Prompts is an Inktober-inspired Progressive Web App for touchscreens to help encourage a daily drawing habit. The idea has been lingering around in my brain for over two years and about two weeks ago I finally buckled down and got to building. The concept is fairly simple: Each day you visit the site and there’s a new prompt waiting for you.
Prompts is still a bit beta trial period for now. I already have a half-dozen ideas on what to do next but I wanted to get Prompts into the hands of real people and get real feedback before moving forward.
A handful of technical tidbits that may be interesting:
- It’s a full-functioning PWA, which means you can even draw offline (how novel!).
- It’s only 7.3kb of gzipped JS.
- The drawing surface is handled by signature_pad which creates ink-like bezier curves based on pen/finger speed. It’s achieves a nice effect with a small footprint.
- I deployed it on my own subdomain because dammit, I want subdomains to be cool again.
- Monetization is being handled by Coil. I’ll write more about this decision soon.
There are a few known issues in Mobile Safari’s Add to Homescreen feature. This is not ideal because I want touchscreen iOS devices to have first class support, but there’s not a clear pathway forward due to Safari’s WebView support being fraught with misery. I’ll continue to iterate here and hopefully find some good solutions.
For this month Prompts will trail the official Inktober list and if people find that useful and want more, let me know Twitter and I’ll build out a bigger list of prompts and future features. I hope you find Prompts to be fun and that it inspires you to pick up a bit of a daily drawing habit.