Great work Artur. I think this has potential, with enough contributors, to be a widely used tool. It's unfortunate that some people are getting really hung up on a specific interpretation of the submission title (that it currently has feature-parity with Illustrator), instead of talking about the seriously impressive amount of work you've put into this thing, or actual constructive criticism. Don't let it get to you, and keep up the great work :)
Agreed wholeheartedly, and this is as someone who's literally spent thousands of hours using Illustrator. I played with it for a few minutes and found the interaction to be very natural, and I only found a couple of bugs. I would suggest that if you avoid a lot of the print-specific aspects of Illustrator like color separations, supporting spot colors, screening options and a lot of their more gimmicky features, this could actually end up replacing it for a lot of people.
* one bug is here: http://mondrian.io/?p=5xf0YH Somehow I created a piece of geometry that's a line segment that can't be filled or stroked. Hover around near the end of that arrow and you'll find it. It was created using the line tool.
edit: never mind, it turns out I just didn't completely grasp the selection model. If I click on the line segment, the endpoints get selected and I can move it, but the fill/stroke panels don't appear. However, if I drag-select it so I get the line's bounding box, they do. The selection model is a bit quirky, although I suppose you're probably trying to simplify Illustrator's weird assortment of selection modes. Good luck with that. :)
The selection model used to work the way you expected - clicking on a line segment would select the whole shape.
I changed it to select only the two points that made up that line segment because I thought it made more sense, and there's usually plenty of hit-area on the inside of the shape for selecting the whole thing. In this case, I see how it was confusing.
I suppose I could revert back to the old selection model, or add an edge case where clicking on a line segment selects the whole shape if it consists of only two points. The current system would make more sense if there were more things you could do with selected points besides just moving them around with the arrow keys.
Wow. Love it. Love the visual history. It feels quite snappy. The UI aesthetics are great. You've got most the pen tool features I used in Illustrator, and managed to do it without having multiple kinds of arrows to keep track of, which always bugged me.
Played around a bit for a few minutes and threw a few of my usually handwritten SVGs at it with disastrous results. View boxes don't seem to work, dashed lines, symbols, any kind of shape reüse in general; groups are ungrouped automatically, but apparently properties defined on groups are not propagated to child elements when ungrouping. And it manages to lock up Firefox and IE completely.
Not terribly impressed so far, but then again, I'm not a designer or an artist and I manage to write SVGs that fail in various renderers due to implementation deficiencies. But those I tested were not even complex or used advanced features.
At the moment I'd guess this is aimed at the most trivial vector graphics possible, i.e. only basic shapes, stroke and fill. It might work for that, but that's well beyond what I use of SVG or Inkscape usually.
You're right, it still chokes on a lot of SVG features. It is in no way spec-complete. All I can say is hopefully people contribute and it works better for everyone. The version I'm sharing is what I've been able to muster by myself in a year between school and work.
That said, if you opened issues on Github describing how to lock it up in Firefox and IE, and listing those SVG features that it doesn't render, that would be very helpful. Cheers.
Apologies, if that came across too negative. It's just a bit frustrating when you see »Oh, nice, it's based on SVG and compares itself to Illustrator and Inkscape« and try various things you have written in the past years only to notice that none of them work.
Assuming ygra is German he/she probably just hit the [separate] ü key. That being said, until their follow up above I thought the comment was intended to be a parody of HN negativity.
I think that it's terrific but does a disservice to Illustrator. It's terrific because you've built it - and what's there, works, wonderfully - but does a disservice to Illustrator because the devil is in the million details that Illustrator has already implemented. But I know you want help to make and iron out those details, so really well done!
Awesome! I'm really awful at drawing on my computer. Many failed attempts at trying to learn Illustrator, Gimp, etc. What's really cool about a web app of a drawing app is that you could use all the open source product tour JS libraries to create interactive tutorials... So impressive, thank you!
If you failed at using Illustrator or Gimp effectively, then you didn't try hard enough. Follow video tutorials and try to recreate graphics, in time you'll get better.
