Loading.Monodraw For Mac allows you to easily create text-based art (like diagrams, layouts, flow charts) and visually represent algorithms, data structures, binary formats and more. Because it’s all just text, it can be easily embedded almost anywhere. A picture is worth a thousand words. A diagram is probably worth twice as much.
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Enhance your technical documentation (code, specs) with easy to comprehend textual art. Visualisation of data structures, algorithms and data formats plays a crucial role in understanding. You will be reading the code more often than writing it, so why not make it much easier to grasp. Easily create text banners with just a single click. FIGlet is built into Monodraw and we bundle 148 fonts as standard (custom ones are supported, too). You can interactively resize the text box, change the font and adjust the alignment – no need for a terminal. Combine the simplicity of plain text with the power of mind mapping.
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Monodraw gives you the freedom to manage your textual data exactly the way you want. Move text around anywhere in the infinite canvas – no need to be constrained by the linear structure of a text file. Do you deal with databases? Then you know how useful entity-relationship diagrams can be.
Visually describe your data model with a simple ER diagram. Monodraw supports Crow’s Foot notation in three different variants to suit your personal preference. Monodraw is powered by a custom CoreText-based text engine giving you precise control over the layout. You can adjust the alignment, position, line sweep direction and line movement. Adding a border around your text is only a click away, too. The line tool makes connecting shapes as easy as pie.
Orthogonal and staircase lines are supported with the ability to set a line dash pattern. Attachment points allow you to dynamically attach your lines to other shapes so that you don’t have to re-arrange them each time you move things around. The rectangle tool can be used to create all kinds of boxes which are the most commonly used element in text art. Specify border or a background with just a few clicks.
Oh, you can add shadows, too! Last but not least, custom attachment points will help you attach your lines at exactly the right place.
It is time for our second Monodraw beta progress update. I have been busy implementing some very important changes that have significantly increased the app's utility and usability. Let's take a detailed look at what has been happening over the past few weeks.
![]() Time Frames
I know a lot of people just want to find out when the public beta will ship. Our stance on the topic has always been – it's done when it's done. As we slowly but steadily complete more of the tasks left for the launch, we are getting a slightly better idea about the time frames.
We have just announced our lab programme, so if you want to be one of the first people to get your hands on Monodraw, sign up. At the moment, it seems that I have about two weeks worth of work left until the app is in a state to be distributed to the lab participants – my personal aim is for this to happen before the end of the year.
Once we have shipped the alpha, there is one major feature left for the beta – a special tool that we have kept secret, which we will reveal when the beta launches. Once 2015 rolls around, we will be at the final 10% but as it usually happens, those last few bits of work might take a disproportionate amount of time. Depending on how we progress over the next few months, we are hoping to ship the beta in the first quarter of 2015.
Line Tool
One of Monodraw's main goals is to make common operations very easy thus saving you time. When using ASCII art to draw diagrams, lines are used to connect the various shapes. I completely changed the way they work, so you automatically get the right behaviour in almost every case. And for the rare times when the app cannot guess your intentions, full manual control is avaiable – the best of both worlds.
Before I describe the changes, we need to revisit how lines worked up until now. We used to have two types, orthogonal and step. The line itself had a starting orthogonal direction (whether it will firstly go along the X or Y axis). There were two major problems with this approach:
To resolve all of these problems, I removed the starting direction and introduced four different modes which fully determine a line's behaviour:
You might have noticed that lines' automatic behaviour depends on the endpoints' preferred directions. How are those determined? You don't have to do anything for built-in points as those work out of the box – for example, rect attachment points prefer perpendicular directions to their respective sides. For custom points, you can manually set the directions via a contextual menu thus giving you full control – a point can have multiple preferred directions, all of equal priority. Check out the screencast below for all of the new functionality.
Pencil Tool
The pencil tool allows you to 'paint' characters using the mouse and up until recently, using it was confusing for several reasons:
All of the above problems were resolved by making the following changes:
Text Tool
The text tool introduces an interesting conundrum because editing can mean two different things – editing the text or the shape itself. The intuitive and consistent behavour is to always edit the text first but we must also provide an alternative way to edit the shape – this is done using a popover. This approach removes any confusion that might arise when dealing with text fields, as the screencast below demonstrates.
Notable Changes
I made lots of other changes, some of the more notable ones are:
Thanks for reading this far – until next time!
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