Monodraw

Curious what some of the requested features are since it seems feature complete to me

Thanks for your work in making an excellent tool; I, and many of my coworkers, use this. The price point is entirely fair and it’s a pleasure to use every time. But - above this - thank you also for prioritising personal life above development.

It’s great as it is and we’ll be happy to see new features when you’re ready. I would be really proud if I were in your position.

Cheers!

Thank you, Milen! It's nice to see Bulgarians being behind a popular desktop app! I've been a paid user for years and Monodraw is among the first apps I install when I get a new MacBook machine!

Thank you so much for Monodraw! I've used it on and off for _years_.

Hi - I'm not a user but I am reacting to obvious love many developers have for your app.

Have you thought about open-sourcing it?

Or even keeping it closed source but crowd-sourcing help?

No need for profit sharing - your income is a nominal management fee if that. Just need a nice credits page to give thanks to the names of the people who contributed.

Might work?

a license doesn't magically stop bad things from happening.

As someone who has worked on an open source product with a commercial version, the FAQ matches my experience. I think you're letting you're mixing up is and ought.

Contributors don't magically appear. Maintaining a community, reviewing changes, steering, etc. all take time and energy. Again, contributors don't magically appear who can do those things, who are aligned with the creator.

Licenses don't magically stop bad actors.

Both statements by the author are correct.

To be fair, the last tweet is from 2 years ago.

However, I’ve made pretty good use of it, and it’s really a “complete” product. Not much more to update than the occasional mandatory platform upgrade.

I’ve toyed with the idea of open sourcing the product. I reached the conclusion that it’s not the approach for two main reasons:

- I believe in a strong, centralised product vision and execution - The code will be packaged up and sold by unscrupulous people who will not contribute back

I’m a strong advocate of interoperability and open data formats. The Monodraw data format is not proprietary and I do have plans for a plain text format (currently, it’s just zipped JSON which doesn’t play nice with VCS).

Interoperability is key to competition and avoiding lock-in, so I’ll push in that direction as my time permits.

It’s perfectly fine that it’s proprietary. Just because it exists doesn’t mean other people are entitled to the source code.

EDIT: Happy to see Milen's sibling comment about fixing breakage!! I realize you have to make a living -- is there a way to contribute for these new features (or is it a totally new app -- which is fine!).

I've considered the idea of letting other developers have access to the source code and help with the development. Unfortunately, I couldn't figure a way to make it fair - e.g., if someone starts contributing, do they start receiving a percentage of the proceeds? What's a fair percentage and what about multiple external contributors?

I could never come up with a workable model, so it's either fully open-source or proprietary. As I mentioned in another comment, I believe the way to go is an open data format which allows interoperability. This way there's no lock-in and competing apps (open or closed) can exist.

For what it's worth, the Monodraw data format is not secret, it's just compressed JSON. I haven't documented it because it's more of an implementation detail and I'd rather spend my very limited time on improving the product.

Hope that provides a bit more context.

At this point, the only apps worth using were released 10 years ago, and have all been removed from Play Store. I have to either use my own backups or download sketchy APKs. I'm not exaggerating, today I tried a number of shoddy disk space analyzers full of bloat and ads, until giving up and just using one from 2014... (except it'd been deleted, so I had to do a bit of digging.)

It may not have reached commercial success, but to me it's the best commercial application on MacOS. Nothing comes close in value.

1. You can just “Save as” to PNG, it takes no time or effort.

2. I use to use Monodraw exclusively for making diagrams in source code, but over time I’ve become so comfortable with the tool, keyboard shortcuts, etc. that now I just use it for all diagrams. It’s a very nice tool.

In the second link, about the Smalltalk VM plugin, you can see is pre-formatted text in markdown.

In the Mapless guide, when I've kept it as text (as the first preferred way to have it done) it became challenging to make it work for all screen sizes and an image was the "good enough" approach for the case.