Ugh, this entire thing is in coffeescript too, now I have to learn coffeescript to make sense of this library.
'The golden rule of CoffeeScript is: "It's just JavaScript". The code compiles one-to-one into the equivalent JS, and there is no interpretation at runtime'
There really is very little magic with coffeescript. Most of it is syntactic sugar which can be learned at a glance of: http://coffeescript.org/ .
Don't mean to come off as pushy but I think it's well worth learning what coffeescript is. Especially if you are familiar with javascript, as it's a straight upgrade in your toolkit.
As an additional testimony, I've actually been learning coffeescript without really knowing JavasScript, and it has actually gone fairly well. For the most part it's intuitive, and if you're willing to be a little frustrated figuring out some of the syntax changes it can be rewarding.
Basically, the punchline is how ridiculous it is that some people can believe they're entitled to something being a certain way, that they didn't know even existed until a few minutes ago.
"Ugh, this really cool library isn't written in something I already know. What an asshole for doing that."
I think the OP is not saying "it was impossible to learn", but "the amount of effort required to learn wasn't worth the return I would get from it". The latter may well be a sensible decision.
And it's great when someone tries to makes the learning process easier, and even better when they open source it.
Yeah, exactly. I also don't have a need to use any of those heavy weight apps more than a few times a year, so every time I go back, I have to start over again from scratch. Something appealing, lightweight, with good tutorials would be such a boon for web developers who don't have time to learn all the subtleties of Illustrator.
This is terrific. Been fiddling around with the pen tool. So far, not much worse than Illustrator!
A few feature requests: having the shift-c tool (convert anchor point, I think) and being able to delete anchor points would be great. Much harder to work without that. Saving also didn't work the first several times I tried (but great to see auto-saving to ¿localStorage?)
Congratulations! I know how difficult this kind of stuff can be - I tried something similar a few years back and ended up dropping the project before it got too far; although I learned a lot about object oriented programming. Great work!
This is amazing. I could have really used something simple like this in the past, and really appreciate the ability to use it in the future. Seriously, thank you!
The Maven Pro font appears to be infinitely thin at weight 300, it only starts being readable at 120px+. It doesn't have a version for that weight, so the browser is [failing at] simulating that.
There is already a database product called Pentaho Mondrian. You may want to think about chosing another name, there are still 1-2 alternative famous artists left :-)
- how do I change the node type? Eg, if there are no handles, how do I get handles (antlers I think you call them in the code).
- How do I go from colinear handles to "broken" handles: handles that form an angle at the node, so I can have two different curves joined at an acute angle at one node?
- How do I do intersections, unions, groups, layers, etc?
But I gotta say it again, it's really beautiful...
Pixl is definitely cool. I don't think it's a really fair comparison for one thing Pixl is more like Photoshop rather than Illustrator. Pixl is a Flash app which probably makes a difference to some people as well.
are you actually making money off that? check my profile for a link to an open source project of mine that has similar functionality with a lot more content management features.
AI, like PSD, is proprietary and unfriendly to developers because Adobe's software is really complex (and they don't want to share the market). I want to write a small backend that uses one of several AI->SVG converters out there so people can use AI files in Mondrian. Unfortunately I haven't had time yet.
don't know if you are interested in edtech but check out appynotebook.com ... it is an open source LMS with a vector graphics drawing layer and a lot more.
Is this negativity really necessary? If you're going to leave a comment about something not working at least say what went wrong and what could fix the issues you had.
I'm sick of comments like this constantly polluting HN's community with negativity.
It is not negativity, it is the real world.
The author put up his wares and someone reviewed it and shared his thoughts. Hopefully, maybe, someone will come along and say "hey I checked in a fix for it!".
It's a very very basic vector editor that doesn't even let you rotate things, import any standard vector formats (SVG, EPS, AI, PDF), have dotted outlines, distort, curve the text, etc etc etc.
I understand it was a lot of work, and you did a great job, but let's not pretend this implements even 1% of Illustrator.
