Yeah I'm very familiar with Josh Ge and Rex - my current project uses rex files for loading images - I just have a lot of metadata I bake in through hacky ways and rex format is not very flexible - rexpaint is great though
I don't use the app often, but I felt comfortable purchasing because it wasn't a subscription. The few times I do want ASCII art, it does the job perfectly, so it works super well to have in my back pocket. Thanks for not going the subscription route.
Are there any enhancements that you've wanted to do, but haven't had the time?
I'm a huge fan, and am surprised how stable Monodraw has been for me. I've kept a single, growing document open as a scratch pad for the last three years. The only downtime was converting it to the new-ish file format haha.
There’s this layout library in C called clay which is basically a renderer agnostic flex box style layout engine. You might be interested in reading its source!
Yeah, there's a few such libraries that I'm aware of but I haven't had time to evaluate them. I do plan to at least look into them and make decision from there.
nucleic/kiwi uses the same algorithm that autolayout uses. It's also a tried and true implementation I've used many times, including in console environments.
In the retro computing world, the use of "ASCII" to construct levels and worlds is quite prevalent.
I immediately considered whether Monodraw might be used as a kind of level editor in that context.
Would you consider adding an '8-bit character bitmap' mode, which allows for the bitmap to also be edited?
With such a feature, Monodraw would become immediately applicable to those of us building retro games for older platforms where this technique is used rather extensively to produce compelling art-work.
For context, here is an example game which uses plain ol' ASCII chars to deliver some fun Moon Buggy action:
> Would you consider adding an '8-bit character bitmap' mode, which allows for the bitmap to also be edited?
Can you clarify with an example? Monodraw supports "surfaces" which are just like bitmaps - you can use the Pencil tool and draw on those surfaces with any characters you want (there's a palette in the inspector), just like a bitmap editor.
Adding more character sets besides ASCII and shape elements?
Having all the Unicode emoji galore as an option would be great. Not just for colorful code docs, but millions of social media content creators out there!
I guess we might be describing the same thing, and I am yet to have time to download and play with Monodraw (IT policies), but if there is indeed a way that surfaces could be replaced at a pixel level, so that for example the 'A' character becomes a Pacman, then we'd be aligned.
The only issue is, are these surfaces 8x8 or similar, and would it be possible to load in a 6x8 bitmap, for those unusual 8-bit computers of the era which used them .. I refer to my favourite system of the period, the Oric Atmos, which graphics techniques are described here: https://osdk.org/index.php?page=articles&ref=ART9
IF I can edit the bitmap and render as 6x8 characters, Monodraw would be immediately useful for level design. In any case, when I have access to a non-work computer, I hope to spend some time digging in and informing myself, so apologies if none of this is relevant ..
There are plenty of tools which can be used to do these kinds of projects, I'm more intrigued by the nice interface of Monodraw and whether it can be added to the repertoire ..
Not parent commenter, but I've been using rexpaint for a while but the editor is clunky and format too limited, I've been looking at other options - At a quick look monodraw does look interesting as a more fully featured replacement.
Like many others I also want to express my gratitude for a fantastic app. I bought it in 2016 and it’s seen a lot of use since then (recently almost daily). Being able to copy to clipboard for adding diagrams in source code is the killer feature!
I am trying it for the first time. One point of feedback, with the caveat that my only experience so far is opening the tutorial:
I immediately hate that when intending to scroll vertically using the trackpad on my macbook, it constantly unintentionally scrolls horizontally as well and I have to correct it. It is particularly irritating since there is no content on the canvas to see when scrolling.
Maybe I'm just super accustomed to browser scrolling behaviors, which snap scrolling based on initial direction.
I'm mostly posting this because its the kind of papercut that might be forgotten over time.
Once I started using it for actual diagrams, the issue completely faded away. Scrolling a super long vertical-only document is an unimportant edge case.
This is the god damn holy grail of ascii chart editing.
