agreement

2008-07-21T12:16:00.000-07:00

We created a public license agreement which allows person or organization to obtain either binaries or sources of the product.
Of course, you may still leverage a power of our graphics engine via javascript API for free. If you need to setup your own server, you need to agree with our license requirements.

If you need more details about license rules and prices for binaries or sources, write us to litha.paint@gmail.com.

regards,
Vyacheslav Evgrafov

Litha-Paint is on the eBay

2007-11-05T03:10:00.000-08:00

Dear web2.0 community.

During last sixteen months our tiny team was absorbed in developing litha-paint.com - javascript-powered vector graphics editor. Me and my friend Alex Padalka have been created core functionality for the product for 4 months of intensive exhausting work. At the time, we were working full time for some software company. But our hearts, dreams and all our free time were dedicated to our project.

We didn't had customers, didn't had investments and even didn't had a business plan. The only thing we had is the faith, that drawing vector graphics in webbrowser, equipped only with javascript - is amazing thing and a kind of magic. But real life had showed that having just faith was not enough.

Internet community warmly met our product and asked for some more features. Many site owners asked us to integrate LiThA engine into their online stores and portals. It was obvious that we need full time dedication to the Litha-Paint in order to satisfy growing demand. We started to search VC but failed very soon. There are no venture capitalists here in Ukraine and obtaining visa to USA is near impossible.

At that time we still had a fuel for one more quick march. We decided reorganize our codebase and extract convenient API to our drawing engine. That process took us three monthes. We finished the task in May 2007 and started working with webdesk.in, supporting them with their wDraw.

Soon after that we received more inquiries from entrepreneurs related to using litha-paint on their sites. We couldn't accept any of proposition, because it would requires a lot of customization works. We just haven't resources for managing all such things.

We decided to sell Litha-Paint.com on eBay. It was very personal decision for me and Alex. Both of us should agree that we can't materialize or dream. Both of us should accept that we understand nothing in business. In context of amount money and emotional and intellectual power we spent on LiThA-Paint, we started to think about product as of our own child. But delay may mean death for the project. There still is a niche not taken yet by Flex, Sliverlight and JavaFX. There still is demand for lightweight software. We started an auction on 04.11.2007 with starting price = 0.99$.

If there would be a person who would want to do something with the product, we will help him. We will provide all sources, scripts, manuals, our knowledge about sourcecode, server infrastructure, etc.

The auction would last for ten days.

sincerely yours,

Vyacheslav Evgrafov.

Latest News

2007-06-13T08:46:00.000-07:00

Many things happened last month.
First of all we performed some performance improvements on the client side by reducing amount of divs for ellipse, line, polyline, polygon and free hand.
Secondly, we created start page with more info about our product and created a simple demo.
And last but not least, we started integration with YouOS. The new application YouDraw is built using Litha technology and it would be hosted on YouOS. YouDraw should provide an idea to javascript developers about how to utilize drawing power of Litha on their own sites.

API has been released!

2007-05-11T10:33:00.000-07:00

We just released our javascript API that allows sites from outer domains utilize Litha's drawing functionality. API described on our wiki. Simple example of Litha's canvas usage by 3-rd party site from other domain name you can find here.

Litha-Paint under Bitty Browser

2007-03-17T05:10:00.000-07:00

Bitty Browser has gained popularity on the Web and is available on several popular resources such as Netvibes, Google and Windows Live.
The good news is that Litha-Paint works under Bitty Browser in full-size mode.

Just try the following:
1) open www.bitty.com;
2) find Bitty Browser on the right side of the page;
3) type www.litha-paint.com in its address bar;
4) select "Open it in full-size"
5) click on "Skip to my selection"

Bitty would load Litha-Paint. You'll need to create new document, specify width and height of the document in pixels. That's it. Now you can draw in Bitty Browser!

The work is still under progress...

