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Comment by exsf0859 | Hacker News Reader

Interesting UI, and great that's it's open-sourced!

M1 Mac owners should also check out the iPad version of Draw Things, which has a large number of features and is in very active development:

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/draw-things-ai-generation/id64...

Be aware that there is a bug in macOS 13.2b1 that makes Draw Things unusable on that version of macOS. Hopefully Apple will fix that soon.

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In my opinion Draw Things is the best stable diffusion app currently available for macOS/iOS. It's free, it is available in the App Store, it manages downloading models and weights, it supports a wide selection of popular models as well as custom weights, and it supports inpainting, text2image, and image2image.

It has some oddities: it uses a sqlite database to store generated images rather than the more traditional files, and the UI is idiosyncratic. You have to follow the author's twitter feed to learn how to use the advanced features.

Appears to be https://twitter.com/drawthingsapp

Storing images in the database is not a bad thing https://www.sqlite.org/fasterthanfs.html

Your link suggests this is the case for small images, thumbnails, not large images such as that typically produced by SD

That article also points to the paper https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/publication/to-blob..., the images produced by stable diffusion are about 500-600Kb in size. At this point it could be a similar performance or could be a little better or a little worse. I am not saying that it is better to store files in SQLite, just saying that nothing wrong with it, if those files are below 1Mb.

> I am not saying that it is better to store files in SQLite, just saying that nothing wrong with it, if those files are below 1Mb.

There is one very obvious thing wrong with it, the fact that those resulting images aren't files that are easily accessible to other things.

Unless storing in SQLite actually offers a real advantage in some other way, it's a disadvantage when the output is something you'll want to use with other tools.

SQLite has also measured the performance impact for storing larger BLOBs:

https://www.sqlite.org/intern-v-extern-blob.html

The verdict: storing blobs in the database is totally fine. Stable diffusion is totally compute bound, the overhead of storing a 1mb file in a sqlite db is miniscule.

Will storing thumbnails in a postgres database offer performance improvements as well?

It’s likely a function of building for iOS first and then porting to MacOS.

It is unfortunate that the UI is not even attempting to be platform native, though.

The box vs. the chocolate

I use iOS instead of Android because of the box. Apps that don’t look like the box art stick out like a sore thumb on iOS.

It crashed for me on my Macbook M1

be advised that it’s quite slow on an ipad if it doesn’t have an m1. it was faster on my iphone 14pro than on my ipad mini :|

The iPad Mini is quite old in terms of the SoC it shipped with.

Any recent iPad or iPhone has much better silicon , even if it’s not an M1.

mine has the A15 which was launched last year. and it still feels slow :(

Ah I forgot about the refresh for the 6th gen.

The difference in speed with your phone might be down to RAM? 6GB vs 4GB? I forget if the latest mini is LPDDR4 or 5 but it might be 5

Otherwise the A16 and the A15 aren’t that different, though the A16 does have a newer ANE ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_A16?wprov=sfti1 ).

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