drawr

» see drawr.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

drawr opened on 1 October 2008, run by pixiv, and it was a drawing tool that lived in the browser window. You did not install anything or own a program. You opened a page, drew with a mouse or a pen tablet directly into a Flash canvas, and posted the result to a feed where other people were doing the same thing. The barrier to posting a picture was as low as the barrier to posting a comment, which is the whole reason a community formed around it.

The feature that made it worth remembering was 筆跡再生, stroke replay. drawr did not just keep the finished image. It kept the sequence of strokes, so anyone looking at a drawing could press play and watch it being made, line by line, at the speed it was drawn. People used this to learn from each other, and plenty of the site's traffic was people watching drawings happen rather than looking at them finished.

By the end there were roughly 7.17 million drawings on it and the user IDs ran to 359,451. The service closed at 13:00 Japan time on 2 December 2019, which is 04:00 UTC, after a notice that gave users a few months and a tool to pull their own work down.

I was drawing nothing in 2008, so the community side of this is not mine to claim. The technology is, though. Flash was the layer the entire web I grew up on was built on top of, from the games down to the video players, and every Turkish forum I read in that decade had something embedded that needed it. drawr shows what happens to a product whose actual substance was written in that runtime.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what the files actually were ~

Archive Team's notes on drawr are unusually technical, because archiving it meant understanding its storage. A drawing could come with up to three files spread across a dozen image hosts named img01 through img12. The .png was the flattened render anyone could see, and the .gz beside it held the real thing: the drawing data as zlib-compressed AMF3, the binary serialization format Flash used to talk to servers. A picture made over more than one sitting got an .xml as well, pointing at the several .gz files that made it up.

Drawings could also be built on top of other drawings, in which case the .gz contained an obfuscated URL to the earlier picture's render, chained back as many layers as the artist had used. By November 2019 the API that resolved the oldest of those chains had already stopped working, so some of the very first drawings on the site were partly unreadable before the site itself closed.

~ the reasons pixiv gave ~

The closure notice is still readable and it does not hide behind strategy language. Adobe had formally announced that Flash Player distribution ends at the end of 2020. Browsers were already refusing to run it, which meant drawr could not be viewed, and the browsers that still ran it were carrying a security risk for the people using them.

The second reason is the more interesting one. pixiv wrote that when drawr launched, digital illustration meant a desktop PC with a pen tablet or a mouse, and that the devices people actually draw on had since spread out to tablets and phones. A tool built for one input method in 2008 was addressing a smaller and smaller share of the people who draw.

~ where the drawings went ~

pixiv did the migration properly, which is rarer than it should be. Users could request a download URL for their own posted work, stroke data included rather than just the flattened images, along with the message attachments they had sent and received. The destination offered was pixiv Sketch, and pixiv built a mode into it called シンプルドロー, Simple Draw, explicitly to carry over the feel of drawing on drawr. The company also did the engineering work to port stroke replay off Flash and onto HTML canvas, so the one feature that defined drawr outlived its runtime.

Archive Team ran a grab in November 2019 and got nearly all of it into the Internet Archive across six collections. And drawr.net itself has never gone dark: it redirects to archive.drawr.net, which still answers, still records that service ended at 13:00 on 2 December 2019, and still shows the download link labeled as no longer provided. Whoever built that page also left something for anyone who opens the source. Above the stylesheets sits an HTML comment containing the drawr wordmark drawn in ASCII art out of the letter a, and under it, visible to nobody who merely reads the page, a line thanking users for eleven long years.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

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