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Amadine – Vector graphics software for Mac

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Re: Amadine – Vector graphics software for Mac

#71

Post by dman »

pvg wrote: post #68
dman wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I respectfully disagree. A contrary viewpoint which I happen to share is the following - As a software developer you build productivity multipliers for your users. Users spend non trivial amounts of time, money and energy building skills to master a tool you build. Users use these skills to earn a livelihood and sometimes due to a change in employer / life situation find themselves in a position where they do not hav…

I think a 'user-centric' angle is one of the good ways to think about this but presenting one possible set of user priorities as some sort of high-minded moral imperative and a different one as 'questionable ideology' does not do your argument any favours. There's a long-running subculture in MacOS (and once Nextstep and now iOS) software development that I'll call 'app craftsmanship'. At its best it produces high-qu…

Now that you point it out, I realize that I should have edited the parts about questionable ideology out. It was needlessly argumentative and distracts from the point I was trying to make.

Re: Amadine – Vector graphics software for Mac

#72

Post by aasasd »

PlutoIsAPlanet wrote: post #12
jen20 wrote: post #2

Although I don’t have much use for vector graphics software, it is _great_ to see people building new native mac apps which take advantage of the unique features of the platform instead of targeting a cross-platform lowest common denominator!

I'm curious as to what features are unique to the platform?

Toolbars that aren't just tables crammed in from left to right.

(Might've been finally addressed in Win10—dunno, I left that world behind a while ago.)

Re: Amadine – Vector graphics software for Mac

#73

Post by dman »

ken wrote: post #60
dman wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ive been surprised because in codebases I have worked on, you usually have an abstract rendering api at the bottom with multiple implementations for each platform. Ive been curious why you couldnt abstract out things like window creation, layout, rendering and implement the abstract api for multiple platforms.

The very concept of "a window" is pretty different across platforms. MacOS is the only one with a concept of proxy icons. It has a distinction between the key and main window. There's a responder chain for event handling. Toolbars have a built-in editor. There's QuickLook for easy previewing of sub-files. There are standard popovers, which can be torn off. On the Windows side, I'm sure they've got their own set of un…

Completely agree with everything you said but the curiosity that drove my initial question still stands. To be specific do you think Sketch / OmniGraffle are unimplementable on Windows? Why would the creators of those apps after achieving such success on OSX, be unwilling/unable to address the windows market. I am convinced there are good rational reasons for this, I was hoping that someone from one of those companies could comment on this. [It is possible that in their target demographic everyone uses OSX, but is that the case?]

Re: Amadine – Vector graphics software for Mac

#75

Post by pvg »

dman wrote: post #71
pvg wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a 'user-centric' angle is one of the good ways to think about this but presenting one possible set of user priorities as some sort of high-minded moral imperative and a different one as 'questionable ideology' does not do your argument any favours. There's a long-running subculture in MacOS (and once Nextstep and now iOS) software development that I'll call 'app craftsmanship'. At its best it produces high-qu…

Now that you point it out, I realize that I should have edited the parts about questionable ideology out. It was needlessly argumentative and distracts from the point I was trying to make.

In that case you just end up with different kinds of user priorities and developers choosing to deploy their finite resources to address some of them. Not much mystery or sleep disruption left in it then.

Re: Amadine – Vector graphics software for Mac

#76

Post by Chazprime »

dman wrote: post #73
ken wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The very concept of "a window" is pretty different across platforms. MacOS is the only one with a concept of proxy icons. It has a distinction between the key and main window. There's a responder chain for event handling. Toolbars have a built-in editor. There's QuickLook for easy previewing of sub-files. There are standard popovers, which can be torn off. On the Windows side, I'm sure they've got their own set of un…

Completely agree with everything you said but the curiosity that drove my initial question still stands. To be specific do you think Sketch / OmniGraffle are unimplementable on Windows? Why would the creators of those apps after achieving such success on OSX, be unwilling/unable to address the windows market. I am convinced there are good rational reasons for this, I was hoping that someone from one of those companie…

If the app is a native Cocoa application, it’s been written in Obj-C or Swift. Cross-platform apps and frameworks are usually written in C++ with a UI implemented in a common framework like Qt.

