Prototyping cards on Macs

Is Multideck better than "Cocktail"???

https://cocktail.software

You two (2) may be competing for the SAME audience of Game Designers... Obviously you'll say that your software is better, who would not. Or that it caters to another audience (like Mac users).

This is not my business... But maybe you should CONTACT "Dan" over at Cocktail and see if you guys can MERGE products (or come up with a common feature list). Sometimes it is COOL to COLLABORATE with people and you guys BOTH are designing software for Card Creation...

If you guys can SEE "eye-to-eye"... Maybe an AWESOME COLLABORATION could ignite and then for sure you BOTH would have the BEST of both breeds...!

Just a thought. Cheers!

We feel differently about "things". Personally, I find that running my projects alone nowadays is a detriment to the success of my ventures. But finding someone who shares your passion is ... well hard. I meant no disrepect... I just saw two (2) people designing the same thing and thought: "Maybe these two (2) people could or want to work together...?!"

Like I said from my experience nowadays things are veering towards collaborations. And not single person ventures. I'm even suggesting that Cocktail with its features could be improved upon with another 1 or 2 Developers to make the product more appealing to much more users.

It's natural that when you look at two (2) pieces of Software that both are hard to compare because they have a different set of features. But if say one product was to ADD a set of features, perhaps the more prominent ones, then you would have a product that is probably better than BOTH alone.

I didn't say ANYTHING about "Not being good enough" either. You maybe took my comment the wrong way. Like I said, it was a bit of "personal reflection" in that I feel like my SOLO projects are not at par with the teams of 5 to 8 people working on games nowadays... It's hard to compete on KS when you have a team with a dedicated Graphic Designer who can bling out a page and spend a couple of months making everything look "prettier"...

Again that's my own personal "baggage" and I was just thinking: "Hmm ... They BOTH are designing card design software ... Maybe they could be good working together...???" That's what my real thoughts are.

I was NOT complaining... As I said, I was merely eluding to the fact that IT SEEMS like both of you are working on a similar piece of software. From an outsider's POV.

I have not looked into Multideck because it is a Mac product. In another perspective, if your product is good for Macs, why not introduce the features into the PC world also. I get it: you're not interested in collaboration. And that's fine too.

I think you chose to bite off my head because I suggested that maybe you could collaborate with another Developer. Sorry, my bad. I thought maybe two (2) people working together might produce a better end-product (for both individuals).

Again it was mostly my own reflection, that I could benefit greatly from another "team member" to be at least 2+ people in my future ventures.

Don't be offended... That was not the intention. I guess some misdirected intention based on personal experience that biased my good judgement.

Sorry again no offense was meant. Best of luck with your software!

My tool for making cards (https://www.boardgamegeek.com/thread/299033/inkscape-extensions-boardgam...) runs on Macs (older versions were primarily developed on one) and in Windows and Linux. In general developing for multiple platforms is not a big deal and the default for many developers as most development tools and frameworks are multi-platform anyway. (Of course when making it as an expansion script for an existing multi-platform application it becomes even easier.)

Everyone has their own wishlist for a tool like this, and they are reasonably easy to make, so I perfectly understand why there are so many. Mine has been available (for all platforms) and free since 2008. Back then the only alternative I was aware of was Nandeck, but it only runs on Windows, and there were several design-choices I were not happy with (and, at that time, it did not have many features I was looking for, but those have probably been added over the years). In particular I thought it made much more sense to use a full-featured existing graphics editor (like Inkscape) for drawing cards instead of trying to invent my own editor. Others obviously disagreed and instead of using my tool (or helping me improve it) they decided to make their own tools, and I have no problems whatsoever with that (100% agree with the maker of Multideck above, almost so much that I am tempted to start typing in all caps here).

Applications on Mac being like other Mac-applications or not is one of those things that results in having multiple applications for the same thing I guess. For me when I used Macs (both at home and at work, for almost a decade), I still pretty much treated those as just prettier Linux computers, and I always avoided using applications that were not available on both, because I still also used Linux. It was confusing if an application did not behave the same. I could accept that in some applications when I used them on a Mac I had to remember to press Cmd instead of Ctrl for keyboard shortcuts, but it was annoying when the differences went deeper than that.

Cross-platform was always the selling-point of C (and C++) and UNIX operating systems. Since I got into those things at the university it just became a habit to always worry about weird "other platforms". At work in most projects I also have to always think about all sorts of different hardware platforms that will run the same code. I work(ed) on some Linux-only projects, but even then there was always different hardware to worry about and other things that differed.

It is a way of future-proofing my own code as well. I do not know for sure what platform I will be on in a few years. And even on the same platform there are unfortunately breaking changes now and then, so it makes sense to always keep at least one or two abstraction layers between your code and the platform. I am not going to litter my code with Linux-specific calls even if I have no immediate plans to run it on anything else. That is a mistake I have tried to avoid since MSDOS-days.

About as far from boardgame design we can come, perhaps. :)

For my Inkscape extension not much of it applies as that is just a python script, and it is up to the Inkscape developers to worry about supporting different platforms. I think there has been one or two bugs in my code because I never test it on Windows, but nothing that required any major Windows-specific workarounds, mostly just relying on the APIs already existing in python to abstract differences between systems.