A:
I work on the web using Chrome and I’ll use the paint tool on a WebGL canvas.
It’s very efficient, it just draws out an entire image and saves it as a PNG file. If you download the canvas or try it out, it looks really nice.
I also used Paint.NET, which works really well with Chrome. You can open up a file, edit it, and then click on the button that says “Save As”. And then it’s as simple as that. Now, it didn’t work for me, because of my browser’s limited canvas viewport size (which is 1024 by 768 pixels). But when I’ve tested the drawing speed with a lot of images, I can see a huge improvement.
In Windows Explorer, just right-click anywhere, and select “Open File” and then choose something like Paint.NET. And then try it for yourself. If it draws really fast and very smoothly, it’s better than what the other browser does (Chrome, for example), but it’s nowhere near as good as Paint.NET.
Here’s my “Hello, world!” canvas sketch:
And then the result of a painting with Paint.NET in Internet Explorer:
You can see the difference. I’d be a lot happier with that than using Photoshop (or GIMP for that matter).
Can you tell us how you think WebGL can be applied to graphics in general, without sacrificing much, or at least not too much? Do you think this is the new standard in 3D or will it just be one of those things that won’t get used? Why not both?
A:
Right from the start, I’ve been against the idea of WebGL. First, the implementation is far too complex. Now, the “experimental” support for WebGL was introduced in Chrome, which is not a very “real” thing to do. It would have been easy to implement it in GIMP or Paint.NET, but they are not very good artists (well, at first anyway). GIMP, Paint.NET, and other 3D programs that support WebGL have more than enough resources to do the job. Even better, the WebGL spec is very simple, and the browsers that use it are well-designed. I will say, that for some people, I am optimistic if the new WebGL standard is realized properly. With the right APIs,
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