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Yet another "paint visualiser". The brief was to produce an application that looked and felt like the ICI Mouse Painter web application. Importantly, this application had to install and run on in-store pc's (without any connection to the internet).

More interestingly the application had to share as much of the data, data formats, and technology previously developed for Mouse Painter.

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The user-interface was hosted by IE, yet presented as a full-screen kiosk style application (i.e. it didn't look or feel like a series of web pages). A set of specific active-x controls were developed, these supported drag n drop operation, and felt like regular UI elements. Dynamic html and javascript were used for glue, and the back-end was built on top of previously developed COM components, this time the emphasis being on scriptability.

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The user-interface was vastly improved when compared to Mouse Painter (both visually from a users perspective).

The use of IE was hidden by hosting IE in a small Visual Basic application that ran full-screen (importantly for an in-store application the VB app enabled key-strokes to be caught before IE saw them, disabling certain all "interesting" user actions)

All pages were data-driven - greatly enhancing maintenance & support.

The "decorate" user-interface supported drag-n-drop operation between the active-x controls - very natural to use, with a way cool feel.

Images were rendered off-screen, and re-sampled down to the correct size - resulting in smooth images not unlike the sort of images you may typically see on tv