The Amazing CatPad

The Amazing CatPad was a site for online drawing activities. It functioned from 1998 until 20031.
The idea behind it can be called a One-Click-Cat: a user can come to the site, open an embedded drawing application (Java applet), draw a picture with the mouse (usually a cat, according to the name of the site2), press "Submit" button, and the picture immediately appeared in the online gallery.
The site was kind of an online drawing blog (before the blog notion existed) where any visitor can express him/herself at any time and all other visitors can immediately appreciate the creation.

Among other features the site had:
- a possibility to open private or public galleries;
- a possibility to send picutures by e-mail;
- a picture voting mechanism;
- a possibility to post pictures into user's blogs;

The application was rated JARS Top 25% and featured in the Yahooligans catalog, where it attracted the attention of some 100,000 visitors. Later, we have created and published the book (in Russian) that includes cat-related texts and many drawings from the Amazing CatPad site. The book is also available online.

For the technical details of how the application functions, please refer to the following diagram:


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1The site is now down because of the hosting problems. To properly function the application requires a dedicated Java server to run on the server side.
2Amazingly, 100% of the users were following this rule of drawing nothing but cats :)