2007-03-02T06:18:00.000-08:00

...it seems like creating interoperable canvas would take more time than we expected before. The main reason is a cross-domain security model which is implied in current browsers. This would not allow us to use XMLHttpRequest object to interchange data between javascript canvas (which has been loaded from our server) and customer's http server.
Certainly, this restriction makes sense, but prevents our job to get done. Therefore we've found another way to transport our data. But this method has its own restriction that enforces us to rewrite imposing amount of code.
But there is also a good news. Litha has got additional help topics, thanks to Egor Emeliyanov. He wrote "Working with documents" section and several topics for "Drawing" section. We appreciate his time. Litha still doesn't make money (because of free registration and lack of adv), so contribution is highly appreciated.

Sincerely yours, Litha-Paint team.

Every site could have drawing canvas

2006-11-23T09:28:00.000-08:00

Currently we are working on integration schema that every site could use. This would enable site owners to utilize Litha drawing service on their sites. If you are selling tee-shirts or making a postcards you may want your visitors to be more interactively on your site.
In a couple of weeks we would present an example of Litha's canvas on the outside site. Don't miss it.

Next version has been released.

2006-11-20T01:24:00.000-08:00

Here are the features that have been added on the last week:

1) open images in the following formats: GIF and BMP;
2) open images from URL;
3) scroll bars support. It is possible now to draw on the canvas that are bigger then a viewport;
4) stability of UI against browser resizing.

Bye YCombinator!

2006-11-09T12:38:00.000-08:00

Several days ago we had an interview with YCombinator over the Skype. Nice people, generally speaking.
They asked us several questions such as: how are going to make money, why did you call your project in this way and some other questions on which we already answered in the application form.
It seems they liked our editor but they refused to fund arguing that they need to meet us personally (we are not in USA).

If you know another investor who could handle with visas, please drop me a line.

litha.paint@gmail.com

Comparison between OVH and Rackmounted.

2006-11-07T01:55:00.000-08:00

We finally moved to Rackmounted server and we feel quite happy with their services. In the past we were need to wait for about 5-8 hours to get respond from OVH support team.

The situation is totally different with Rackmounted. While we've got crash of ssh once, they resolved our issue in about 5 minutes. Usually, they respond us in 3-7 minutes. This is great for us.

Furthermore, they gave the same hardware in a twice cheaper. ($105 against 180 Euro).

Reincarnation

2006-11-01T05:38:00.000-08:00

Hi there.
Litha-Paint is online again. We hope to add layers and insert images feature into litha document by the end of this week.

Think we are dead?

2006-10-13T07:39:00.000-07:00

Hah! Not now and not here!
The message on the front page is just a joke. We are just switching our current hosting provider, because we were extremely unhappy with OVH.
We decided to move to Rackmounted because it's cheaper and have urgent mode support. Well, let's see how it will be...

The next major step is completed!

2006-08-16T10:47:00.000-07:00

Hello everybody.
From the very first day of the Litha-Paint's life, visitors were trying to open JPEGs and PNGs from their computers but unsuccessfully.
That was not a bug, that was a lack of the functionality. But it is possible to do from today! You can open and upload JPEG and PNG images and Litha-Paint documents to the server.
Today we get closer to the our main goal: full support of the SVG format. And we are happy about that.

Technorati Profile

Document management has been slightly improved

2006-08-09T11:46:00.000-07:00

We just finished a refactoring of open/save/publish/export/upload dialogs. Now Litha-Paint has only a two tabed dialogs instead of four. We hope that this would improve an usability. Maybe we are digging into wrong direction? Let us know. There were some bugs fixed such as delete of opened document.

A small manual has been written

2006-08-09T02:05:00.000-07:00

Yesterday we've done creation of a manual. There you can find info about drawing process in Litha-Paint.

Currently we are working on open/save dialogs and thus they are temporary unavailable.

Have a good day!

We've been down for the count for 57 hours

2006-07-29T12:59:00.000-07:00

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:

2006-07-26T00:57:00.000-07:00

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.

2006-07-26T00:51:00.000-07:00

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

2006-07-24T12:54:00.000-07:00

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

2006-07-20T08:12:00.000-07:00

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!

2006-07-19T01:25:00.000-07:00

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 !

2006-07-19T00:23:00.000-07:00

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.