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Helftone Blog
Company blog · blog.helftone.comdesignprogrammingbusiness
Helftone Blog is the company blog at blog.helftone.com, writing about design, programming and business. Since 2013, 22 different Hacker News readers have linked it 37 times, most often “Monodraw: Maintenance Mode”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2025-04-07, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (20) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link this developer blog for Monodraw ASCII art editor updates, its maintenance-mode announcement, and posts on Mac App Store and ASCII art. Comments cite it as a source; none judge the writing.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 20 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Monodraw: Maintenance Mode8 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2018-12-30
- Mac App Store: The Subtle Exodus2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2014-10-14
- Clear in the iCloud2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2013-06-07
- Monodraw – a non-subscription, powerful ASCII art editor2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2022-03-10
- Sustainable Indie Software2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-05-10
What Hacker News says?
Funny. The front page (still) states: "We're a small studio that loves to make delightful apps. We just launched Monodraw." The blog says: Maintenance Mode With immediate effect, Monodraw is entering maintenance mode. This means that there will be no more updates in the future. While I'll be aiming to provide OS compatibility updates, if required, those are not guaranteed. Accordingly, the price has been reduced fro…
Comment linking /monodraw-maintenance-mode/
on “Monodraw”Submitted Mac App Store: The Subtle Exodus as a story · 335 points
HN discussionThis went into "maintenance mode" in 2018, has anything changed? https://blog.helftone.com/monodraw-maintenance-mode/
Comment linking /monodraw-maintenance-mode/
on “Monodraw”Submitted Monodraw – a non-subscription, powerful ASCII art editor as a story · 145 points
HN discussionApple has completely lost the goodwill of Mac developers. The one and only reason the ones that haven't gone bankrupt are still staying is because they have no other choice due to platform lock-in. Every single conversation that I've had with indies recently have gone along the same lines: Apple is killing the indie scene. I wrote about the MAS exodus [1] more than a year ago and people were skeptical back then. Thi…
Comment linking /mac-app-store-the-subtle-exodus/
on “Leaving the Mac App Store”Submitted Sustainable Indie Software as a story · 18 points
HN discussionI’m also a happy Monodraw user. I felt sad to hear a few months ago that they are stopping its development [1]. That being said, the software —in its current version— works very well. [1] https://blog.helftone.com/monodraw-maintenance-mode/
Comment linking /monodraw-maintenance-mode/
on “Ask HN: Which tool do you use to create beautiful diagrams?”Submitted Show HN: My first platformer game (Mac, Demo) as a story · 10 points
HN discussionShameless plug: If you're on a Mac and want an app to create those ASCII diagrams, check out Monodraw [1]. I've just released an update [2, 3] which allows you to define to define snippets / templates which you can easily re-use: seems perfect to define snippets for this website. [1] https://monodraw.helftone.com [2] https://blog.helftone.com/monodraw-snippets-update-sneak-pee... [3] https://blog.helftone.com/monodr…
Comment linking /monodraw-snippets-update-released/
on “Show HN: Ascii to SVG”Submitted Monodraw: Birth of an App Icon as a story · 5 points
HN discussionIn reality it is still maintained though I think. They released an update to bring native Apple Silicon support for example: https://blog.helftone.com/monodraw-v1.5-apple-silicon-macos-...
Comment linking /monodraw-v1.5-apple-silicon-macos-11-big-sur/
on “Monodraw: ASCII art editor for the Mac”Submitted Monodraw: Maintenance Mode as a story · 4 points
HN discussionUnfortunately in minimal maintenance mode for the last 3 years. https://blog.helftone.com/monodraw-maintenance-mode/ Still works well though.
Comment linking /monodraw-maintenance-mode/
on “Monodraw: ASCII art editor for the Mac”Submitted Monodraw Beta: Now Available – Helftone as a story · 3 points
HN discussionAFAIK Brandur uses Monodraw [1]. It's so cool, I even purchased a license for myself, although the author of the app stopped its active development [2]. [1] https://monodraw.helftone.com/ [2] https://blog.helftone.com/monodraw-maintenance-mode/
Comment linking /monodraw-maintenance-mode/
on “How Postgres Makes Transactions Atomic (2017)”Submitted Clear in the iCloud as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI have been doing this for years, my favorite tool is Monodraw [1]. It’s unfortunate they decided to discontinue its development [2]. [1] https://monodraw.helftone.com/ [2] https://blog.helftone.com/monodraw-maintenance-mode/
Comment linking /monodraw-maintenance-mode/
on “Explaining Code Using ASCII Art”Submitted Sustainable Indie Software as a story · 2 points
HN discussionYeah Monodraw was great. Too bad he sunsetted it last October[0]. [0] https://blog.helftone.com/monodraw-maintenance-mode/
Comment linking /monodraw-maintenance-mode/
on “YUML – Easy Embeddable Diagrams”Submitted Making an Infinite Scrollable Area on OS X as a story · 2 points
HN discussionWhat makes you think it's abandoned? The author is active on Twitter, the last update for dark mode was in May 2019 and I don't see any show stopper bugs or crashes on Catalina. Small utilities like this don't need an update every month. I bought it a while ago because 1) It's very cheap and a great show case for a small niche Mac app that's both beautiful and works well 2) The two times per year I use it, it's alre…
Comment linking /
on “Svgbob – convert ASCII diagrams to SVG, now with styling support”Submitted ASCII Art and Unicode as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI stumbled on this, very likely here on Hackernews, long back. Back then, I loved the App Icon, and then the interface, and even used it few times. I bought it and kept it, hoping to use it but my needs never needed to do this on a regular basis. This is a tool that outputs plain text that can be opened by any other tool. Definitely not a painkiller but a good to have vitamin by your side. I believe the team is a ti…
Comment linking /monodraw-reveal/
on “Monodraw – a non-subscription, powerful ASCII art editor”Submitted Clear in the iCloud as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI'm still trying to maintain Monodraw and release new features [1] - as much as my personal time allows! :) [1] https://blog.helftone.com/monodraw-v1.6/
Comment linking /monodraw-v1.6/
on “A brief reflection on Mac software stagnation”Submitted Mac App Store: The Subtle Exodus (2014) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionAs nice as it is Monodraw is in maintenance mode. https://blog.helftone.com/monodraw-maintenance-mode/ Monodraw was released in May 2015, about three and a half years ago. Unfortunately, it did not achieve commercial success and it meant I had to get a job.
Comment linking /monodraw-maintenance-mode/
on “A brief reflection on Mac software stagnation”Submitted Sustainable Indie Software as a story · 1 points
HN discussionWe have Unicode now. Not everyone and not everywhere, and depending on the font, the line-drawing characters may not be the same width as the others even if it's a monospace font (e.g. see https://blog.helftone.com/ascii-art-unicode/ ). The whole point of text files in things like RFCs is to be as portable as possible, and using Unicode somewhat defeats that point.
Comment linking /ascii-art-unicode/
on “Uber CLI”Submitted Demystifying Inner Shadows in Quartz 2D (iOS, Mac) as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
