I finished some more tweaks to ComicJuice:

• IE6 and 7 are now supported, thanks to the amazing ExplorerCanvas by Google. It emulates the <canvas> tag in IE, meaning that client-side scriptable vector graphics are now available on all the major browsers (IE, Firefox, Safari, Opera). I doubt Konqueror will be far behind.

  This opens up some cool abilities, like dynamic in-page graphs, mini-widgets (sliders, dials, maps, ...) and even pure JS games. There's a bunch of examples linked on Wikipedia (though most don't use ExplorerCanvas yet).

• I added support for uploading your own images rather than using pictures on the web. It uses a customized and themed version of core's JS uploader.

  

• I improved the clipping of speech bubbles so there should be less useless whitespace around comics, especially when embedding them.

Announcing.... ComicJuice!

I'm proud to announce the start of ComicJuice, a web 2.0 social mashup tool that lets you create comics in your browser and share them with others.

Update: Now with Internet Explorer support! Thanks to Google's ExplorerCanvas. Viewing comics works in IE6 and 7, while editing still requires IE7.

The crazy part is that I started working on this only friday evening (that's 4 days ago). Once I had the initial idea and a rough plan, I simply couldn't not code it.

A lot of jQuery and JavaScript later, with some <canvas> wizardry (boy is that thing inconsistent across browsers), we have a fully-fledged comic creator. The best part is that all of it is rendered client-side, so no actual images need to be generated. To display a comic, we use the same code as the editing interface. The down-side is that it doesn't work in IE, but I've been thinking about maybe doing a rough canvas emulation. We'll see. For now, the latest versions of Safari, Firefox and Opera have been tested and work well.

You can also embed comics with iframes, and copy/pastable code is provided. Like this lame example:

(No longer available)

I figured a Web 2.0 mash-up would not be complete without a fitting design to go in, so I designed icons, sliders and toolbars for the editor, as well as a theme for the website. The theme is a Garland knock-off: I guess I'm proving myself wrong that it's a bad base theme. It's actually quite good as it has fluid/fixed 1-3 column layouts in it.

I'm curious to see if ComicJuice takes off and what people do with it. It was a blast to code in any case. Check it out.