AwwApp: A fun HTML5 app for drawing with friends – and it works great with touchscreens

If you’re a proud parent and owner of an iOS device, you know how important drawing apps are to your little ones. They’re addicted to putting their fingers onto the touch screen and are simply amazed by the stuff they see afterwards.

Why not show them AwwApp, a simple HTML5 web app that’s incredibly easy to use. A Web Whiteboard was developed by Senko Rašić, a web developer from Zagreb, Croatia, who has agreed to do a little interview for The Next Web.

TNW: How did you come up with an idea for an online whiteboard app?

SENKO RAŠIĆ: “I scratched my own itch. I had a small tablet PC with a lousy choice of touch-friendly apps. Being a web dev, I wrote a drawing web app for myself. People liked it, suggested embedding and sharing, which I added and it turned out to be a hit – sharing is a major feature of AWW now.”

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You can use the AwwApp with your friends. Just invite them into the whiteboard and you’ll instantly see what are they drawing. It’s actually quite amazing to see the different uses of HTML5 today; it even has potential to replace current CAPTCHA systems.

AwwApp doesn’t have too many options; you get three different brush sizes, seven colors and ability to invite someone, download your image or share it with friends.

Senko promises that the app will remain free for end users, but he has plans to monetize it in the future by charging a monthly fee to people wanting to embed the functionality into their own apps.

But before he could sell the app, Senko needed a way to test out the embed API interface. So he build a Facebook AwwApp:

The Facebook app was the first use of the embed API I’m offering to customers, so it was a good stress test. Beyond that, I had to work around the fact that Facebook doesn’t expose good real-time API for third parties (so eg. I can’t use FB requests for board sharing) – I’m hoping that’s going to improve in the future.

So go ahead, take out your iPad or any other touch screen device, open up AwwApp and give it to your toddler. While your kids draw with their fingers, you can jump in and draw with them using the AwwApp in your browser.