It's one of the few pieces of software I bought a licence for, rather than tolerate free tiers or simply not use it, because I approve of the licensing model.

Same here

That's cool … but we're calling buying an app licensing it now?

That word is a red flag for me — wondering what dark pattern is awaiting, finding myself digging for the fine print…

Yes. Always nice to see good, Electron-free native apps for Mac.

Not sure how comparable they are since I never used Monodraw due to not running MACs, but there is https://asciiflow.com/ and https://monosketch.io/ which I usually use. The latter is using some advanced UTF8 characters and when trying to get it incorporated for my personal blog, I had to use their specific monospaced font from their repo, as otherwise lines wouldn't line up correctly.

or even the "export to ascii" of draw.io? I would be happy to hear what the advantages could be.

The most obvious difference (and one worth much more than $10 to me) is that one is native and the other is not.

Monodraw's main selling point is that it's a fully native AppKit macOS app. If you value the experience, then you might like the app.

asciiflow.com is great as well.

(Monodraw developer here)

Very nice product!

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

Was this to scratch your own itch or who needs this?

Ouch! It looks very sweet i must say. Having worked on a similar idea for a while as a side project, it does hurt to see something better coming out.

I hope we can one day compete. :)

Edit: removed the URL

Windows version in the future?

> Monodraw does not use activation or any other form of DRM. We have complete trust in our customers.

Interesting. But, why?

Really neat, great work!

Would it be possible to export to text with escape sequences for the colors?

Huge fan of the product, just wanted to say Thank You :)

Hi Milen.

I love the app, please keep up the good work. It's perfect as is (at least for me).

Thanks for all the text ;)

Are there any enhancements that you've wanted to do, but haven't had the time?

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.

On one hand, this could provide a lot of value as some things are just plain hard to explain using only words. On the other hand, aren't you worried about when someone else comes along and needs to update one of those comments? If they're not aware of this tool, it's either going to be incredibly tedious or simply not going to happen.

Sounds super interesting, where do you put these diagrams ?

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?

Absolutely love monodraw for diagrams in documentation! All of the diagrams for Oban and Oban Pro are done this way:

Job Lifecycle: https://hexdocs.pm/oban/job_lifecycle.html

Composition: https://oban.pro/docs/pro/1.6.4/composition.html

> am now always looking for more ways to include this for inline-documentation.

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

Antique furniture meant something- it was done by hand.

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.