
Amadine – Vector graphics software for Mac - delib
https://amadine.com
======
jen20
Although I don’t have much use for vector graphics software, it is _great_ to
see people building new native mac apps which take advantage of the unique
features of the platform instead of targeting a cross-platform lowest common
denominator!

~~~
eddieh
Yes, there's so many great Mac/Apple only applications that beat the pants off
of any cross-platform apps, especially stuff built with Electron.

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.

~~~
ralusek
The irony of Figma being better than all of those applications, while having
been built with Electron, will not be lost on those who have used it.

~~~
eddieh
I doubt that claim so much. Every Electron application I've ever used is
seriously deficient in many ways. First every app has its own set of UI
controls, so right there you loose one of the best things about native Mac
apps, consistency. Next I've yet to find a single Electron app that doesn't
break some core Mac feature such as copy/paste, system wide spellcheck, system
wide dictionary, the emoji picker, system wide settings, scrollable area
bounce, zoom, tabs, windows, menus, keyboard shortcuts, drag & drop,
screenshots, and so on. Third every electron app consumes way to many system
resources and almost all are painfully slow. But, hey I'll give Figma a try
and report back.

~~~
eddieh
\- Empty window stoplight controls (breaks HIG).

\- 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.

------
pier25
Still a little rough around the edges but these guys get it!

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.

slowclap.gif

------
ken
I bought iDraw (back before AutoCAD bought Indeeo). I bought Affinity
Designer. I tried demos for everything else I could get my hands on. I even
tried Inkscape.

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.

~~~
willio58
I don’t consider any adobe app that I’ve ever use to be Mac-like honestly. For
95% of my usecases, sketch and pixelmator do the job. I’m hoping this program
takes care of the 5% gap in features i need for very specific vector drawing.

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.

------
sudhirj
Any recommendations for an iPad + Pencil vector app? This app has a note that
an iOS app is coming soon, wondering if anyone has any existing apps they
like.

~~~
razster
I enjoy Affinity Designer on my iPad. I use it on Windows desktop for most of
my logo designing. For work I use Illustrator, so I'm use to both.

------
nnq
WOW! _This almost feels as good as Fireworks did back in the day!_ I'll
probably use this for my upcoming web coming. Waaay nicer usability than
Affinity (which was way nicer to use than Illustrator already): special path
width control points, multiple strokes and inner shadows etc. on same shape...

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!_

------
simongr3dal
OT, but does anyone know of a vector drawing program that allows me draw in a
similar that Fusion360 or SolidWorks does with their 2D CAD sketches?

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.

~~~
Rexxar
It's not exactly what you want but I have made a little software that is a
sort of mix between Inkscape and Geogebra in which you can define a lots of
shapes geometrically
([https://www.ludigraphix.org](https://www.ludigraphix.org), recent show HN :
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19942367](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19942367))

------
whalesalad
Love the sales page and all the illustrations, especially the drawing of the
Mustang. I have the same set of performance pack wheels on a shelf in my
garage.

It's nice to see more and more of Adobe's lunch getting taken away by indie
shops and products.

------
lgrebe
Wow! Really a great tool.

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…

~~~
mkl
Inkscape seems like it matches that description. The code part isn't as nice
as Chrome or Firefox, but it's there.

------
latexr
> Developed with precision and attention to what users need

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!

------
coldcode
I just started using Affinity, how does this compare?

~~~
boromi
I'm also curious. Affinity is compatible with Windows which is a huge
advantage. It looks like affinity has more features but is also 30$ more
expensive, which is not a big deal considering how powerful it is.

------
wj
I've been wanting to learn Illustrator in order to create a children's book
but never got around to it. Will give this a demo.

------
ahmadster
Sorry, no, Figma way better [https://www.figma.com](https://www.figma.com)

~~~
omnimus
And probably way slower. Figma is awesome but most of these complicated
vectors would stall figma to unpleasant experience.

Also vector drawing in figma is super basic.

------
alexkwang
Mac native app is released.

