Monodraw for Mac
I'm incredibly excited to reveal something that we've been working on for a while now. It's a new app for the Mac called Monodraw. As the name suggests, it's about text art in a monospaced font environment. Here's a sneak peek of how the app looks today (work in progress), showing a robot that Atanas drew.
The Monodraw website contains more information about the feature set, includes additional screenshots and a screencast, it's worth checking it out. We're planning to run a beta program in due course, so be sure to reserve your place (first-come, first-served).
The reason why I started making Monodraw is a bit peculiar. I had an idea for a text editor (like every programmer has at some point in their life) and I started researching suitable data structures. In the process, I stumbled upon some very nice ASCII diagrams and flow charts which considerably sped up the learning process. I realised that it would be very helpful if I could embed such drawings directly in my code – a picture is worth a thousand words and a high-level diagram can convey a lot information with just a glance. While there are many diagramming apps, they output image files which you cannot embed in your code or text – I want the information to be in the right place, together with its context.
I searched to see if there was a Mac app which would allow me to easily create and manipulate ASCII diagrams for my purposes but I could not find anything. Thus the idea of Monodraw was born. I'm quite happy with the progress we've been making and I'm excited to see how far we can go. Our priority is to ship a polished 1.0 and take it from there – it's only the beginning.
You should follow @Monodraw for the latest updates.