Doesn't seem more convoluted than any other drawing tool to me. The UI of Monodraw appears to be pretty similar to "regular" drawing software.

Think different.

At least for the README, the diagram remains text in three backticks.

ASCII means more than just characters from the ASCII character standard today, for better or worse. The "modern" translation would be something like "text".

I don't agree or disagree with it, so don't argue with me, just trying to explain how people use it today.

I believe here ASCII was used not as in ASCII-the-standard but as “ASCII” in ASCII-art. I also believe that ASCII art should actually be called “monospaced Unicode text” since people doing ASCII art have been using as many codepoints as were available in their platform of choice.

Yeah, "BOX DRAWINGS LIGHT UP AND LEFT" and "BOX DRAWINGS LIGHT DOWN AND LEFT". (If this were ASCII, it would have used | ("VERTICAL LINE") instead of "BOX DRAWINGS LIGHT VERTICAL".)

I think it's the ◀ character. It looks like Chrome (I'm on Windows) makes it wider than other Characters. I think ▶ has this same problem. But from a quick scan, I don't see any other place in the file where one of those characters is used in a way that it being extra wide would be noticable.

You should do a quick scan of the file, it's filled with graphs in the comments, not just one.

Looks fine on my machine - my guess is that your primary font does not contain all the glyphs used (e.g. the box-drawing chars), so its falling back to another font just for those glyphs, causing inconsistencies.

First is using a monospace font, second is aligning line height to font height. Third includes a bit of tweaking and trying different sizes.

Your best bet is to use a good fixed width don't with broad character support. Some are better or worse than others. Cascadia Code and Fira Code work pretty well with differing characteristics and both have nerd don't variants.

Emoji alignment is another problem.

I believe you can treat it as if it were an image by putting it an element with attributes role="img" aria-label="description of the diagram goes here"

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Accessibility/A...

DrawIO feature to save editable PNGs (embedded diagram source code) is absolutely magical.

The tool is quite basic, until you realize, you can create reusable blocks (in scratchpad) with predifened style.

From that point on you just publish editable PNGs to git and draw them rather quickly by dropping in predefined blocks.

It's the second item on the list already.

I was introduced to this recently, still digesting it, looks amazing. And no Mac only, and free to boot. Win, win.

As other have mentioned I’ve used it for diagrams in code comments and READMEs (before GH added mermaid integration).

Making readable diagrams with 80 character width can be a challenge.

I bought it back in either late 2017 or early 2018 and used it a fair amount at first but will admit it’s been a couple years since and haven’t tried reinstalling since my last clean OS wipe.

I bought license to Monodraw in 2018 and have used it off and on since, so I can attest to GP

Try installing figlet, for banner text.

At its simplest:

    figlet "Text"

    figlet -f small "Small Text"

     ___            _ _   _____        _
    / __|_ __  __ _| | | |_   _|____ _| |_
    \__ \ '  \/ _` | | |   | |/ -_) \ /  _|
    |___/_|_|_\__,_|_|_|   |_|\___/_\_\\__|

Have you had this for a long time ..

Similar to the OP, I've had it for years, and used it every and now then through those years.

.. can you share how you’ve used the generated diagrams?

The website mentions exporting in text and images. I use the text importing (to clipboard), with "Trim trailing whitespace".

.. but the raw text would probably be too big in (e.g. a terminal).

It's as big or small as you want it to be? With the obvious constraints of the different banner styles. People have had ASCII banners in consoles for decades, there's nothing new about the ASCII banners from Monodraw.

1Passwords shows that I bought a license on April 6, 2017.

Which one is the dumb one? Because that's probably the one I'm doing.

There are times when I've wanted architecture diagrams to be ASCII in markdown, meant to be consumed through GitHub or in a Backstage portal or something. For me, the ideal workflow would be to just be able to edit those inline but still have cool editor features. Maintaining a separate file is just hassle, and it's hard enough trying to keep diagrams alive as part of documentation as it is.

try gramscii, and aamath for math formulae.