Amadine – Vector graphics software for Mac
amadine.com
amadine.com
I use some great apps on a daily basis that are Mac or Apple ecosystem only.
Acorn - Image editor
OmniGraffle - Diagramming
OmniFocus - Todo list for GTD
Sketch - UI prototyping
Plus Apple's productivity software, Pages, Keynote, and Numbers. I honestly don't know how people manage with G Suite.
There's also a ton of apps I don't use on a daily basis, and won't bother listing.
It really is awesome to see new native Mac apps. Please keep building them, and I promise to keep buying them. I'm giving Amadine a try today.
Safari is another overlooked example: the fluency of moving between Mac, iPad and phone with a shared history, tab handoff etc is fantastic.
- I been waiting over two minutes for it to open a blank document created in the web version...three minutes still blank.
- Had to close and re-open. Still takes a few seconds to load a blank document.
- System wide spellchecker doesn't work.
- System wide dictionary doesn't work.
- Uses CPU time when it should be idle.
- One object on screen and it is already using more memory that any other process on my machines (and that includes Discord).
- It spawned 8 processes!
- Copying an object and pasting into another application doesn't work.
- Doesn't respect copy/paste with style and "Paste and Match Style."
- Doesn't support standard macOS accessibility.
I can probably go on, but honestly I'm not impressed and I'm bored.
native mac development has such a potential but i don't see people using or promoting it. i can easily blame apple for that.
my little experience is that it is very hard to find tutorials that are not geared towards iOS. just try and see for yourself... even books. it is tiring and time consuming to find the right article or tutorial for the macos right now.
funny how people go through hoops to get their ipads connected and stream it on youtube, or to get their simulators working while developing on a mac. some of the frameworks they cover could be done natively on the mac!
(Might've been finally addressed in Win10—dunno, I left that world behind a while ago.)
Example: I am weary from investing so much time and effort in Apple's platform. Being so deeply invested, I am wary of further investments until I can diversify.
This is confusing as hell because "wear" sounds the same as "ware" and weary is a real word and will not upset your spellchecker. Of course "weary" sounds different than "wear", with the first sylable rhyming with ear. Thanks English.
Anyhow, misuse of words like this reduces the impact of your communication. I hope this explanation can help you be a bit more effective in expressing yourself.
'Leery' also means that, which is where I think the confusion comes from.
That may factor in to some people’s decisions.
I've been looking for something like this for ages. A simple lightweight vector graphics software with the best parts of illustrator and none of the fluff. Also, completely macOS native. No web app or Electron based crap.
It even has proper group isolation mode, which neither Sketch nor Affinity Designer have implemented after years of users requesting it. This is for me the most important feature in any vectors software since I very rarely use layers. Groups are so much faster.
Hopefully they will keep polishing it, but it looks very promising and for $20 it's a steal.
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They all have flashy demos and claim to be great Mac apps (well, except Inkscape). A couple weeks later, I end up regretting my purchase. They just aren't terribly Mac-like, and they have all sorts of little bugs that never seem to get fixed. Being a small company in a huge market, their support suffers. There's 10 little obvious things it's missing that you assume will get added real soon, but it turns out there's actually 1000 things it's missing, and they keep picking other little things. Hell, Affinity Designer is 5 years old and arrowheads are still on their to-do list.
After 20 years of futzing around with Mac graphics apps, Illustrator is still the best vector graphics app I've ever used, and the newcomers aren't even more Mac-like (which seems like it'd be a low bar). Adobe had a 30 year head start. No matter how swanky the new CoreImage APIs are, you're not going to catch Illustrator in a year or two. Their manual is an inch thick (or, it was 20 years ago) and extremely well-written. If you haven't read it, you don't know half of the little usability tricks that they've packed in there. I love to hate on Adobe as much as anyone, and it's definitely not a very Mac-like user experience, but when it comes to making graphics, Illustrator is an absolute beast.
The price of Amadine is a turnoff: $20 is simply nowhere near enough to support the depth of features that a vector graphics app needs. I can tell this is going to be severely underpowered.
I've read about "Javascript fatigue". I have "Mac vector graphics app fatigue". Never again.
I don’t use the advanced features of illustrator, partially due to my design style and partially because I’m too lazy to learn them. I’m glad alternatives to Illustrator exist in the market. It’s nice that I don’t have to pay 50$ a month or whatever absurd price adobe charges for cc these days.
Arrowheads are in their beta; you can use them today.
Everything else I agree with, and I’ll add that I miss Freehand.
> I have "Mac vector graphics app fatigue".
Amen. It’s one of those cases where I think “if I had infinite money, I’d build a vector graphics app that works just like I want”. But then I realise that if I had infinite money, I’d have better things to spend my time on.
For someone with a bit of an artistic side, but who also likes to draw "logically" with exact control of the shape but also without introducing 100 new objects in the picture, this seems amazing.
It lacks the "mixing vectors and pixels" part of Affinity Designer which is sort of cool, but the core part, pen and drawing tools seem to be both intuitive and powerful...
Will play with the trial more, if it doesn't crash much and doesn't lack any essential feature for me I'll buy it 100%! Keep up the good work!
It also needs to export to some standard format to be used for print, so using SolidWorks of Fusion360 isn't really an option, I can't export the vector 1-to-1 onto a pdf and do proper colors with those.
