What are unusual and creative usages of html5 canvas

Question

Canvas from html5 was introduced some time ago. Currently it's used (almost) only for demonstrations how cool it is - it's mainly related to painting, games and charts. Many of them can be found at Canvas demos.

How creatively / unusually can canvas be used?

Some examples:

• jsAscii - ASCII art from images with Javascript and Canvas (yea, I know, it's painting but not the classic one)
• Javascript compression using PNG and Canvas

Answer 1

There's a really cool tool called Detexify which uses machine learning on the back end which allows you to draw the LaTeX symbol you're interested in knowing the LaTeX code of and it will suggest one for you based on what it's learned from other users.

Answer 2

My two favorite are:

• Processing.js - an implementation of the processing language in javascript/canvas.
• Bespin - a collaborative coding IDE that feels more like a beautiful native app.

Answer 3

I always thought of creating a simple image editor with the canvas tag. It would be easy to use it for cropping, resizing, changing color values, removing red eyes etc.