Great app... it's had a place on my macOS dock for years. I use it for adding diagrams to my team's internal developer documentation (mostly in a series of Markdown files).
What is the Unicode support? Namely the "Symbols for Legacy Computing"[0] (including the latest supplements [1]) with "newly available" full octants palette could be neat to get sub-character "octant pixel" precision. (And/or exploitation of Braille [2] for the same purpose.)
(Not a Mac user, so cannot try, and not clear from screenshots for me; these all seem like ASCII + )
It definitely looks like a cool app, and I was excited to test it out, but I don't have a Mac. If you ever hit the point where a rewrite makes sense, it would be awesome as a universal app.
One idea I've been toying with would be to do a Kickstarter-style campaign and if it reaches a certain threshold, then I know it would be worth porting.
Targeting Windows/Linux/web still means I cannot re-use the sources. But targeting web might be faster in terms of development time, although I don't have deep expertise on non-Apple platforms, so I cannot say for sure.
Why? There are already all kinds of web sites that do this kind of thing. Monodraw's unique selling point is that it's a native Mac app that takes advantage of the Mac UI and it's done well so the UX is top notch.
If you don't care about making the best possible app that you can, go ahead and do it in the browser. You will get something that's probably good enough and runs everywhere. But it's going to use more battery, more memory, and more bandwidth and not feel like a Mac app. Plus (IMHO) it's less fun to develop for the browser.
I believe the attention to detail that sets Monodraw apart can be transposed to the web as well — albeit diverging from MacOS conventions.
It’s possible to make great web apps, it just takes the kind of care and dedication that @milen has already proven to have. If the web interface lowers the barriers to developing a cross-platform version of Monodraw, then I think it would be silly not to consider investing in it.
Nice tagline, but surely it's not just plain text. It's some unicode shenanigans. How does one make sure their console can display all the necessary characters? How does one make sure others can see their creation?
>I find it unlikely that such copy protection would actually convert a non-paying user into a customer.
I used to think that but then kept tripping across customers who ran multiple copies of my software after purchasing a single license. I now wish I'd tightened the DRM from the start.
I think you're missing his point. If you tightened DRM, would those customers that ran multiple copies pay for multiple licenses?
Fighting piracy is generally not worth it. Those people would never pay, so you're fighting to stop a pirate from using it, not to get them to pay. There's a big difference.
The way that DRM and similar user-not-in-control technologies are making the world into a skinner box is a bigger problem than anything solved by those technologies.
Companies participating in that transformation don't get my money and I'm glad to know that this isn't one of them.
People who pirate software at scale are not typically interested in ASCII art. It doesn't quite cross the threshold of business value and usefulness (e.g. SolidWorks, Photoshop) that would attract pirates.
Just wanted to say: really love the app. Been using it for years. I love the image overlay since I mainly enjoy making ascii renditions of pictures manually by hand.
3x2 were more popular, used in, among others, Teletext and the TRS-80. The only place we found the 4x2s was the Kaypro portable (using the upper 128 positions of the character generator plus a reverse video bit to get all 265 combinations).
Yeah, it was. After I finished working on the iOS app I was previously involved with, I needed to either find a job or make another app.
I was browsing StackOverflow and saw some cool looking ASCII diagrams, thinking to myself "How can I make these easily on macOS?". So that's how the idea was born.
I then spent about 1.5yrs from the initial commit until v1 release. Unfortunately, the financials didn't work out, so I had to find a job eventually.
But I'm still maintaining the app and do have longer term plans when my job situation changes.
you were involved with clear? damn! i was one of the first users back then, even using it to this day! monodraw looks awesome, will definitely check it out!
I was one of the co-creators of Clear and the developer who built the iOS app. It was co-created by me, Realmac and Impending. I had previously interned at Realmac and had been friends with the founder, Dan (they acquired another app of ours - EventBox, which later got rebranded as Socialite).
