By far, the most successful open source thing I’ve done in years is the project I called airquotes. It was my first project built using AngularJS and I published it early on to give others a chance to see something finished which had been built using it other than a to-do list.

airquotes on Github

Since then I’ve built some other projects outside of my day job using AngularJS and though not particularly profitable they are diverse (to say the least) and I’ve decided I’d like to open source them as well to see if they can help people.

The first up is PaperQuik (PaperQuik.com). It’s an app which asks a few simple questions and then generates a printable sheet of paper (lined, dot paper, graph paper, etc.) in the browser. Unlike most sites like this, it doesn’t just have a canned set of PDF files it dispenses, nor does it have a server process building them. Instead it uses the HTML5 canvas to draw an image of the paper and then helps you print that image.

PaperQuik on Github

The second project is ClearAndDraw (ClearAndDraw.com). It’s a simple webapp that I threw together in just a few evenings because I wanted to keep track of my cards and dice for the game Marvel Dicemasters: Avengers vs. X-Men. It’s not nearly as complicated as the paper generation in PaperQuik, but it does show real time filtering using AngularJS and it stores all of the information you give it in localStorage of the user’s browser so it doesn’t forget anything they enter.

ClearAndDraw on Github

Neither of these projects has any back-end at all, they are served up strictly as a set of static HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and images and do all of their work client side. That’s not to say that I don’t want to build a back-end; ClearAndDraw.com in particular cries out for one to be added so users can enter in card/dice information and then retrieve it from any browser and any machine, rather than always having to return to the same place previous cataloging was done. But the initial solution was simple and worked as a starting point. It also presents an example of how a site might save data locally even for unregistered users and then later save that to a back-end data store if the user does create an account later.

I also took an evening and updated airquotes to the current version of AngularJS (1.2.25) and deployed it to a GitHub page so people can play with it without having to deploy it locally (like PaperQuik and ClearAndDraw).