Hay, folks.

Hope everyone had a great Halloween, so anyways, yeah, I just got an account on iScribble.net, and if anyone has never heard of it, its basically a doodle/chat site where you have a duel chat window and white drawing screen, so you can not only draw with friends you can talk with them at the same time, too.

I joined a few hours ago and even had my first Session in the Private section of the site, and if you look to my gallery, you can see I have uploaded the result of that first session. I had a lot of fun with this so far, and I can expect to use it more often then most community websites I have joined.

So if anyone else has an account on iScribble, feel free to join me sometime, though you'll have to inform me first, since I usually spend my sessions in the Private Sessions, which means I have to give you an Invite before you can join the chat room.

As is mostly the case, my username is Snipermander, and I'm usually available to chat from 4 PM - 6 PM on the weekends.

PROS AND CONS OF iSCRIBBLE

Since I'm a woman of fairness, I decided I should be the one to let everyone in on the good stuff and the crappy stuff about iScribble, and the way the site is set up and lawed. This is to ensure that everyone who reads this will know what they're getting into before they decide to join, because take it from me, its not very much fun having a bunch of internet accounts that you never use.

PROS:

Easy to use for even those with a mouse.
Even easier to use for those with a tablet and pen.
Its set up is simple and not very complicated (it took me less then ten minutes to figure out the entire site).
No one is expecting you to make perfect art. You can go there to pretty much vent and just doodle whatever...

CONS:

You will need either a working mouse or a tablet in order to have much fun on this site. A mouse pad just won't cut it.
The actual drawing set up is more similar to that of MS Paint then to Photoshop or other more reasonable programs.
Some of your computer's firewall programs may not be compatible with the flow of iScribble's servers or the program they use to run the drawing section of the chat area. in other words, your firewalls may slow down the movements of your mouse or tablet pen while you are drawing.
You have to keep the content of what you draw to a mimimum (in other words: no violence, porn, or anything that someone under the age of 16 can handle. >>
And finally, here is the worst con of all by far: New Users are completely restricted from more then 70% of the activities of the site!

More on Bullet #4:

New users cannot:

- Use more then 50% of the buttons and tools in the Tools section of the drawing chat.
- Save their pictures!
- Upload their pictures to their Galleries.
- Comment on other people's work
- The only way you can get to be a "Regular" member is if you: gain more then 120000-something log sessions (which sounds like it could take years to do), fill up your drawings book and gallery with as many pictures as you can within a certain time frame (which is impossible anyways since they won't allow you to publish your damn work!), or by actually getting some stranger to save and upload YOUR pictures FOR YOU (which is just ridiculous because that opens up so many damned doors for art thieves!)

So yeah, apparently there is a whole world of negativities to this then I thought. And obviosuly as you can tell, I think this whole idea of "let's completely restrict the hell out of the n00bs so that they'll either give us moneyz or spend every waking hour of their life on our site" is pretty much made of bull shit. Srzly, I didn't join the damned site to win a popularity contest.

But there IS A WAY to get around this inability to save your work And I will show you how:

THE CHEAT

Its actually quite simple.

In order to get around the website's restrictions against saving your work to their site, take a screencap of your computer screen with your iScribble picture already on it.

FOR ANYONE USING A MAC:

You all should have a program already installed on your computer called "Grab", which you should find in either your Dock or in Applications. The program's icon looks like this:



Simply double click on that and follow the instructions on how to take computer screen grabs. I find the best way to get a quality screengrab is through the "Select Window" option instead of the "Selection" option, because at least with "Select Window" you will be assure that you are taking a crystal-clear, evenly sized screenshot, like this:



IF YOU ARE USING A TOSHIBA LAPTOP:

Look to the top right of your keyboard for a key that looks like it has one or two rectangles on it. This is the screengrab key, push it and it will take a picture of your entire computer screen and save it to your computer.

IF YOU ARE USING ANY OTHER KIND OF PERSONAL COMPUTER:

Just use whatever programs are available to you. I am only a wiz on what to use on Macs and Toshibas.

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So there you have it. I have just given you folks all the information there is to know about iScribble for Dummies. I will be saving this journal and referencing it to those who are also new and are baffled by the ridiculous limitations or just want someone cool to chat/draw with. And I'll edit this in the future if I need to.

Hope everyone is having a great holiday season so far! I'll talk to you all later.