Day: December 24, 2018

A new Canvas

by dougpete, posted in application, Chromebook, Computers, Education, Google, Read/Write Web, Sketchnotes, software, Teaching

When the Ministry of Education licensed Photoshop Elements, I really went to town with it. I was an owner and user of the full Adobe Photoshop suite of things and could hold my own, I think, when it came to working the program and doing some post picture taking editing.

If you’ve ever dabbled, you know that the original Photoshop has every feature that you could ever possibly dream of. Photoshop Elements was a nice collection of the features that most would use regularly and, in particular, in schools. Both are so feature-rich, that I could never remember them all and would often be poking around or looking for help just to finish off.

Those were the days when having a kick butt high end computer was the ultimate goal, next to having a specific application to do something really well. And, we ended up buying more and more and as much hard drive space as we could.

The Chromebook is forcing a change in thought. While there will be those who constantly push the envelope to do amazing things, most of us just want to get a job done and not necessarily have all different applications for this and that. Chromebooks have limited storage space so huge application collections is out of the question. Having things work well in a browser is all that’s necessary.

This week, Google announced a new product called Canvas. It’s run in your browser so no permanent installation is necessary; probably just best to put a shortcut in your browser for those times that you need a utility like this.

The palette of tools isn’t huge…

And yet, much can be accomplished with this.

There really isn’t any help and things are fairly intuitive. (It took me a bit of learning though to realize that you gave to click on the tip of the drawing tool rather than just anywhere on the tool to activate the flyout to adjust things.)

For example, colours

And so I gave it a run through to check out functionality. It doesn’t do everything but what it does do, it does well. There seems to be little or no latency as I worked with it. Input via the mouse doesn’t give the greatest results for me but my finger on the screen or my older Wacom tablet worked very nicely. As I write this, I’m using the Opera browser on Linux Mint.

Drawings are saved to your Google Drive and you can do an export into .png format. I think that it’s simple enough that doodlers or sketchnoters may find that it functions well for those tasks.

Give it a shot by clicking here and see if this doesn’t fulfil many of your needs, all through your browser.

This blog post was originally posted at:
https://dougpete.wordpress.com/

If you find it anywhere else, it’s not original.

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OTR Links 12/24/2018

by dougpete, posted in Links

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.