Some people: "applause for native instead of bloated Electron crap".

Also some people: "wtf why only Mac?"

------
dman
Am curious why some vector rendering products (Amadine, OmniGraffle, Paper 53
etc) end up being Mac / iOS only? Are there some APIs that are Mac only? Why
would devs who take an effort to write such a substantial app not ifdef away
the rendering bits to make the app work on Windows.

~~~
pvg
The entire UI is OS-specific. If this was a matter of #ifdefs, we wouldn't
have 50 page weekly discussions on the merits of various cross-platform
technologies.

~~~
dman
Ive been surprised because in codebases I have worked on, you usually have an
abstract rendering api at the bottom with multiple implementations for each
platform. Ive been curious why you couldnt abstract out things like window
creation, layout, rendering and implement the abstract api for multiple
platforms.

~~~
ken
The very concept of "a window" is pretty different across platforms.

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.

~~~
dman
Completely agree with everything you said but the curiosity that drove my
initial question still stands. To be specific do you think Sketch /
OmniGraffle are unimplementable on Windows? Why would the creators of those
apps after achieving such success on OSX, be unwilling/unable to address the
windows market. I am convinced there are good rational reasons for this, I was
hoping that someone from one of those companies could comment on this. [It is
possible that in their target demographic everyone uses OSX, but is that the
case?]

~~~
Chazprime
If the app is a native Cocoa application, it’s been written in Obj-C or Swift.
Cross-platform apps and frameworks are usually written in C++ with a UI
implemented in a common framework like Qt.

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.

------
favorited
Anyone know if there are differences between the App Store version and the
standalone purchase? I like to buy from the App Store when it's available, but
sometimes apps have to gimp certain features to deal with sandboxing, etc.

~~~
eridius
Usually if there's a difference the site will list it. I can't think of any
sandboxing limitations off the top of my head that would affect a vector
graphics program.

------
jordache
Can it draw curves with arrow heads? If so, I'm ditching Affinity Designer...

~~~
drmeister
Oh yes, please someone answer this. I have used adobe illustrator for 15 years
- then affinity designer for a few more years. I just want vector graphics
with arrows without enormous subscription fees - damnit!

~~~
auxym
Pretty sure inkscape can do this?

~~~
jordache
Don't know if it can.. However inkscape is HORRIBLE across the board when
compared to commercial apps like affinity designer and illustrator.

The $50 one time cost for affinity designer is essentially free, when
factoring in its improvements over inkscape.

------
tptacek
How does this compare to Autodesk Graphic? (I haven't looked at Affinity; I'm
not one of the cool kids; I'd be interested in hearing if that's way better
than Graphic as well).

------
davidcollantes
This is really well done, and very powerful, wow! The attention to details,
and the nice UI, so neat, and smooth. Thanks, bought it!

------
andrewingram
Off topic, but I'm curious who did the skateboarder illustration. It matches
an aesthetic that I have a need for.

~~~
princekolt
It's in their instagram: [https://www.instagram.com/p/BsqFlu-
lKYf/](https://www.instagram.com/p/BsqFlu-lKYf/)

~~~
andrewingram
Thanks!

------
exabrial
I've wanted something as good as Inkscape, but native on OSX, this looks
interesting

------
ryanmarsh
I’m not the least bit artistic but this looks really nice and approachable.

------
numbers
I'm curious about what the name means...anyone know?

~~~
userbinator
It sounds like a chemical to me, probably because there are many other
compounds with a -dine suffix, e.g.:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acridine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acridine)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyridine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyridine)

------
butz
Any plans to bring it to other platforms, possibly Linux?

------
vbuwivbiu
Pixelmator has a vector graphics mode Command-Shift-V

------
hartator
Would that finally replace Fireworks in my hearth?

------
sam0x17
Ugg why are people still making Mac only software. It is so easy these days to
target the Unix operating systems together with roughly the same codebase.

~~~
saagarjha
Not for high-quality software with a GUI.