To port the application to Windows, you’d lose a lot of the Mac-specific features, or have to do a substantial amount of work implementing platform-specific UIs.

Re: Amadine – Vector graphics software for Mac

#77

Post by willio58 »

ken wrote: post #64

I bought iDraw (back before AutoCAD bought Indeeo). I bought Affinity Designer. I tried demos for everything else I could get my hands on. I even tried Inkscape. They all have flashy demos and claim to be great Mac apps (well, except Inkscape). A couple weeks later, I end up regretting my purchase. They just aren't terribly Mac-like, and they have all sorts of little bugs that never seem to get fixed. Being a small c…

I don’t consider any adobe app that I’ve ever use to be Mac-like honestly. For 95% of my usecases, sketch and pixelmator do the job. I’m hoping this program takes care of the 5% gap in features i need for very specific vector drawing.

I don’t use the advanced features of illustrator, partially due to my design style and partially because I’m too lazy to learn them. I’m glad alternatives to Illustrator exist in the market. It’s nice that I don’t have to pay 50$ a month or whatever absurd price adobe charges for cc these days.

Re: Amadine – Vector graphics software for Mac

#78

Post by delhanty »

simongr3dal wrote: post #50

OT, but does anyone know of a vector drawing program that allows me draw in a similar that Fusion360 or SolidWorks does with their 2D CAD sketches? It also needs to export to some standard format to be used for print, so using SolidWorks of Fusion360 isn't really an option, I can't export the vector 1-to-1 onto a pdf and do proper colors with those. I cannot for the life of me figure out bezier curves to create arc s…

I had some thoughts of writing some software a bit like that, and would be interested and hearing what would be the feature set for a minimal viable product. *

For example, if you could do things like

>I cannot for the life of me figure out bezier curves to create arc sections with proper radii that blends into another line, and abusing adding and subtracting shapes from each other is a cumbersome process and editing the final shape often requires me to start all over creating that composite shape.

and also

>I would like to have more technical and fine-grained control over the way my drawings are made, than what pulling with my cursor on those handles gives me.

But for everything else (color/fills etc.) you would export to other software

>It also needs to export to some standard format to be used for print, so using SolidWorks of Fusion360 isn't really an option, I can't export the vector 1-to-1 onto a pdf and do proper colors with those.

Would that still be a useful product?

* Disclaimer: Way back around 2001/2002, I worked on the Solidworks sketcher, and also before that used to work for D-Cubed Ltd. (SolidWorks and Autodesk Fusion 360 sketchers both implement their unbounded geometry constraints/dimensions using the D-Cubed DCM2 constraint management component licensed from Siemens PLM.) To implement what you want one needs at least some of the features from DCM2. Either implement one's own code, or one licenses from Siemens PLM (expensive) etc. Most licensees for DCM2 were 3D. There was one product that I recall that fits your description - Imagineer from Intergraph - but it got discontinued. I suspect that there is a market for what you describe, but maybe it's somewhat niche.

Re: Amadine – Vector graphics software for Mac

#79

Post by TheSpiceIsLife »

ricardobeat wrote: post #54
oceanghost wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given the poor state of Apples PC hardware, I would be weary of investing in the platform as a developer or user.

What poor state? The hardware is ok, design still top notch despite going downhill, a few components above average (ex SSD), otherwise it’s just stupidly expensive on the high-end.

Don’t all of the recent MacBook Pros and Airs have low relatability scores?

That may factor in to some people’s decisions.

Re: Amadine – Vector graphics software for Mac

#80

Post by ejstembler »

jen20 wrote: post #2

Although I don’t have much use for vector graphics software, it is _great_ to see people building new native mac apps which take advantage of the unique features of the platform instead of targeting a cross-platform lowest common denominator!

Is it truly native? I was digging around and found some references to https://www.wxwidgets.org. I thought the GUI looked a little off to be truly native...
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