Monodraw
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The discussion around Monodraw, a $9.99 Mac app for creating ASCII art, has sparked a lively debate about its perpetual licensing model, with many commenters praising the developer's approach as a refreshing change from subscription-based services. Some users, like greengreengrass and __MatrixMan__, have expressed their appreciation for the model by purchasing the app, while others, like JKCalhoun, have raised eyebrows over the use of the term "license," wondering if it implies hidden fine print. The conversation has also touched on the semantics of "licensing" versus "buying" software, with some arguing it's a more accurate term since you're purchasing a perpetual right to use the product. Meanwhile, others have noted the app's Mac exclusivity, with some, like mrzool, appreciating the developer's commitment to creating native, Electron-free apps.
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Looks great, and also love the perpetual license for $9.99 rather than the host of subscription services, i'll probably end up buying it just to support good practices.
That word is a red flag for me — wondering what dark pattern is awaiting, finding myself digging for the fine print…
In the US, the First-Sale Doctrine won't apply to software (unlike tangible books and records) so you probably do not have the right to sell your copy of this software to another person.
Since that's not true ownership, I think it can only be described as a license.
But I'll agree that all sorts of shenanigans can, and often do, hide under that generic term. However, "buy" could suggest many substantial rights that are not on offer (most importantly distribution), so it's a bit of a quandary.
The phrase "Buy Now - $9.99, yours forever" might thread the needle. The sale page would still need to include all the legal terms, of course. I think "license" is a necessary word there.
Not sure how first sale affects software sales other than software rental in the USA is an exception to the first sale doctrine. Software rental is not allowed unless it's a physical video game copy for a video game console or you have a physical copy of the software and you can't just easily make a copy of it in the normal course of using it (not sure exactly what this would mean, but presumably things like software for embedded devices). There are exceptions for libraries and educational institutions.
I am not a lawyer, however.
A perpetual, irrevocable, lease could be a thing.
I know it's pedantic, but to me the key thing is that it is the rights themselves that are "licensed." Not specific copies. The license covers what ways you are and are not allowed to make more copies (that aren't just your personal copy). So e.g. Open Source/Free Software/Closed Source libraries can be "licensed" and copies of them can be modified and included in work you create according to the license.
But I don't think the software of a SaaS is leased, sold, or licensed. It's just a service that is available and perhaps promised to stay available for a term. And of course Monodraw is not a SaaS anyway.
Also not a lawyer. I have read more contracts than most healthy adults, but that is just as likely to be distorting as clarifying.
Regardless, when you buy it, it's yours forever - no activation, no DRM, no subscription, no fine print.
(Monodraw developer here).
how does this compare to asciiflow.com which is free and open-source?
asciiflow.com is great as well.
(Monodraw developer here)
In the retro computing world, the use of "ASCII" to construct levels and worlds is quite prevalent.
I immediately considered whether Monodraw might be used as a kind of level editor in that context.
Would you consider adding an '8-bit character bitmap' mode, which allows for the bitmap to also be edited?
With such a feature, Monodraw would become immediately applicable to those of us building retro games for older platforms where this technique is used rather extensively to produce compelling art-work.
For context, here is an example game which uses plain ol' ASCII chars to deliver some fun Moon Buggy action:
https://www.oric.org/software/ascii_moon_buggy-2500.html
The same technique is used here, albeit with redefined character sets, to implement a Scuba Dive adventure:
https://www.oric.org/software/scuba_dive-89.html
> Would you consider adding an '8-bit character bitmap' mode, which allows for the bitmap to also be edited?
Can you clarify with an example? Monodraw supports "surfaces" which are just like bitmaps - you can use the Pencil tool and draw on those surfaces with any characters you want (there's a palette in the inspector), just like a bitmap editor.
The only issue is, are these surfaces 8x8 or similar, and would it be possible to load in a 6x8 bitmap, for those unusual 8-bit computers of the era which used them .. I refer to my favourite system of the period, the Oric Atmos, which graphics techniques are described here: https://osdk.org/index.php?page=articles&ref=ART9
(EDIT: details on the charset feature, which would be 'nice to have' in Monodraw, here: https://osdk.org/index.php?page=articles&ref=ART9#title11)
IF I can edit the bitmap and render as 6x8 characters, Monodraw would be immediately useful for level design. In any case, when I have access to a non-work computer, I hope to spend some time digging in and informing myself, so apologies if none of this is relevant ..
Having all the Unicode emoji galore as an option would be great. Not just for colorful code docs, but millions of social media content creators out there!
Brilliant app, nice work.
I was browsing StackOverflow and saw some cool looking ASCII diagrams, thinking to myself "How can I make these easily on macOS?". So that's how the idea was born.
I then spent about 1.5yrs from the initial commit until v1 release. Unfortunately, the financials didn't work out, so I had to find a job eventually.
But I'm still maintaining the app and do have longer term plans when my job situation changes.
[1] https://milen.me/software/clear-iphone-walkthrough/
I was one of the co-creators of Clear and the developer who built the iOS app. It was co-created by me, Realmac and Impending. I had previously interned at Realmac and had been friends with the founder, Dan (they acquired another app of ours - EventBox, which later got rebranded as Socialite).
I hope we can one day compete. :)
Edit: removed the URL
I wish I had the time to port it to all three desktop OSes.
But more importantly, my priority is delivering the best user experience and that's where AppKit shines.
If you don't care about making the best possible app that you can, go ahead and do it in the browser. You will get something that's probably good enough and runs everywhere. But it's going to use more battery, more memory, and more bandwidth and not feel like a Mac app. Plus (IMHO) it's less fun to develop for the browser.
