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

[tikimcfee]

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.

[codetrotter]

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.

[codetrotter]

Also, I tried to open Glyph3D.xcodeproj from the GitHub repo in Xcode and got an error message that says:

> The project ‘Glyph3D’ is damaged and cannot be opened. Examine the project file for invalid edits or unresolved source control conflicts.

> Path: /Users/user/src/LookAtThat/Glyph3D.xcodeproj

> Exception: didn't find classname for 'isa' key

Although this could also just be that the version of Xcode I have installed is too old. I haven't used Xcode in a while so I haven't updated it for a while either.

My currently installed version of Xcode is Xcode version 15.0.

[zitterbewegung]

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?

[tikimcfee]

> call flow graphs

Stay tuned! This is a planned future I had temporarily removed while I worked on performance in the Metal engine, and is coming back very soon =) I'd love the opportunity to pick your brain about potential intermediate formats as well - e.g., if you have specific languages or datasets that you'd want to be able to operate on. I have some ideas about adding a tiny runtime scripting layer in this as well to operate on text JIT, instead of just laying it out.

> Can this work with visionos?

Theoretically yes, but I haven't done the work to composite the two rendering layers together. Like a lot of Metal, there is a massive amount of documentation that would certainly be helpful if written, but currently isn't. I do plan on this, however, in the future.

[dlivingston]

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.

[tikimcfee]

Thanks for the input!

- Yep, it's annoying to have the current window controls overlayed by the safe area. You can still move it around if you're careful enough, but yes, it's not great.

- The mobile app expects you to download from Github directly for now, because yes, there's no direct file import yet. Not a hard add, but just needs a bit of a different pipe to either copy or access the out of sandbox files.

- Yes, the mobile windowing controls are meant more to allow access to all the demos for now, not for a pretty UI. It's not terrible on iPad since you can use the pencil for more accuracy, but I did have a plan to put the tabbed and sidebar controls back in place for mobile at some point.

- Sorry about the search; if the 'reset' control doesn't do the trick, you might be out of luck for this version. The same fix I need to put in place to work within the current screen's safe area is the same that would keep these windows within viewport. And, ideally, to include a similar 'IDE' view as the desktop to avoid these multi window cases that are inconvenient or broken.

I'll be focusing on a few changes related specifically to mobile UI in the next few builds of this. Touch, for example, has no way to rotate along the y-axis, and there's no way to 'hover' for bookmarking on tap.

[visekr]

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 : )

[tikimcfee]

Glad you think so! =)

I'd love to chat with ya. Do you see my email? Feel free to email me! If not, reply here with whatever you'd prefer to chat with and I'll get back to you.

[d-lisp]

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.

[tikimcfee]

This is exactly the use case I'm aiming for! I've done a lot of mentoring, a big part of getting familiar with a code base is building one's mental map for where things are in any kind of relationship to what things are doing. In upcoming versions, I'll be restoring the 'state sharing' control that lets multiple devices share their camera orientations and bookmakers between users in a local P2P state, and maybe eventually some remote server backed way.

[LoganDark]

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

[tikimcfee]

Ha! You're kinda right and I like it. I guess thinking of literal files floating in space isn't a unique human experience eh? Good to know I've got someone like me out there at least =)