Monodraw flowchart9/11/2023 When creating diagrams, lines commonly have labels to clarify their meaning, so it is important for Monodraw to be able to cater for that use case. Making a circuit diagram with an arbitrary number of inputs and outputs becomes a breeze.Ĭustom anchor points created in a surface shape and used to attach lines. That's why I have added support for custom anchor points and you can position them anywhere you want. For lines, the start point, end point and any midpoints are all anchors, in addition to special points that lie on the segments themselves (orthogonal segments get 3 anchor points while step segments get one).īut any predefined anchor points will never be enough to handle every case out there. For a rectangle, we provide 17 predefined anchor points. While dynamic positioning provides you with a lot of power to express the spatial relationship between shapes, it is limited by what anchor points you can attach to. There are no limits of the complexity of those relationships, they can span multiple shapes, e.g., you can attach a shape to another shape which in turn is attached to yet another one.Ī rectangle's dynamic position is attached to a line's endpoint. For example, you can express the following relationship: the top-right corner of a rectangle of size 10 by 5 is attached to the start point of a particular line. The position of such shapes is defined by three properties: a dynamic point (which can be attached to any anchor point), a size and a corner position (e.g., top-left). Let's take a look at how it works for any rectangular shape (rectangle, text field and surface). We have taken the idea further and every shape's position is completely dynamic and attachable to any anchor point – you can create arbitrarily long chains. You might be familiar with the concept of anchor points where you can have lines that are attached to other shapes. Dynamic Positioningĭynamic positioning is a very powerful concept that can be used to express the spatial relationship between shapes, so that when you move a single shape, all related shapes would automatically move with it. It's a win-win for both developers and users. While refactoring does take longer, the sooner architectural changes are made the better – you end up with a better maintainable codebase (so easier to improve in the future) and the code should have less bugs. As the changes affected the foundations of Monodraw, I had to refactor the affected parts so that everything is nicely designed and fits together correctly. This meant I had to make two major changes to the fundamental way Monodraw worked – introduce dynamic positioning and fully editable shapes. ![]() Tools should be empowering and allow you to easily create rather than forcing you to express yourself in their "language" (i.e., the abstractions they provide). I came to the realisation that the tool was fighting you rather than helping you – exactly the opposite of what was expected. For example, you could only edit the corners of a rectangle and if you wanted to change a single character, you had to create a separate surface shape, position it above and set a character there. This makes it harder to express the relationship between shapes, so you end up having to manually move and re-adjust them. The position of shapes could not be dynamically specified, apart from line end points.After the Monodraw reveal, we want back to drawing board and noticed two important shortcomings: The aim of the beta program is to release a build of the app that is not quite fully featured or polished but provides a solid foundation to build on. Next up, I want to explain why it has taken longer than expected to provide the first status update. Our customers deserve to be treated with respect and honesty. ![]() Always feel free to send me an email or just tweet one thing I can promise you is the truth – no corporate or marketing speak. It is my intention to provide regular updates on our blog so that you are not left in the dark, wondering what is happening – if you don't see any updates for a while, it probably means we are busy working and there is nothing that we can announce just yet. My mission is to be completely open about what's happening behind the scenes, what work is being done and what our plans are. It has taken a bit longer than I expected but we have made some significant progress and more importantly, completed some essential improvements to how the app works.īefore we go any further, I want to set out what you can expect from us when it comes to Monodraw's development. It is finally time for our first Monodraw beta progress update.
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