from Hacker News

Show HN: Glyph3D – A 3D text visualizer for macOS and iOS / iPadOS

by tikimcfee on 12/1/24, 9:52 PM with 21 comments

Hello internet folks!

I'm happy to share the first TestFlight release of Glyph3D, a 3D text visualizer for macOS and iOS. It's free, supports pretty much any utf8 data, and is a pretty interesting way to navigate your repositories or data directories without the limitations of standard text windows!

Download and bookmark for macOS and iOS: https://github.com/tikimcfee/LookAtThat/

- You should be able to download public repos from GitHub and render them.

- Play with opening and closing windows. I've disabled many of the in-flight features to keep user confusion down, and will be creating additional documentation about those features as they are implemented.

- Editing works but there's nowhere to put the data for now ;) The user can pull from the app's caches if they want for now, but there's no actual repo support - by design. Bringing in the git SDK, or accessing the CLI, is a bit more work and danger than I want to include in the app right now.

Any feedback is welcome, and if you'd like to support me or the project in any way, please reach out to me, and I'll be looking forward to that conversation.

  • by codetrotter on 12/2/24, 7:47 PM

    It’s a very specific kind of feedback but, your app seems to not be aware of the way that the top bar works on for example iPhone 15 Pro.

    This results in part of the UI of your app shown on first launch ("Window Controls" menu, containing "App Tools", "Files", "Editor", "GitHub") being obscured by the black oval that surrounds the camera on the top of the display on these phones. This happens in portrait as well as landscape orientation.

    You’ll probably be able to see the same issue if you select the iPhone 15 Pro or similar model in the iPhone simulator in Xcode.

  • by zitterbewegung on 12/2/24, 5:26 PM

    I could see this working really well with call flow graphs for reverse engineering or disassemblers like IDA or Ghidra see https://clearbluejar.github.io/assets/img/2023-01-22-callgra...

    Can this work with visionos?

  • by dlivingston on 12/2/24, 9:52 PM

    I tried this out on an iPhone 15 Pro.

    Some notes:

    - Opening in portrait mode, the Window Controls title bar is obscured by the Dynamic Island. I cannot move this window without going to landscape orientation.

    - The "Open Folder" button on the Files window doesn't work. File access is never requested.

    - The App Tools window looks funky in landscape mode. The tab bar is only 50% filled, vertically.

    - Windows appear in inconvenient locations, offscreen, partially obscured, or have strange sizing. I found myself rotating between portrait and landscape mode frequently just to do basic UI interactions.

    - Global Search completely obscures other windows, and its title bar is offscreen. This breaks the app. I have to force-close to get it back into a working state.

    You should probably pull iPhone support until this is tested more thoroughly. I imagine similar issues occur on iPad. Not to be harsh, but it's literally unusable on iPhone in its current state.

  • by visekr on 12/2/24, 6:18 PM

    This is really cool - I've had a halfbaked idea of a visual code editor for a while and this really solidifies my concept. if anyone wants to work together on it lmk : )

  • by d-lisp on 12/2/24, 7:29 PM

    I had the idea last year to create some kind of lsp/uml chimera that would render codebases in 3D so you could navigate them wearing a vr device. You would edit files from there, create files maybe classes, draw inheritance schemes, meet with other persons, explain stuff; and that would be a somewhat fun way of welcoming interns.

  • by LoganDark on 12/2/24, 5:59 PM

    This style of visualization reminds me of "VIRUS: The Game": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIgpWGVvfjA&list=PLi_KYBWS_E...