(The Short Version)

I like to

with my friends online. I also like watch my friends and I

And so I made:

Drop

Click the icon for the App Store page.

(The Longer Version)

Drop is a very simple drawing program that lets you draw on two layers with friends over the internet and on your local network (thanks Bonjour!). Start your own server or connect to someone elses. The person running the server can save a recording of the session that can be opened and replayed by anyone with a copy of Drop. It's pretty cool.

Drop supports UPnP and NAT-PMP for automatically forwarding ports from your router (check the preferences).

Notes

The server listens on port 63630. If you're behind a router/firewall you'll need to forward this port to your computer. If you have a router that supports UPnP (or NAT-PMP) you can enable the port forwarding preference in Drop and it will try to forward the port for you. If it's unable to you'll have to configure your router's port forwarding yourself. There are lots of guides online for doing this.

History

I used to use PaintChat to draw with my friends, but it's written in Java and always gave me trouble, especially since I switched to a Mac. Since I switched I've been wanting something like it that was made for OS X and have found nothing like it. Painter used to have network support in version 6 but it was removed in all versions after that (not that painter isn't awesome. I bought version 6 and have upgraded to version 9).

Until recently there really weren't very many bitmap drawing programs for OS X that weren't The Gimp, Photoshop or Painter and nothing supported network drawing anymore. So I picked the features that I really needed to have and began work on my own drawing program. So now I've actually got a working drawing program but I don't have network support. Like usual when I begin coding some big feature that could get messy, I started a new project to work the kinks out in there first and add it into the main project once it worked how I wanted it to.

Things went very well for this test project but I needed to get people to test it so I could know that my network code was good enough to move into the main application. Instead of just throwing out my rough test app and because I was so happy with how it was turning out, I just decided to develop it into a full application of it's own and release it for anyone to use.