I’m the author of Monodraw, happy to answer any questions.
I also wanted to thank you for making such an awesome piece of software.
Monodraw: ASCII art editor for the Mac
91–100 of 109 posts
Re: Monodraw: ASCII art editor for the Mac
#92Long-time user here. Laying out newsletters, flow charts, diagrams, and figlets. It has very few issues these days, and only a couple minor points of frustration in the UI. For my purposes, it's the best thing out there. A couple of workflow tips for using Monodraw: * Open a few docs in Monodraw at a time and leave them open for your different needs: text boxes, figlets, diagrams. Each with a few elements already wai…
By the way, Finder will let you get info on just about any document and check 'Locked' or 'Stationary Pad'.
Locking should prompt you on any attempt to change the document to unlock or duplicate.
Stationary Pad will automatically create a local copy when you open the file, and instead open that copy.
Re: Monodraw: ASCII art editor for the Mac
#93I've always liked ascii flow https://asciiflow.com But actually more often I've needed things like https://github.com/weidagang/text-diagram as it is much easier to maintain But I actually need more types of diagrams, so slowly, as one of many little side projects, I've been building a little library for all kinds of ascii diagram generation
That sounds great, I don't suppose you have anything of that project that's ready to share (even just to look at, not use)?
Re: Monodraw: ASCII art editor for the Mac
#94Remember, when embedding ASCII art in HTML, hide it from screenreaders and provide alt text. Otherwise it's an incomprehensible mess of seemingly random characters.
Good point, any pointers to how I'd best do that?
Not the OP, but I'd just wrap it up like this:
...
> ...most screenreaders will consider the element with role="img" set on it to be to be like a black box, and not access the individual elements inside it.
(https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Accessibility/A...)
Re: Monodraw: ASCII art editor for the Mac
#95Long time Monodraw user here as well. While I still use it quite often for README.md docs, excalidraw has replaced most of the use cases I had, along with having a much nicer and upbeat feel (something I'm generally after when writing boring technical docs).
Anyway Monodraw is just awesome in its own way, and I really like the easy way you can draw stuff in it, ASCII is so restricting it simplifies design decisions for us art plebs quite a bit. I just wish there could be a way to export it as a xkcd / excalidraw style PNG after you've done drawing.
Re: Monodraw: ASCII art editor for the Mac
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
One potential conclusion: Mac users understand the productivity increase and the value of apps feeling native, since the Apple ecosystem is one of the primary places to get such a native experience today. This shouldn't necessarily be interpreted as "Mac users are special flowers", but rather, "Mac users may have stronger opinions about this because they've experienced the benefits of native apps". I've been around t…
That's a great conclusion. Sadly the way it's usually felt is through entitlement. I can't count the number of time where I've seen an electron/Flutter/anything app presented, and Mac users are once again asking for a native app while pretending to not understand why the app is cross platform in the first place. If they're so attached to native apps, maybe they should build a website/community where people ready to p…
I'd say that if you had to choose a desktop platform to build paid apps for Mac OS is the best choice. Mac users tend to spend (more) money on software.
BTW. there is a paid native slack client: https://shrugs.app
Re: Monodraw: ASCII art editor for the Mac
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
The insistance on native feeling UI and shortcuts is something I only see from Mac users. I think the app would work perfectly well in Electron but would just attract the usual complaints from Mac users.
Because some of us are shut down with responses of "be happy you got this app at all" (Linux users) or somehow get ignored when we speak up (Windows users - though I guess Windows hw often having more cpu power and memory leads to less complaints?)
I'd rather not have the app than have a version that feels out of place on my system.
Re: Monodraw: ASCII art editor for the Mac
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
It would not be possible to do this in electron. To have the same great native feeling UI you’d need to use AppKit - not HTML. Don’t get me started at the usual shortcuts and general platform behavior most electron apps get wrong.
It's totally possible to do this in Electron. I've used plenty of Electron apps that were simply ripped off MacOS and dumped on Linux (Kitematic, for example). The entire Mac-native UI works perfectly fine on Linux, the only issue I ran into involved some Mac-ified ini files.
What do you mean by `Mac-native UI`?
I guess they tried to make the app look like a native app?
The interesting part is that this is even worse IMHO. Because you get into an uncanny-valley pretty soon.
Re: Monodraw: ASCII art editor for the Mac
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
Good point, any pointers to how I'd best do that?
Not the OP, but I'd just wrap it up like this: ... A simple approach is best. I don't have a screenreader on my current machine (as far as I know) so I can't verify actual behaviour right now, but according to MDN: > ...most screenreaders will consider the element with role="img" set on it to be to be like a black box, and not access the individual elements inside it. ( https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Ac…
Neat! I'll make sure to do it this way. That makes me wonder, what else on the websites I (not a web dev) maintain might need special treatment for accessibility. Pity the Chrome dev tools don't seem to help with that.
Re: Monodraw: ASCII art editor for the Mac
#100I’m the author of Monodraw, happy to answer any questions.
Looks like a really great app! However, screen shots from older versions of Mac OS on a product page always make me a bit worried about the future of an app. Do you intend to update the UI and such to match Big Sur and the upcoming Monterey?
It's been on my list and we've made some progress but to be completely transparent, I've been extremely overloaded and it's been hard to set aside time for it.
So, I'll try to get to it eventually but no promises on timeline.