It’s possible to make great web apps, it just takes the kind of care and dedication that @milen has already proven to have. If the web interface lowers the barriers to developing a cross-platform version of Monodraw, then I think it would be silly not to consider investing in it.
Interesting. But, why?
I find it unlikely that such copy protection would actually convert a non-paying user into a customer.
I also don't want to make the software network dependent in any way.
I used to think that but then kept tripping across customers who ran multiple copies of my software after purchasing a single license. I now wish I'd tightened the DRM from the start.
Fighting piracy is generally not worth it. Those people would never pay, so you're fighting to stop a pirate from using it, not to get them to pay. There's a big difference.
As a user of Monodraw in an airgapped environment: thank you!
Companies participating in that transformation don't get my money and I'm glad to know that this isn't one of them.
Would it be possible to export to text with escape sequences for the colors?
I love the app, please keep up the good work. It's perfect as is (at least for me).
Thanks for all the text ;)
I'm a huge fan, and am surprised how stable Monodraw has been for me. I've kept a single, growing document open as a scratch pad for the last three years. The only downtime was converting it to the new-ish file format haha.
I really care about stability and performance, so I’m happy to hear that it’s being appreciated.
I'd love some scripting features, to create and edit designs through code. But I'm aware my use case is a little niche.
Does it support the new 3x2 and 4x2 mosaic characters (and the HP big 3x3 cell letters) from recent Unicode specs?
I immediately hate that when intending to scroll vertically using the trackpad on my macbook, it constantly unintentionally scrolls horizontally as well and I have to correct it. It is particularly irritating since there is no content on the canvas to see when scrolling.
Maybe I'm just super accustomed to browser scrolling behaviors, which snap scrolling based on initial direction.
I'm mostly posting this because its the kind of papercut that might be forgotten over time.
Once I started using it for actual diagrams, the issue completely faded away. Scrolling a super long vertical-only document is an unimportant edge case.
This is the god damn holy grail of ascii chart editing.
Well done.
Was going to politely ask for full dark mode but just noticed from your blog that it seems to be on the way?
> Harness the Power and Simplicity of Plain Text
Nice tagline, but surely it's not just plain text. It's some unicode shenanigans. How does one make sure their console can display all the necessary characters? How does one make sure others can see their creation?
(Not a Mac user, so cannot try, and not clear from screenshots for me; these all seem like ASCII + )
[0] https://www.unicode.org/charts/nameslist/c_1FB00.html [1] https://www.unicode.org/charts/nameslist/c_1CC00.html [2] https://www.unicode.org/charts/nameslist/c_2800.html
Bravo.
the fact i can export to clipboard and re-import it and reconstruct all the shapes etc. almost flawlessly is such a big win.
It's an issue I'm seeing even for comments touching too much on algorithmic stuff. To take a somewhat common example, if you were dealing with a credit card payment flow, where would the explanation of how a transaction goes through a few states asynchronously, which all trigger a webhook callback ?
Obviously the people working on the code need to be aware of that, so documentation is somewhere needed. I've seen people put whole blocks in class headers, other sprinkle it all inside the code, personally I ended up moving it outside of the code. Where would you put it?
Job Lifecycle: https://hexdocs.pm/oban/job_lifecycle.html
Composition: https://oban.pro/docs/pro/1.6.4/composition.html
same lol. here is a blog post of mine where I used them - https://avi.im/blag/2024/disaggregated-storage
I had to convert them to images because I couldn't get to working with Hugo, static site generator
It's one of the better parts of literate programming without typesetting.
[1] https://blog.regehr.org/archives/1653 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31891226
Same with ASCii- you could respect that it took some time to make it. What respect and feeling will there be for work in the future?
Everything generated or thought cheaply generated on whims. Everything throwaway.
Good art is good art. Focusing on the time spent making it is a poor substitution for the ability to critique the art itself.
Anyway, people made this same argument when image editors came into their own. There is a long, tiresome generational tradition of artists thinking the new crowd has it too easy and doesn't appreciate the grit that goes into making art in earlier mediums. We can do better.
https://app.monosketch.io/
https://web.archive.org/web/20210503172024/https://fatiherik...
https://textik.com/#
https://asciiflow.com/#/
https://fsymbols.com/draw/
[1]: https://apps.apple.com/app/nonoverse-nonogram-puzzles/id6748...
https://alternativeto.net/software/monodraw/
https://asciiflow.com/#/
and
https://meatfighter.com/ascii-silhouettify/
to create input text for TerminalTextEffects to create terminal animations like the following:
https://chrisbuilds.github.io/terminaltexteffects/img/change...
https://github.com/ChrisBuilds/terminaltexteffects
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8433417 - oct 09 2014
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9545252 - may 14 2015
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27832910 - july 14 2021
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32134469 - july 18 2022
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39651796 - march 9 2024
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45037904 - 1 year ago
and the some
all of these gained interest, so my conclusion is Monodraw benefits a lot from being regularly exposed to HN crowd.
There's a visual simplicity and legibility to the kind of straight-forward but slightly-decorated diagrams shown in the sample images. And the fact that I can now copy-paste them anywhere as well (rather than the classic "screenshot of a Miro or Paint.js board") is so cool.
https://github.com/casparwylie/cascii-core
Very nice.
[1] https://www.gridsagegames.com/rexpaint/
[1] https://github.com/cmang/durdraw
It's a great simple app I use for inline comment diagrams and more importantly server login banners.
I love to login to a server with a customized banner and a tagline. It's just a small joy makes work more fun.
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