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Boy van Amstel

Carbonize - Beautiful images of code by Carbon, natively on your Mac

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Carbonize brings Dawn Lab's Carbon to the Mac desktop and adds some native features that make it even more of a pleasure to use.

- You can drag code onto Carbonize's Dock icon.

- Use the Services menu that's available in many editors to send code to Carbonize.

- Drag exports from the preview window into as many apps or sites as you like.

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Boy van Amstel
Maker
Hi everyone! Carbonize is an app that I really wanted to have for myself. I use Dawn Lab's Carbon often to share code examples with friends, colleagues and on social media. While the editor is a joy to use, going into my browser and pasting in code isn't ideal. The various editor extensions might work for some of you, but I like some more flexibility. That's why I wrapped carbon.now.sh in a WKWebView (so you get all the latest features and their great editor) and added a bunch of native features that make it feel very much at home on your Mac. 🖥 You can: - Drag code onto its Dock icon. - Right-click on text and use the Services menu to send code to Carbonize directly. - Use the convenient export preview windows to drag images into as many apps as you like, or sites like Twitter. Carbonize is free, as are all my apps at the moment, with a Tip Jar to help me continue this trend. If you like Carbonize, consider using it. There might be confetti. 💪 Let me know what you think! Cheers, Boy - Huge props to Dawn Labs for making https://carbon.now.sh - Thanks to @sindresorhus for some valuable feedback while I was making this. 🙌
Lu Frankland
@boyvanamstel I literally made a terrible web-app to do this to my HTML snippets the other day but that was just for styles in a HTML format. This is so much nicer! Have you considered adding some form of html version so you can use these in emails and the recipient can then copy/paste the contents?
Boy van Amstel
Maker
@ne0 Not sure what you mean Lu. If you're looking for a web version: Dawn Labs made this terrific web-app to do this and I 'just' added a native feel to it. Check out https://carbon.now.sh If you're looking for an HTML export, that's not available yet but could be cool. Carbon.now.sh does do SVG exports which Carbonize doesn't fully support yet.
Fotis Evangelou
OSX 10.14+ only? Seriously?
Boy van Amstel
Maker
@fotis_evangelou Yea, I prefer to make sure it's stable and tested. If interest is high I can dedicate more time to it and maybe lower the system requirements, which means more time spent on testing for me. I hope you understand.
Fotis Evangelou
@boyvanamstel I'm pretty sure it works at least 2 versions back... But hey.
Boy van Amstel
Maker
@fotis_evangelou I know, I'm pretty sure it does too. That's just not how I release stuff. I'll let you know if I change the deployment target.
Sam Ayres
@boyvanamstel Might be worth releasing an unstable version so others can test and report whether or not it works as expected? @fotis_evangelou Complaining about a restriction of a free app isn't constructive tbh.
Boy van Amstel
Maker
@sam_ayres Waiting for feedback on that would dramatically increase the amount of time I need to get an update out. Also, having multiple versions of the app out in the wild takes more time to manage. That's not viable or acceptable to me at this point, sorry. I super appreciate you all wanting to use this app I made. I just hope you understand that I need to manage my time properly or everything will grind to a halt.
Akshay Kadam(A2K)

Always wanted a native app even if its WebView since I use Carbon a lot. So thank you for making it :)

Pros:

Works like a charm

Cons:

None

William Fendler
It appears to be well-executed and these always look pretty but encouraging stuff like this seems like a big step backwards for the web. The fact that a user can't select and copy text should be reason enough to avoid it not to mention the accessibility problems. Maybe it's an overreaction but it feels like we should be heading the other direction!
Boy van Amstel
Maker
@wfendler Thanks for bringing this up. I can see what you mean. The accessibility implications are real and hard to avoid. This is not an alternative to adding properly formatted syntax highlighted code on your website. It does fill a need – I think – when sharing these images in places where there’s a character limit. Especially if a proper alternative for those who can’t see what’s in the image is included. I partly chose Carbon as a base for this because they explicitly mention accessibility on their about page: https://carbon.now.sh/about/. Posting the images to Twitter directly through Carbon will add a picture description: https://help.twitter.com/en/usin.... That does not cover all the instances where these images are shared elsewhere though, or when a description isn’t added. And it does not fix text selection. I would like to look into this more. Maybe I’ll start by adding a notice that encourages adding more accessible ways to access the information besides the image. Any suggestions you might have are welcome.
Boy van Amstel
Maker
@wfendler I've added a section about accessibility to https://www.dangercove.com/carbo.... I'll see if I can add it to the App Store description in the next update.
William Fendler
@boyvanamstel Thanks for the reply! I didn't know Carbon added description text when you tweet it. It's only one environment (twitter) and you have to share it through their platform to get so I'm afraid of the "images of code" trend in general but I'm glad to hear they/you are doing something about improving accessibility of the images.