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Show HN: I open-sourced my web app alternative to Illustrator

mondrian.io

51–60 of 94 posts

Re: Show HN: I open-sourced my web app alternative to Illustrator

#51
post #13

Played around a bit for a few minutes and threw a few of my usually handwritten SVGs at it with disastrous results. View boxes don't seem to work, dashed lines, symbols, any kind of shape reüse in general; groups are ungrouped automatically, but apparently properties defined on groups are not propagated to child elements when ungrouping. And it manages to lock up Firefox and IE completely. Not terribly impressed so f…

Pardon the meta-comment, but “reüse” is just so comically HN.

Re: Show HN: I open-sourced my web app alternative to Illustrator

#52
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might be shocked (shocked!) at how clean and readable some of the CoffeeScript source is. To pick an example at random: https://github.com/artursapek/mondrian/blob/master/src/geome... Artur really did a nice job with structuring this project...

Vanilla JS is easier for me. I don't have time to learn the workings of coffeescript just to read a library casually.

'The golden rule of CoffeeScript is: "It's just JavaScript". The code compiles one-to-one into the equivalent JS, and there is no interpretation at runtime'

There really is very little magic with coffeescript. Most of it is syntactic sugar which can be learned at a glance of: http://coffeescript.org/ .

Don't mean to come off as pushy but I think it's well worth learning what coffeescript is. Especially if you are familiar with javascript, as it's a straight upgrade in your toolkit.

Re: Show HN: I open-sourced my web app alternative to Illustrator

#53
Great work Artur. I think this has potential, with enough contributors, to be a widely used tool. It's unfortunate that some people are getting really hung up on a specific interpretation of the submission title (that it currently has feature-parity with Illustrator), instead of talking about the seriously impressive amount of work you've put into this thing, or actual constructive criticism. Don't let it get to you, and keep up the great work :)

Re: Show HN: I open-sourced my web app alternative to Illustrator

#54
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rotation is possible. Activate the (rotate indicating) tool and move the resize/move/rotate handles.

Ah, sorry. It works in such a non-obvious way, I missed it.

The rotation tool works exactly the way Illustrator's does.

Re: Show HN: I open-sourced my web app alternative to Illustrator

#56
post #53

Great work Artur. I think this has potential, with enough contributors, to be a widely used tool. It's unfortunate that some people are getting really hung up on a specific interpretation of the submission title (that it currently has feature-parity with Illustrator), instead of talking about the seriously impressive amount of work you've put into this thing, or actual constructive criticism. Don't let it get to you,…

Agreed wholeheartedly, and this is as someone who's literally spent thousands of hours using Illustrator. I played with it for a few minutes and found the interaction to be very natural, and I only found a couple of bugs. I would suggest that if you avoid a lot of the print-specific aspects of Illustrator like color separations, supporting spot colors, screening options and a lot of their more gimmicky features, this could actually end up replacing it for a lot of people.

* one bug is here: http://mondrian.io/?p=5xf0YH Somehow I created a piece of geometry that's a line segment that can't be filled or stroked. Hover around near the end of that arrow and you'll find it. It was created using the line tool.

edit: never mind, it turns out I just didn't completely grasp the selection model. If I click on the line segment, the endpoints get selected and I can move it, but the fill/stroke panels don't appear. However, if I drag-select it so I get the line's bounding box, they do. The selection model is a bit quirky, although I suppose you're probably trying to simplify Illustrator's weird assortment of selection modes. Good luck with that. :)

Re: Show HN: I open-sourced my web app alternative to Illustrator

#57
post #8

Awesome! I'm really awful at drawing on my computer. Many failed attempts at trying to learn Illustrator, Gimp, etc. What's really cool about a web app of a drawing app is that you could use all the open source product tour JS libraries to create interactive tutorials... So impressive, thank you!

If you failed at using Illustrator or Gimp effectively, then you didn't try hard enough. Follow video tutorials and try to recreate graphics, in time you'll get better. Ugh, this entire thing is in coffeescript too, now I have to learn coffeescript to make sense of this library.

> Ugh, this entire thing is in coffeescript too, now I have to learn coffeescript to make sense of this library.

This reminds me of a really funny bit Louis CK does about wifi on an airplane. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KpUNA2nutbk#t=234

Basically, the punchline is how ridiculous it is that some people can believe they're entitled to something being a certain way, that they didn't know even existed until a few minutes ago.

"Ugh, this really cool library isn't written in something I already know. What an asshole for doing that."

Re: Show HN: I open-sourced my web app alternative to Illustrator

#58
post #8

Awesome! I'm really awful at drawing on my computer. Many failed attempts at trying to learn Illustrator, Gimp, etc. What's really cool about a web app of a drawing app is that you could use all the open source product tour JS libraries to create interactive tutorials... So impressive, thank you!

If you failed at using Illustrator or Gimp effectively, then you didn't try hard enough. Follow video tutorials and try to recreate graphics, in time you'll get better. Ugh, this entire thing is in coffeescript too, now I have to learn coffeescript to make sense of this library.

Wow that's the opposite reaction than what I had.
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