Modulart Studio: Home-made for the studio

Introduction

Behind every new project is a story. And stories, when correctly transmitted, can be compelling.

I don’t know if this article will captivate you, but I hope so. I love writing short articles, sharing a code snippet I learned about, or book I read. This time, it’s an article about a project I’m very proud of, Modulart Studio.

The app was officially released on July 18th at 7:41 AM GMT on the Mac App Store and at 3:13 PM GMT on the iOS App Store. And yes, I keep track of this kind of information!

A brief description

You may be reading this article after having discovered Modulart Studio. In that case, you can skip this short description!

If this is your first time hearing about my app, I’ll try to explain it as simply as possible!

In mathematical terms, you can generate lines in a circle with modular arithmetics. In artistic terms, you can play around with numbers to create mesmerizing paths.

Take the description that sounds the most interesting to you! I won’t be offended by your choice, although I do have a preference!

For instance, with Modulart Studio, you can choose a multiplication table. Let’s choose 100, the maximum. You can then pick a modulus: in that case, the number of integers you multiply 100 with. We’ll choose 10. That gives us, at most, ten paths.

I had written a continuation for my explication but couldn’t quite illustrate it with words. Therefore, here’s a look at what you can do with Modulart Studio, and later you’ll get a link to a valuable YouTube tutorial.

The inspiration

The tools I regularly use did inspire my work. These include Sketch, Photoshop, and Illustrator. However, it is mainly a YouTube tutorial that sparked interest within me.

Mathloger’s incredible video, Times Tables, Mandelbrot and the Heart of Mathematics was inspiring, entertaining, fun, and engaging. I wanted an app that could procure all those feelings by creating the kinds of circles they were showing. I thought the idea was too niche and should be more widespread. Why isn’t this an art already? Mandala Art exists, so why not Modular Art or Modulart?

The beginning

I had the idea floating in my head, but I knew when to start building it. In the middle of spring, something important happens. Yes, WWDC, Apple announces its developer conference, but something that affects me more directly: the Apple Swift Student Challenge. It was 2022, the challenge’s 3rd year and my 3rd year participating. The project was simple, build Modulart Studio in a little over a week using SwiftUI, a fast, fluid, and efficient user interface framework.

If you’re curious about how the project initially looked, check out this video and its GitHub repository!

The wait

So what happened between 2022 and 2023? Why did it take over a year to finally publish the app to the App Store?

I had other priorities with college exams, social life, and other non-code projects, such as my newsletter. At the time, I thought it would be long and tedious to update the app, and it did take longer than I had expected.

When I started rewriting the code this summer and modifying the project, I had estimated a single day of work. How foolish I was. It took around a week to finalize a working, satisfying version for iOS, iPadOS, and macOS.

The plan

Updates will come in semi-regularly because I still have to study for college exams and other life projects and activities come my way. However, like my other apps, I aim to update it every other month with bug fixes, adjustments, and new non-tedious features to implement. New features will probably come during summertime, right after WWDC announcements and the end of my final exams.

Some features I’m looking to add are the ability to export to video and SVG, use different shape outlines, and other quality-of-life improvements linked with the operating system.

Note that I might add these future features behind a paywall. It will probably not be a subscription because I do not see a point in making the payment recurrent. I would have to make my updates more frequent to justify a subscription. Nonetheless, there might be several one-time in-app purchases, depending on what feature you want to unlock.

Conclusion

Modulart Studio is still very young, but I believe it has great potential to be an app in every artist’s toolbox.

If you enjoyed this article, do not hesitate to share it with your circles (no pun intended)!

If you still haven’t checked it out, here’s my last call for you to take a look and try out Modulart Studio!