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Monodraw

monodraw.helftone.com

141–150 of 218 posts

Re: Monodraw

#141
post #54
post #47

I've used this in the past and enjoyed it. My one complaint, if I recall, is that you have to use its own built in file format to maintain all the cool features like anchors and resizable boxes and stuff. You can't just point at at an ASCII drawing in a markdown document and get all the functionality for free. I suspect if someone really wanted to they could crack that through clever algorithms and LLMs - and I've ex…

Interesting take. Do you have a lot of existing diagrams you'd like to manage? If I'm starting from scratch, I would sort of expect/want to have the abstract file format like this, seeing it as like a PSD, and the output as a rendered, flat image like PNG. Or source code vs. binary. Parsing an output artifact back into a more semantic and abstract form is hard to get perfect, I would imagine.

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.

Re: Monodraw

#143
I maintain a list [1] of main web based text to diagram tools including ascii drawing tools like these. Web alternatives for this are probably https://fsymbols.com/draw/ or https://textik.com/ or https://asciiflow.com/#/ or https://web.archive.org/web/20210503172024/https://fatiherik... or https://app.monosketch.io

[1]: https://xosh.org/text-to-diagram/

Re: Monodraw

#144
post #23

Funny. The front page (still) states: "We're a small studio that loves to make delightful apps. We just launched Monodraw." The blog says: Maintenance Mode With immediate effect, Monodraw is entering maintenance mode. This means that there will be no more updates in the future. While I'll be aiming to provide OS compatibility updates, if required, those are not guaranteed. Accordingly, the price has been reduced from…

Developer of Monodraw here. I haven’t updated the official website (priorities and lack of free time). I’ve pushed out some updates after the maintenance mode announcement but the frequency is not guaranteed since my free time is extremely limited. I’m still committed to fixing any breakages due to OS upgrades and ensuring the product continues to work. While I have some new features in the pipeline, I cannot commit…

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

Re: Monodraw

#145

I'll never understand willingly restricting yourself to one desktop platform. Especially with a paid app. Oh well. Looks nice

Sketch, Rogue Amoeba apps, Panic, etc. plenty of Mac-only businesses. They make decent money. As Mac users actually tend to pay for their software rather than expecting everything to be free.

If you released the same software for the same price on Windows, not only would it be more difficult to develop (due to Windows lacking the same abstractions as macOS), you'd probably have way less users, as Windows users don't typically buy apps like this.

Re: Monodraw

#146
post #4

what's the native linux alternative? aka not a webapp edit: hm, maybe https://github.com/nkh/P5-App-Asciio

For anyone who is willing to use a webapp, I like drawio[0]. You can download locally[1] and self host (I just use the python webserver). While finding the Github, I see they now actually package an Electron application, so that is probably worth exploring[2]. [0] https://www.drawio.com/ [1] https://github.com/jgraph/drawio [2] https://github.com/jgraph/drawio-desktop

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.

Re: Monodraw

#147

I maintain a list [1] of main web based text to diagram tools including ascii drawing tools like these. Web alternatives for this are probably https://fsymbols.com/draw/ or https://textik.com/ or https://asciiflow.com/#/ or https://web.archive.org/web/20210503172024/https://fatiherik... or https://app.monosketch.io [1]: https://xosh.org/text-to-diagram/

Pikchar is another to consider for your list. From the creator of SQLite…

https://pikchr.org/home/doc/trunk/doc/userman.md

Re: Monodraw

#149

I maintain a list [1] of main web based text to diagram tools including ascii drawing tools like these. Web alternatives for this are probably https://fsymbols.com/draw/ or https://textik.com/ or https://asciiflow.com/#/ or https://web.archive.org/web/20210503172024/https://fatiherik... or https://app.monosketch.io [1]: https://xosh.org/text-to-diagram/

Have you also checked out some of the lists on https://fmhy.net? Some there might be of interest.

Re: Monodraw

#150
post #147

I maintain a list [1] of main web based text to diagram tools including ascii drawing tools like these. Web alternatives for this are probably https://fsymbols.com/draw/ or https://textik.com/ or https://asciiflow.com/#/ or https://web.archive.org/web/20210503172024/https://fatiherik... or https://app.monosketch.io [1]: https://xosh.org/text-to-diagram/

Pikchar is another to consider for your list. From the creator of SQLite… https://pikchr.org/home/doc/trunk/doc/userman.md

It's the second item on the list already.
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