If you grew up in the 80s (or even earlier) chances are you experienced theMagic Slate (or Telescreen), a legendary toy. Because yes, even back then children had toys with screens! This toy allowed you to draw on a rectangular board using two rotating cursors, one allowing you to draw vertical lines and the other horizontal lines by moving a stylus placed under the screen.
It seems that the developers at Google are very nostalgic, because they have just put online Web-a-Skeb, a web version of this toy. This free site works on all browsers whether on computer or mobile.
As in the original game, users have two cursors at their disposal to draw on the screen. If in the physical version you had to shake the toy to clear the screen, here, the developers have added a "Shake" button. But they have pushed realism to the maximum. If you press the shake button once, the trace will still be a little visible! You will have to try several times to get your screen to be perfect!
To go a little further, the developers have also added a button to change the appearance of the line: with a shadow or multi-colored... a possibility that obviously did not exist in the original game.
Once again, Google Chrome Labs allows the developers of the American firm to demonstrate that it is possible to create user-friendly tools on the web… here, according to a tweet from one of the designers, it was about testing these rotary button systems! And it works pretty well!
To improve the usability and now that the demonstration is done, the developers are thinking about adding a keyboard control which would allow for slightly more precise drawings!
In any case, I might waste some time on it in the next few days! Interested web developers can check out the source code of Web-A-Skeb on GitHub.
Web-A-Skeb
