This looks useful. The real fun of the risograph is experimenting with the many inks to get that vibrant, expressive riso look rather than something natural like you might go for with traditional CMYK printing. This might make that experimentation a little faster.
Spectrolite – Mac app to make colorful risograph prints and zines more easily
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Re: Spectrolite – Mac app to make colorful risograph prints and zines more easily
#12FYI the images are very low resolution, which is a shame for a graphical application. Looks like image srcset is set to max out at 800 px. On my screen that's stretched to nearly 2000px which makes it very blurry!
Usecase is for printing on paper en masse for zines and posters, resolution doesn't really matter much here
Sorry I wasn’t clear. I’m referring to images on the webpage (i.e. screenshots).
Re: Spectrolite – Mac app to make colorful risograph prints and zines more easily
#13Given that this is an Electron app, why only release for macOS?
Re: Spectrolite – Mac app to make colorful risograph prints and zines more easily
#14TIL what the risograph process is: https://web.faa.illinois.edu/app/uploads/sites/6/2021/05/ris...
It’s by far one of my favorite machines, even though I’ve never used one (and am far from a print designer). I just really love that it’s basically the traditional screen printing process, but automated.
Re: Spectrolite – Mac app to make colorful risograph prints and zines more easily
#15Given that this is an Electron app, why only release for macOS?
The devs may not have linux or windows machines to build on
Re: Spectrolite – Mac app to make colorful risograph prints and zines more easily
#16Given that this is an Electron app, why only release for macOS?
The devs may not have linux or windows machines to build on
And they don't need to – Electron tooling can cross-compile just fine nowadays. Of course, to test it you do have to have access to the platform, but even an untested release would be nice.
(That said, I'd probably release it as a webapp instead – unless there's some native code involved, and even that probably could be compiled as Wasm.)
Edit: looked into it, seems they are using a Go executable as the core of the app, which means a naive port (drop app.asar into Electron package for another platform) isn't an option here but it still should be pretty easy to port.
Re: Spectrolite – Mac app to make colorful risograph prints and zines more easily
#17Given that this is an Electron app, why only release for macOS?
If you're on Windows or Linux yourself, why not contact them and ask / offer to be a tester? It might be as simple as they haven't gotten around to it, they don't have demand, or they don't have a device to test it themselves.
Re: Spectrolite – Mac app to make colorful risograph prints and zines more easily
#18Given that this is an Electron app, why only release for macOS?
If you're on Windows or Linux yourself, why not contact them and ask / offer to be a tester? It might be as simple as they haven't gotten around to it, they don't have demand, or they don't have a device to test it themselves.
I'd love to beta-test this on Linux but I'm afraid I won't last for long – I'm just not in the target audience for risograph printing software. I could help setting up a test suite that can then be be run across all platforms, though.
And it seems like they are reluctant to support other platforms:
> Currently there is no active plan to make a Windows version. We'll post here if that changes. (https://spectrolite.app/how-to/using-spectrolite/download#wi...)
Re: Spectrolite – Mac app to make colorful risograph prints and zines more easily
#19Given that this is an Electron app, why only release for macOS?
To answer hypotheses from others:
> Will there be a Windows version?
> Currently there is no active plan to make a Windows version. We'll post here if that changes.
Re: Spectrolite – Mac app to make colorful risograph prints and zines more easily
#20This looks useful. The real fun of the risograph is experimenting with the many inks to get that vibrant, expressive riso look rather than something natural like you might go for with traditional CMYK printing. This might make that experimentation a little faster.
Big fan of riso so I welcome the initiative!
Not on Mac tho so I'll keep using 'photoshop' for mockups, and hoping this will be adopted well enough to warrant a win version down the line.