localzuk Posted April 27, 2016 Posted April 27, 2016 Does anyone know of a cloud/web based alternative to Serif DrawPlus? It gets used to teach the basics of graphic design here (logo design, so including things like shadows, text art etc...).
localzuk Posted April 27, 2016 Author Posted April 27, 2016 Canva? Overly primitive. Doesn't have any real drawing manipulation tools - just drag and drop elements/properties.
2ilent8cho Posted April 27, 2016 Posted April 27, 2016 QueekyPaint - free browser based drawing and painting tools. ?
localzuk Posted April 27, 2016 Author Posted April 27, 2016 Doesn't appear to have a text tool at all.
jinnantonnixx Posted April 27, 2016 Posted April 27, 2016 (edited) Inkscape through Rollapp? https://www.rollapp.com/app/inkscape I really like Calligra's Karbon, too. https://www.rollapp.com/app/calligrakarbon Sumopaint is a flash graphics package, a bit like an old version of Photoshop. https://www.sumopaint.com/home/ Edited April 27, 2016 by jinnantonnixx 1
Arthur Posted April 27, 2016 Posted April 27, 2016 Pixlr Pixlr is a photo editing app, not a DTP. It would be like using Photoshop instead of InDesign.
dhicks Posted April 28, 2016 Posted April 28, 2016 Inkscape through Rollapp? Ooh, useful-looking. Are you using Rollapp yourself? Any idea if their group pricing is strictly per-user or per simultanious user? We're looking at putting Chromebooks / iPads into classrooms, and are considering what web-based applications we use along with those. The apps available via Rollapp cover several areas we would need, but the pricing is a bit high for us if we'd have to pay for each user on our system. Paying by number of simultanious users would be rather more affordable, though. Rollapp seems to be using Ericom's AccessNow or a similar product. That's licensed per simultanious user, not per total number of users. The software itself is open source, so the main ongoing cost would be providing a server to run on. Is anyone else hosting their own similar system, either on their own hosted hardware or on AWS or similar? A local authority, MAT or centralised IT support company, for instance?
CyberNerd Posted April 28, 2016 Posted April 28, 2016 Rollapp seems to be using Ericom's AccessNow or a similar product. That's licensed per simultanious user, not per total number of users. The software itself is open source, so the main ongoing cost would be providing a server to run on. Is anyone else hosting their own similar system, either on their own hosted hardware or on AWS or similar? A local authority, MAT or centralised IT support company, for instance? We provide many of these using Citrix, but it isn't so cost effective when you take into account the Citrix licenses and per user/device TS licenses. I've toyed with the idea of providing this type of service using something like guacamole on the frontend to some scalable, cloud based linux servers on the back. At the end of the day how much would someone be prepared to pay for an hours class-session of inkscape ? It would probably only cost a few cents to run it on AWS/GCE for that long but how would you charge for it? Schools wouldn't want to pay by the minute which leaves the per user model; this has to be expensive incase it's left running 24/7/
jinnantonnixx Posted April 28, 2016 Posted April 28, 2016 Ooh, useful-looking. Are you using Rollapp yourself? Any idea if their group pricing is strictly per-user or per simultanious user? We're looking at putting Chromebooks / iPads into classrooms, and are considering what web-based applications we use along with those. The apps available via Rollapp cover several areas we would need, but the pricing is a bit high for us if we'd have to pay for each user on our system. Paying by number of simultanious users would be rather more affordable, though. Rollapp seems to be using Ericom's AccessNow or a similar product. That's licensed per simultanious user, not per total number of users. The software itself is open source, so the main ongoing cost would be providing a server to run on. Is anyone else hosting their own similar system, either on their own hosted hardware or on AWS or similar? A local authority, MAT or centralised IT support company, for instance? No, I don't use it, I just remember looking at it a while ago. Have you looked at the Broadway extension to GTK+? This might allow you to host your own Linux apps like Inkscape, rendered through a browser on your own network at no cost. Roll-your-own RollApp, if you'll excuse the hideous pun. Running GTK Apps on Web with Node + Broadway | woGue 1
CyberNerd Posted April 28, 2016 Posted April 28, 2016 (edited) No, I don't use it, I just remember looking at it a while ago. Have you looked at the Broadway extension to GTK+? This might allow you to host your own Linux apps like Inkscape, rendered through a browser on your own network at no cost. Roll-your-own RollApp, if you'll excuse the hideous pun. Running GTK Apps on Web with Node + Broadway | woGue The problem with Broadway is it is really limited to GTK+ apps which are few and far between. I can get it working with gedit etc but not inkscape. There's always X11 over ssh but then that is limited in browser support - don't think chrome ssh clients support it. Edited April 28, 2016 by CyberNerd 1
pete Posted April 28, 2016 Posted April 28, 2016 Have a look at Lucidpress.com it's from the same people who do Lucidcharts.com and there's a "hey, you're a school - have it for free" option. https://www.lucidchart.com/pages/usecase/education https://www.lucidpress.com/pages/usecase/education 1
dhicks Posted April 28, 2016 Posted April 28, 2016 Have you looked at the Broadway extension to GTK+? No, looks worth a look, though. I'm suitibly impressed with Ericom AccessNow, though - we're now using it for staff remote access, so they can just log in to a Windows remote desktop via a web browser window. Documentation and customisability is good enough that it was simple enough to write a basic bit of load-balancing code quickly in Javascript, and it's licensed per simultanious user as a one-off fee, so we pay around £800 for a dozen users to be logged on at the same time and that's all we pay. We have to pay yearly licensing fees to Microsoft on top of that for Windows, obviously, but using Linux-based servers instead would sort that issue.
