milen

42 ms·

181.
by milen 12y ago
What's quite interesting is that a few years ago, when you bought from the MAS, you assumed you will always be able to install the software and it will be kept up to date. Nowadays, the unfortunately reality is the opposite - it's
182.
by milen 12y ago
There's a lot of whispering going on behind the scenes and some developers have had enough (and I guess more to come in the future). The only way to have your voice heard would be to leave the MAS. If Apple wanted, it could easily reso
183.
Mac App Store: The Subtle Exodus(blog.helftone.com)
335 points by milen 12y ago|245 comments
184.
by milen 12y ago
1. That's part of the design, should be apparent at most sizes but if your browser width is around the 2000px mark, it will look more like a bug. 2. Sorry about that, the issue seems related to the font metrics which results in the rob
185.
by milen 12y ago
Possibly, depending on user demand. The first beta build will not have support for ANSI, though. In general, the best way to have your voice heard would be to drop us an email, so that we can have at least some quantified data - thanks.
186.
by milen 12y ago
Thank you - I'm glad that we are on the same page :) I've got nothing against web apps, I use some on a daily basis - they have their own set of advantages over native apps. But for the purposes of Monodraw, I wanted to provide th
187.
by milen 12y ago
So, there are two related questions on that subject. 1) Why Mac? Because I'm an Mac / iOS developer and I know Cocoa. I have no experience programming for Windows (e.g., MFC, WinForms, WPF) nor Linux (GTK+ / Qt - I dabbled a
188.
by milen 12y ago
I would love to but I'm not a Windows developer (I have no experience on that platform), so there are no immediate plans. Depending on how things go, we might re-consider. I'm also playing with the idea in my head of collaborating
189.
by milen 12y ago
One of the major reasons for that position is that OS X updates are now free. The user experience comes first, no compromises. But please note that I'm not saying that I'll drop support for 10.9 because there's some convenien
190.
by milen 12y ago
Thanks :) There's currently no colour support, as my focus has been to make a solid v1. I've looked into ANSI escape sequences to support colour and it should be quite easy to add. Part of the problem when I work on Monodraw is th
191.
by milen 12y ago
I don't want to give any estimates as they would just be broken, lead to user disappointment and put unnecessary pressure on us. But I can tell you that from the bits that we have left, none of them require any internal architectural c
192.
by milen 12y ago
No, we haven't settled on a price yet (I don't know what it should be). If you have any thoughts on the subject, I'm all ears :) Our top priority currently is to create tool that we're proud of and which ours users love.
193.
by milen 12y ago
It's quite easy for me to support arbitrary character sets, so if there's enough demand, I can definitely implement it. If you can just drop us an email (see "How do I provide feedback" section at the bottom), that'
194.
by milen 12y ago
Apologies that the robot didn't render correctly in your browser - here's how it should look http://imgur.com/pst21UO I believe this is caused by the font used to render it, which is not a monospaced. We'll i
195.
by milen 12y ago
I don't think all the cool tools are coming out for the Mac but it's undoubtedly skewed towards it. The reasons for this are a mix of cultural, social and technical, along with momentum. Speaking for myself, when I was getting int
196.
by milen 12y ago
Thanks! I replied to fensipens explaining that the app can work in both Unicode or ASCII mode, which can be switched on the fly. The reason why I made the screencast in Unicode mode is simply because it looks nicer :)
197.
by milen 12y ago
Thank you :) Yes, we are going to charge for it because we have to - we are a very small independent software studio without any funding. The future of the software belongs in the hands of our users, they will decide if our work is worth it
198.
by milen 12y ago
I've designed the app so that you can choose your character set - Unicode or ASCII. This is a property of the document and can be changed on the fly, so you should be able to use the tool for text in a legacy environments as well.
199.
by milen 12y ago
You're quite right that the most important thing about the tool is that you can take the exported plain text result and put it in your code, web pages, etc. But when it comes to actually creating the content, we want to provide the bes
200.
by milen 12y ago
As far as the internal data model is concerned, there are no newlines. All shapes exist in an abstract discrete coordinate system and draw to it (if you're using the text tool, you can insert new lines etc but that's internal to t
201.
by milen 12y ago
Hey guys, I'm the developer of the app - glad to see it appear on HN. I'm working on it as we speak, so that we can ship the beta out ASAP. If anyone has any questions, just shoot - happy to answers :) Thanks!
202.
Monodraw – ASCII art editor designed for diagrams, flow-charts and more(monodraw.helftone.com)
4 points by milen 12y ago|0 comments
203.
by milen 12y ago
Whichever route you take, you _must_ watch any relevant WWDC sessions - they contain a lot of valuable information, and more importantly, in many cases, information that's not available in the docs.
204.
by milen 12y ago
I don't know about your jurisdiction but in most EU countries, the sale proceeds from Apple lie outside the scope of VAT. Thus, you need to subtract your effective VAT rate and the net effective rate that you end up paying on the MAS i
205.
by milen 12y ago
Even though your particular split between upfront + recurring costs is different than in my example, it's still in the spirit of sustainability. I honestly have no idea how the economics pan out if you had $50 app and $X yearly upgrade
206.
by milen 12y ago
I generally agree with you. One of the interesting bits of information from the article is the financial boost from paid updates. You can sort-of approximate this on the MAS but none of the options are ideal. In my opinion, you absolutely m
207.
by milen 12y ago
I've been talking to iOS / OS X indies over the past few weeks and with very few exceptions, all I hear is "revenue down X% over the last Y years". We've seen this first hand, too. Luc Vandal wrote a good article [1
208.
The Financial Side of Building Mac Apps(tyler.io)
175 points by milen 12y ago|41 comments
209.
Auto Layout on OS X: A Tale of Backwards Compatibility(blog.helftone.com)
1 points by milen 12y ago|0 comments
210.
by milen 12y ago
I did some further investigation [1] by running 20 million iterations in Release and profiled the code. Turns out, at least 82.9% of it was just swift_retain / swift_release (ref counting). Whether those retains / released can be

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