I have a box full of little drawings I’ve made over the years, mostly on lecture notes. Some of them are sketches for things I’d like to put in comics some day, but many of them are just abstract doodles with no particular purpose. Still, I’ve kept them because I like them, and each has, I think, some potential to be used one day.
I’ve thought for a while that what I’d really like would be a program I could use to scan all these little drawings into my computer. It further occurred to me that I have many other bits of paper lying around and taking up space that could be fruitfully subjected to the same treatment.
Certainly, I could do this with standard scanning software, but it would be very time-consuming, because standard scanning software is designed to scan things well , not quickly. There are document scanning programs focused on speed, but they tend to be designed for large organisations with complicated OCR needs. I just want to scan things with minimum fuss. So I though I’d have a go at writing my own. Some day. In the future. My main problem would be not so much writing the software as dealing with the Sun expanding into a red giant and consuming the lifeless husk of the Earth before I got started.
It turns out, however, that somebody else was thinking along the same lines, and produced kip, which is more or less precisely what I was thinking of, only much better. It’s as if the idea sprang fully-formed from my head like Athena from the mighty Zeus, only without the unpleasant headaches or my actually learning anything about Cocoa programming.
I’m having a fine time scanning in all my little drawings, and seeing which ones might actually make good comics.