I cannot for the life of me figure out bezier curves to create arc sections with proper radii that blends into another line, and abusing adding and subtracting shapes from each other is a cumbersome process and editing the final shape often requires me to start all over creating that composite shape.
I would like to have more technical and fine-grained control over the way my drawings are made, than what pulling with my cursor on those handles gives me.
For example, if you could do things like
>I cannot for the life of me figure out bezier curves to create arc sections with proper radii that blends into another line, and abusing adding and subtracting shapes from each other is a cumbersome process and editing the final shape often requires me to start all over creating that composite shape.
and also
>I would like to have more technical and fine-grained control over the way my drawings are made, than what pulling with my cursor on those handles gives me.
But for everything else (color/fills etc.) you would export to other software
>It also needs to export to some standard format to be used for print, so using SolidWorks of Fusion360 isn't really an option, I can't export the vector 1-to-1 onto a pdf and do proper colors with those.
Would that still be a useful product?
* Disclaimer: Way back around 2001/2002, I worked on the Solidworks sketcher, and also before that used to work for D-Cubed Ltd. (SolidWorks and Autodesk Fusion 360 sketchers both implement their unbounded geometry constraints/dimensions using the D-Cubed DCM2 constraint management component licensed from Siemens PLM.) To implement what you want one needs at least some of the features from DCM2. Either implement one's own code, or one licenses from Siemens PLM (expensive) etc. Most licensees for DCM2 were 3D. There was one product that I recall that fits your description - Imagineer from Intergraph - but it got discontinued. I suspect that there is a market for what you describe, but maybe it's somewhat niche.
It's nice to see more and more of Adobe's lunch getting taken away by indie shops and products.
At the crossroads of Web an Vectorgraphics, I’d love to see a „wysiwyg“ svg editor with the visual interface of a great drawing tool like amandine and at the same time a split window pane like the chrome inspector to modify a resulting svg code and having changes there be immediately visible in the visual interface…
Imagine I’d be amazing to get a hang of svg and as a result be able to build some great stuff for example by hooking up d3js…
Affinity Designer also promises precision, but when it comes down to it I find it embarrassingly imprecise, buggy, and lacking in basic functionality. It can’t even do an acceptable job of joining two shapes at a point.
I’m cautiously optimistic about Amadine. I’ll give it a spin, and fingers crossed it lives up to its promise!
Also vector drawing in figma is super basic.
Some people: "applause for native instead of bloated Electron crap".
Also some people: "wtf why only Mac?"
The second reason is that Mac users pay for software. You can sustain a business as an independent software vendor by targeting only Mac users. Linux users tend to want all free & open source software. Windows users tend to steal apps. A disproportionate number of Windows users I know are happy to steal all their commercial software—I'm not just talking about students and economically disadvantaged people, I'm talking about 6-figure salary software developers.
By building a cross-platform app you will decrease the amount of paying Mac users while increasing the number of Windows users willing to steal from you. The amount of work required to support Windows and all the missed Mac sales may not be worth the effort.
MacOS is the only one with a concept of proxy icons. It has a distinction between the key and main window. There's a responder chain for event handling. Toolbars have a built-in editor. There's QuickLook for easy previewing of sub-files. There are standard popovers, which can be torn off.
On the Windows side, I'm sure they've got their own set of unique features and constraints that the Mac doesn't have. (The Ribbon and keyboard navigation come to mind.) Same with Linux.
Lacking a feature often means you need to design the UI different elsewhere. Without proxy icons, you might need to add a menu item to mimic that functionality, for example. These things domino into each other. There's a reason that good Mac apps and good Windows apps don't tend to look identical.
English and German are fairly similar, as languages go, but you can't just do a word-for-word replacement of English and get a good German paragraph, or vice versa. Not infrequently, you need to re-arrange everything to make it work. The pieces you have to work with are just different.
2D/3D graphics APIs (if that's what you're referring to) aren't like this. For the most part, they're all playing with the same basic pieces. When my Mac traded OpenGL for Metal, I barely noticed, even as a developer writing graphics code. When my Mac switched from Carbon to Cocoa, everybody needed to rewrite almost everything.
To port the application to Windows, you’d lose a lot of the Mac-specific features, or have to do a substantial amount of work implementing platform-specific UIs.
There's a long-running subculture in MacOS (and once Nextstep and now iOS) software development that I'll call 'app craftsmanship'. At its best it produces high-quality, slick apps that usefully leverage the platform's strengths and build dedicated (and typically paying) user bases. So when someone puts out a new Mac or iOS and makes a fuss about how it's fully native and supports the Face Bar™, they're signaling to potential users 'Hey! I'm about to do some App Craftsmanship here, people' and hoping deciated users will flock to them, credit cards in hand. They're not selling to the people who are going to be irritated the app doesn't run on Ubuntu Maimed Mastodon. And that's not a moral failing, it's just market targeting.
After all, there are good Windows- and Linux specific applications as well, and for most fields learning a new tool for doing things you understand isn’t that hard.
Your example is how I used to develop portable native software as well.
The $50 one time cost for affinity designer is essentially free, when factoring in its improvements over inkscape.
Either way, it'll have little overlap with unrelated stuff when you type it into a search engine, which is not unimportant.