dhicks Posted April 28, 2016 Posted April 28, 2016 At the end of the day how much would someone be prepared to pay for an hours class-session of inkscape ? It would probably only cost a few cents to run it on AWS/GCE for that long but how would you charge for it? Schools wouldn't want to pay by the minute which leaves the per user model; this has to be expensive incase it's left running 24/7/ We're currently looking at Soundtrap for music editing and WeVideo for video editing. WeVideo charge around £200 per year for a 50-user license, which we consider not bad value. Both allow logins via users' Google accounts, so there's only the one set of details for users to remember. A suitibly scaleable solution running Inkscape on AWS would need some work - you'd need to integrate Google / Azure logins / Dropbox / Facebook logins and connect up to the relevant file APIs and so on, but that should be quite do-able. I'd go for a number-of-simultanious-users licensing model (with some degree of flexibility as hitting a hard limit right in the middle of a class doesn't go down well), with accounts being logged off after a certain time period of inactivity. 1
dhicks Posted May 4, 2016 Posted May 4, 2016 The apps available via Rollapp cover several areas we would need, but the pricing is a bit high for us if we'd have to pay for each user on our system. I've had a quick email conversation with RollApp, who proved very helpful and are willing to charge on a per-concurrent-user model. I think they're going to be a bit expensive for how much we would use them - we use Inkscape, but we're only a prep school, we probably can't really justify buying their package just to use Inkscape, but other schools might find them a better fit for their requirements. 1
CyberNerd Posted May 5, 2016 Posted May 5, 2016 I've had a quick email conversation with RollApp, who proved very helpful and are willing to charge on a per-concurrent-user model. I think they're going to be a bit expensive for how much we would use them - we use Inkscape, but we're only a prep school, we probably can't really justify buying their package just to use Inkscape, but other schools might find them a better fit for their requirements. What did they expect the rough costs to be?
dhicks Posted May 5, 2016 Posted May 5, 2016 What did they expect the rough costs to be? Based on 50 concurrent users, around £800 a month. I've just run a few rough calculations based on a VM in Google Compute Engine, and 50 VMs running 24 hours a day would cost around £1,000 a month, so their pricing is actually quite competative compared with other cloud-based options at the moment. Practically, I think our best option is going to be to stick with on-site hardware to run VMs at the moment, I think it'll be a few years until prices come down enough to be a realistic option for us.
CyberNerd Posted May 5, 2016 Posted May 5, 2016 Based on 50 concurrent users, around £800 a month. I've just run a few rough calculations based on a VM in Google Compute Engine, and 50 VMs running 24 hours a day would cost around £1,000 a month, so their pricing is actually quite competative compared with other cloud-based options at the moment. Practically, I think our best option is going to be to stick with on-site hardware to run VMs at the moment, I think it'll be a few years until prices come down enough to be a realistic option for us. What about one VM running 24/hrs per day and 49 load balanced booting up when needed? I notice there is a Docker deploy option in GAFE - do you happen to know if these can be access by end users or is it more of a web app feature ?
dhicks Posted May 5, 2016 Posted May 5, 2016 What about one VM running 24/hrs per day and 49 load balanced booting up when needed? Yes, of course, along with users being logged out after, say, half an hour's inactivity, should reduce the runtime bill a fair bit. However, I can understand why Rollapp sets their pricing at a level that allows for people actually using the system for at least a whole working day. I notice there is a Docker deploy option in GAFE - do you happen to know if these can be access by end users or is it more of a web app feature ? I've not done anything with Docker, but my guess is that you'd want a dedicated VM per user, with a decent amount of RAM, for responsivness when using a GUI. Handily, I happen to have a couple of cloud servers in the on-site server cupboard not doing very much at the moment, so I can try re-creating this kind of infrastructure myself and see how far I get. The cloud servers give me around 20 separate (single-vCPU) VMs with something like 4GB of RAM and a dedicated 64GB SSD each. My guess is that I should be able to write a login system that authenticates against Google Apps (or Azure, or Facebook, etc) and returns a connection token of some kind. Once a user is authenticated I can open an interactive GUI session on a VM with Ericom AccessNow, I just have to figure out how to use that connection token to connect up their Google Drive account in such a way that Linux sees it as the VM user's home folder. I'm not sure if google-drive-ocamlfuse can manage this: google-drive-ocamlfuse - A FUSE filesystem over Google Drive 1
j224 Posted May 5, 2016 Posted May 5, 2016 Does anyone know of a cloud/web based alternative to Serif DrawPlus? It gets used to teach the basics of graphic design here (logo design, so including things like shadows, text art etc...). Einked Vector Graphics Editor?
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