How do I draw on the canvas quickly

I'm developing a game in which drawing is the main mechanic. To this end, I'm using the canvas plugin from the forum. It was working just fine on PCs, but it's very laggy on phones. Since I'm using text boxes, I can't really go with cocoonjs (currently using phone gap), so I'm not sure what to do. Ashley mentioned in another thread that the latest iOS and Android releases would run much faster, but I'd like to see if I'm over complicating the matter first. I've got about a half second of lag on phones for drawing and I'd like to pull that down significantly. Any ideas? I can post a capx if that would help.

Would using a completely different method like this work for your intentions?

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/485 ... ample.capx

You could ofcourse also search for alternatives to textboxes on the forums..

Hi gizmodude4,

If you are an iOS developer, you can download iOS 8 beta 5 and test your game on it right now if you want.

Thanks Sebastian. I don't have a piece of hardware that can use iOS8, but hopefully I'll get my hands on one eventually.

Thanks for the suggestion LittleStain, but that demo also runs kinda slowly on my phone. It also doesn't have the ability to change colors, so I couldn't use it without WebGL anyway. And I know about the alternative to textboxes, but they're all rather clunky. If the next OS update doesn't have a big impact on how it performs, I'll try it out and see what I can do

I don't think you should hope for OS updates to help your game go faster if you want your game to be played by as many players possible..

Have you checked through the debugger to see what takes the most amount of resources?

If the textbox solutions are clunky, maybe you could try to unclunk them..

For android, you could evetually try crosswalk to see if the result is smoother or not (for iOS though, only phonegap and the html5 direct export supports textboxes).

Also I could be wrong, but I think the canvas plugin is actually faster with webGL disabled

Really? Where did you see that? I can disable it temporarily until the native browsers in Android/iOS are updated to support webGL and the OSs are proliferated if that's the case